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Looking for the Perfect Turkish Wine and Cheese Pairing #WinePW

 

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This June, Camilla from Culinary Cam has invited the #WinePW crew to explore wine and cheese pairings. Any cheese, any wine, any region our hearts desire! You can read her invitation post here. If you’re reading this in time, join us for our Twitter chat on Saturday, June 10 at 11 AM EST and tell us about your favorite wine and cheese pairings!

I love cheese. And when I say I love cheese, I mean that I LOVE cheese. If the choice came down to chocolate or cheese, cheese all the way. I also have an entire auxiliary freezer for cheese (and pork because, you know, I live in Turkey). However, when Camilla invited us to this event, I knew I wanted to specifically feature Turkish cheese. 

While Turkey doesn’t really have a lot of the ultra gooey, bloomy rind cheeses that I usually favor, it has a hugely rich cheese culture. There’s an entire book dedicated to it called Peynir Aşkı. The unfortunate side of Turkish cheese, is that the majority of styles have little availability beyond the region or even village where they’re made. Cheeses available commercially tend to be far more limited. Since I didn’t have the time to drive across the country and collect rare village cheeses, I went with an array of what can be found at a decent grocery store:

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• Kaşar cheese can be made from cow, sheep, or goat milk. Known in Greece as Kasseri (which has its own PDO) Turkish kaşar comes in several forms. There’s a fresh, melty version that is often served with Turkish breakfast, on toast and other sandwiches, and has a mild, milky flavor. Eski kaşar (aged kaşar) is made purely from sheep’s milk and ages in a sack for 6 months to develop flavor. The best kaşars come from Kars in Turkey’s northeast. 
• Tulum is a traditional goat’s milk cheese, traditionally ripened in a goatskin casing. Traditionally but not always. I’ve had those and they will knock you off your feet. Tulum is a complicated cheese category because there are different styles depending on where it’s made. The most commonly found variations come from Izmir, Bergama (a district in Izmir), and Erzincan (northeastern Turkey); but there are also variations from Trabzon, Konya, Bingöl, Elazığ, Tunceli, Erzurum, Çankırı, Çorum, Malatya, Mersin…the list goes on.  Depending on where it’s from it can be almost like a semi-cooked cheese texture to powdery/crumbly. To makes things more complicated, there’s not just wrapped in goat skin or not tulum. There’s also tulum with walnut, nigella seeds, various herbs, fresh, aged…this seems to be a very flexible cheese. 
• Beyaz Peynir – this category weirds me out. On an international scale, you could compare it to the more widely-known feta. It is made with cow, goat, and sheep milk, usually a mix but sometimes 100% of one of them. But what I find so odd is the name which translates as white cheese. But almost ALL cheese in Turkey is white. There are not (again, at least on the wide commercial scale) colored cheeses in the manner of Gouda, yellow/orange cheddars, Mimolette, etc.
• Lor is goat curd cheese. Think ricotta but with even less flavor.
• Mihaliç is an aged, semi-hard, porous sheep milk cheese stored in brine. The best are salty and tangy.
• Van Otlu is a semi-hard sheep or cow cheese with mixed herbs. There are 25 different herbs that can be used but the most common are thyme, wild mint, sirmo, medi, and heliz (could not find translations for those last three but believe they are specific to the Van area).

Argos Nahita Dokya Tek Parsel Emir, 2021

From Argos in Cappadocia comes a new Emir, the Tek Parsel (single parcel). Not to be confused with the other Nahita Dokya Emir the winery makes. The Tek Parsel is leaner, meaner, and so much more EMIR than the other. 

Medium lemon green with aromas of makrut lime leaf and lemon grass twined around lemon blossom, and crushed quartz. The palate offered flavors of lime curd and lemon grass with a surprisingly heavy (after the delicacy on the nose) Easter lily perfume. Medium low bodied with round but marked acidity, 13% abv, and a medium finish. Very enjoyable.

Gordias Kalecik Karası Beyazı, 2021

Made via direct press for a pale, almost ethereal peach with platinum highlights, this 100% Kalecik Karası is currently one of my favorite rosés. A kaleidoscope of aroma came hurtling out of the glass. Black currants, botanical raspberry leaf, bright grapefruit, and jasmine all vied for attention. One sip puckered my mouth from both the tart flavors and the bone dry feeling. On the palate flavors leaned more citrus with freshly squeezed Meyer lemon and grapefruit mingling with a kind of raspberry lemonade vibe and sweet tarts, finishing with a delicate floral touch. Light-bodied with lots of fresh acidity and 13.3% alcohol, this is a super crushable wine. 

Kastro Tireli Hermos Bornova Misketi, 2022

Hermos is Kastro Tireli’s “natural” line which includes two skin contact wines. This one is 100% Bornova Misketi, organic grapes, fermented with ambient yeasts, and 67 days of skin contact. The resulting wine showed a deep amber-gold in the glass. As aromatic as any Bornova Misketi, aromas of honeycomb, melon, acacia, jasmine, stone fruits, and orchard blossoms leapt from the glass. The palate gave me full-on stone fruits combining some of the floral notes sensed on the nose with ripe apricot, peach, flowers, and cooked honey. Medium-bodied quite tannic, and high alcohol (14%) that balanced well with the fruit. 

Loved it even more than I did the previous vintage!

Heraki Akuarela Çal Karası, 2020

From the new label by winemakers at large Fulya Akinci and José Hernandez-Gonzalez comes the Heraki Akuarela Çal Karası. Grown in the Çal district of Denizli in Turkey’s inner Aegean, the 35-year-old, dry farmed bush vines grow at 900 meters above sea level. Fulya and José ferment this on native yeasts in egg-shaped tanks and bottle with no oak. When-made well, Çal Karası needs no oak. 

Çal Karası is low on the anthocyanin scale so its wines are not darkly colored or opaque. Here a pale, clear ruby through which you could read a newspaper. The nose offered red fruit and earth with raspberry, sour cherry, maybe cranberry, along with forest and tobacco. Low tannins with medium plus acidity and highish alcohol (14%) that wouldn’t know if you hadn’t read the label. Flavors burst with raspberry, thyme, pepper, earthy forest floor and a touch of forest spice. 

Argos Nahita Dokya Kaelcik Karası, 2021

Also from Argos in Cappadocia comes the Nahita Dokya Kalecik Karası. We tried their Kalecik Karası several years ago when they were still bottling under the Gilamada label and were less than whelmed. This new iteration of Kalecik Karası however has all the wow factors the previous wine was missing. Growing at 900 meters above sea level in the volcanic soils of Cappadocia gives a whole new mineral and savory edge to this grape and I am there for it. 

Fermented and briefly rested in stainless before bottling, this is pure Kalecik Karası. A clear, brilliant ruby in the glass with aromas of red fruits, olives, thyme, and the dirt they grew in. The palate gave raspberry, bramble, more thyme, savory, scrub, and earth with an iodine streak along with a silky mouthfeel and medium plus acidity. The alcohol (14%) could have been a touch lower, but it wasn’t so high as to unbalance the wine. Currently, this is one of my favorite Kalecik Karası wines.

Together with my usual partners in crime, we created a couple cheeseboards and systematically went through the five wines I’d chosen one by one to see how things paired. There was a great deal of accoutrement alongside the cheeses (including my latest jams, one being super spicy jalapeño, the other a lime jam with makrut lime leaf, ginger, and chili) that definitely changed the game in a few situations; but my focus was solely on the cheeses and the wines.  We didn’t get as many matches as we’d hoped.

• eski kaşar – was the surprising overall best pairing going with pretty much all the wines
• Bergama tulum – was kind of meh with everything
• Erzincan tulum – also rather meh
• Van otlu: did well with the Emir, okay with the Kalecik Karası 
• 100% cow milk beyaz peynir: did well with the Kalecik Karası 
• mixed beyaz peynir: did well with the Kalecik Karası, withthe addition of honey did well with the Emir
• 100% sheep peynir: did well with the Kalecik Karası, made the Emir almost creamy
• lor – completely overwhelmed by all the wines
• mihaliç (sadly ours was not a good version of this cheese and went with nothing)

Find your perfect wine & cheese match!

• A Grenache Mutant and a Grilled Halloumi Salad by Culinary Cam
• Bitto and Wines from Valtellina by Avvinare
• Franco-American Wine and Cheese Pairings That Span The Globe by ENOFYLZ Wine Blog
• Gruyere Cheese Wine Pairing by Cooking Chat
• In praise of Manchego cheese and Navarra wine by My Full Wine Glass
• Italian Wines with Italian Cheeses and Fontina Gnocchi by Wine Predator… Gwendolyn Alley
• Looking for the Perfect Turkish Wine and Cheese Pairing by The Quirky Cork
• Triple Aged Cheddar Cheeseburger and a Bottle of Cabernet by A Day in the Life on the Farm