Where to have a drink in Istanbul this festive season
The lovely Lisa Morrow, author of several books about life as an expat in Turkey and Inside Out Istanbul asked me to write a guest post for her site. I am very happy to share that she posted it yesterday and hope you all enjoy it!
Where to have a drink in Istanbul this festive season
When I first moved to Istanbul, I lived in an area of the city called Cevizlibağ. Generally foreigners don’t know it and most Turks’ reaction is along the lines of “uuufff, why?”. The why is a boring story and so is the area. It mainly consists of apartment blocks, a few small markets, a tram stop, and a metrobus stop. And that’s about it. It takes around 45 minutes on crowded transportation to reach central Istanbul, I was the only Western foreigner that I knew of, and it’s largely a conservative area, meaning finding alcohol wasn’t easy.
And yet, that’s where my wine journey began. I did all my socializing at the opposite end of that tram ride where I started sampling Turkish wines in restaurants and bars. But if I liked something, I couldn’t go back to my neighborhood and buy a bottle. In the year I lived there, I don’t recall ever having a bottle of wine in my apartment.
Eventually I moved to central Istanbul where an elevated grocery store experience in the hip, heavily foreign neighborhood of Cihangir offered a wall of Turkish wines to explore. And explore I did. First I tried wines from international grapes I knew like Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc. Very soon, I moved onto native grapes like Narince, Öküzgözü, and Kalecik Karası.
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