Several years ago, the Turkish winemaker Seyit Karagozoglu was walking through a familiar vineyard when he noticed something odd. Karagozoglu, who’s done more work with indigenous grapes than any other producer in Turkey, was searching for old-vine sidalan, an ancient variety yielding a greenish-gold wine of strong minerality.
The vineyard was in the village of Gedik, in the foothills of Mount Ida — the mythical birthplace of Zeus, which rises above the ruins of Troy. In years past, he had bought fruit from the vineyard for his winery, Pasaeli, which he established in 2000. It was the end of August, and the grapes were almost mature. Then he noticed a few plants bearing fruit with much pinker skins. He called out to the grower, “Huseyin, what is this?”
“Oh, brother, this is an old grape.”
Karagozoglu is used to working with and thinking about old indigenous varieties, in many cases resuscitating them from near extinction. A tall man of 58, his voice and youthful face can easily grow animated talking about this work. He asked, “What do you mean, ‘old grape’?”
“It used to be everywhere,” the grower said. He and other local farmers couldn’t sell it, owing to its skin color being too dark to produce white wine and too pale to produce red. “We all cut it and planted something else.”
“But it should have a name,” Karagozoglu said.
It did: cakal (pronounced “chakal”) — in English, jackal. The grape ripens about a week earlier than sidalan and other varieties native to that area of Canakkale province, in northwestern Anatolia. Before harvest time, when the vineyards are flooded with workers, the jackals would come down from the mountains and eat these sweeter clusters. Instead of leaving the fruit to the animals, growers began to harvest whatever cakal vines were left and make homemade wine for themselves. Karagozoglu was intrigued. As an experiment, he offered to buy half of that year’s harvest. The grower said he could buy it all.
Back at Pasaeli, Karagozoglu made the grapes into an alluring, rose-type wine: crisp, minerally, just as vegetal as it is citrusy. Most roses are made with red wine grapes in a process that limits contact with the skins. Because cakal is made in the same, full-contact method as reds, it yields a wine more tannic than the average rose. It was unlike anything else. Karagozoglu thought, “This is something we need to do.”
In Gedik, there were about 15 or 20 growers left, each with only a few vines of cakal. Every year, Karagozoglu would collect perhaps 2 or 3 tons in total, enough for a couple of hundred bottles. In 2020, wanting more stability and control over the product, Pasaeli bought a vineyard in the village and started planting its own cakal. It was a major investment in a grape that, in another decade, would have likely become extinct.
“These are treasures of Turkey, these indigenous varieties,” Karagozoglu told New Lines. “All of us have to go out of our way to protect them, to preserve them for future generations.”
He is one of a small number of producers in Turkey working to actively uncover native grapes at risk of extinction, some of which are among the oldest known varieties in the world. In a land where winemaking has its origins, and where vineyards are nearly unrivaled in both quality and scale, these winemakers, along with a handful of activists, researchers and educators, are at the vanguard of a still-nascent modern Turkish wine industry, which is only just starting — despite significant barriers placed before them by Turkey’s conservative government — to uncover the country’s vast terroir. And in order to develop Turkish winemaking, in order to break into the new, they are, in large part, excavating the old.
Turkey today ranks fifth for vineyard acreage worldwide, and is home to as many as 1,400 distinct indigenous grape varieties, more than almost any other country on earth. But the undeveloped nature of Turkish winemaking has to do with the fact that, for much of the past several millennia, it was not Turks who made wine in the lands that now comprise their country. Winemaking originated in what’s known as Transcaucasia, an area spanning modern-day Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and northern Iran. It quickly spread into Anatolia, where it was further developed by Neolithic and Bronze Age civilizations — including those of the Assyrians and Hittites — thousands of years before Turkic tribes began migrating west from the Eurasian steppe.
During the Ottoman era, which began in the 14th century, wine production and consumption was outlawed for the Islamic empire’s Muslims denizens, but tolerated among its Greek, Armenian, Caucasian and other non-Muslim communities. In the late 19th century, there was an outbreak in Europe of a grapevine-eating insect called phylloxera, which destroyed up to two-thirds of the continent’s vineyards. Much of the wine consumed in Europe during that time was imported from the Ottoman Empire, the world’s Islamic caliphate. All of it was produced by its ethnic and religious minorities.
The decades leading up to the empire’s dissolution were characterized by violence against these groups. From the late 19th century until the establishment of the Turkish Republic, in 1923, an estimated 4 million members of the empire’s Christian communities had either been killed, expelled or forced to flee. One of the many consequences of this period was that modern Turkey forfeited its winemaking knowledge entirely, practically overnight. “We lost it all: the maintenance of all the vineyards, the making of the wine,” Umay Ceviker, a co-founder of Yaban Kolektif, an initiative to protect indigenous grapes in Turkey, told New Lines. “All of this history, all of this background, all of the traditions, festivals and rituals [tied to wine] — we were forced to forget everything.”
Under a campaign of aggressive Westernization, which included the easing of restrictions around alcohol, secular Turkey began to produce wine under a state monopoly. But Turks who drank tended to drink raki, a traditional, anise-flavored spirit affectionately called “lion’s milk.” Wine, on the other hand, carried a less affectionate nickname: “kopek olduren,” or “dog killer,” such was the popular estimation of its quality. When Turks did consume wine, they couldn’t always be sure what they were drinking. “There were a few producers in Turkey back then, but they wouldn’t even put the names of the grape varieties on the labels,” Ceviker said. “Turks knew the wineries as brands, but didn’t know the grapes.” It wasn’t until the monopoly began to dissolve, in the 1990s, that wine started to be made, in much higher quality, by boutique producers who focused largely on well-known international varieties — namely strong reds like cabernet sauvignon and merlot — as well as a few of the more popular Turkish ones. Slowly, though, the focus started to shift further inward, to explore more of what Turkey’s terroir could offer.
Early in his winemaking career, Karagozoglu was introduced by a colleague to a white grape variety called kolorko, native to Thrace, Turkey’s European landmass. The colleague had previously produced modest amounts of kolorko wine but stopped, Karagozoglu said, because every year more growers were cutting their vines, making it harder to find good fruit. Karagozoglu had imported wine professionally before he started making it, and said he was reminded of experiences he’d had scouting in Europe. “I know how they do it in Italy, how they do it in Spain. They don’t forget about it. They work on it,” he said, referring to little-known, hyperregional varieties. “When they discover a grape like that, they go out of their way to make it known.” He was motivated to resuscitate kolorko if no one else would.
By the time his vineyards started to bear fruit, nobody had, so he tracked down a grower and bought some 900 pounds, enough for a very small production. Then that grower cut his vines, too, forcing Karagozoglu to find others. “There were five to 10 growers left,” he said. “So how can we save it? We have to plant it in our own vineyard” — one Pasaeli later bought in Hoskoy, on the coast of the Marmara Sea. At a sister vineyard about a dozen miles down the coast, acquired years later, Pasaeli harvests old-vine yapincak, another previously endangered variety. It was the first winery to bottle a 100% yapincak. Its 2011 vintage won a gold medal at the San Francisco International Wine Competition.
Despite a recent proliferation of boutique wineries, Turkey today still has fewer than 200 producers. By contrast, Georgia — Turkey’s eastern neighbor, which has roughly 4% of Turkey’s population, 9% of its land area, and 5% of its vineyard acreage — has about 1,500. Critically, only 3% of Turkey’s vineyard acreage is used to grow wine grapes. (Ceviker noted that in countries like France, Italy and Spain, this figure is close to 90%.) The rest produce grapes that are destined for the table; for “pekmez,” a popular fruit molasses; for raki, which is distilled from grapes; or for raisins, of which Turkey is the world’s leading producer. And grape growers of all kinds are increasingly cutting their vines to plant more profitable, less labor-intensive, more weather-resistant crops, in response to the effects of climate change and to years of crippling inflation that have squeezed farmers’ margins. (According to official figures, food inflation in Turkey is at a year-over-year rate of around 70%, 10 times higher than any other OECD country.) Consequently, more vineyard acreage has been lost in Turkey in the past decade than exists in all of Georgia or Austria.
It’s unclear what has been lost from Turkey’s diversity. “We’re talking about 1,400 varieties now, but we could possibly have been talking about double that amount,” if it weren’t for what died away during the fallow periods of the 20th century, and what continues to go extinct, Ceviker said. Likewise, there is no concrete estimation by any entity of how many of Turkey’s remaining indigenous varieties are endangered. But many are disappearing, and the same qualities that in boutique winemaking globally can connote prestige — a grape’s narrow locality, its obscurity, its unlikeliness to be grown at great commercial scale — are the same drivers that, in Turkey, put such varieties at the most risk.
Yet Turkish wine drinkers are growing more interested in the unknown. “It’s a growing trend,” Karagozoglu said. He described how consumers increasingly contact Pasaeli to ask how to get hold of wines that it makes from little-known grapes, often in limited runs. This small but committed market helps some producers to commit resources to the intensive and mostly manual labor of rediscovering more grapes. Karagozoglu recounted tracking down asikara, a red wine grape believed to have been lost but from which he later made limited bottlings. Initially, he found an article online tracing asikara to villages near Buldan, a town in western Anatolia famous for embroidered textiles. Karagozoglu reached out to contacts in the province to help him investigate. But, even when there’s a general lead, Karagozoglu said, you have no choice but to travel from one village to another in search: “You go to the coffee house: ‘Selam aleykum.’ ‘Aleykum selam.’ ‘Brothers, do you have this type of grape here?’”
Even though wines from indigenous varieties are growing in demand, Turkish producers have struggled to grow their general market share. Wine consumption in Turkey remains only about a quart per person per year, less than 2% of what’s drunk per capita in Italy. Part of the equation is that producers still need to overcome lasting prejudices against wine, Mustafa Camlica, the proprietor of Thrace’s Chamlija Winery, told New Lines. Camlica is responsible for the popularization of the once-obscure papazkarasi — “the Pope’s black” — grape, indigenous to Thrace, and has produced limited editions of little-known central Anatolian whites. “It’s not easy to take wine from the ‘dog killer’ category to a different one,” he said, pointing to the fact that in the past 10 years demand for wine has largely stayed the same. During the phylloxera plague in the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire exported several times more wine to Europe than Turkey produces in total today.
Perhaps the greater obstacles are those placed before producers by Turkey’s conservative government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His ruling party came to power shortly after the state monopoly on alcohol production had waned and pathways for boutique wineries had opened up. Today, those wineries face steep taxes, which are regularly raised; bans on online sales; and strict prohibitions on marketing, which make it illegal to show or depict a bottle of wine online or even mention wine on social media. (Pasaeli chooses to show photos of its wines online. Consequently, its website is inaccessible from Turkey.) Jancis Robinson, one of the world’s most renowned wine experts and the author of multiple global encyclopedias of wine grapes, wrote recently in the Financial Times, “Turkish wine should be great, but President Erdogan’s regime is making things very hard indeed.”
The hurdles are growing increasingly elaborate. The printing and distribution of government labels attached to each bottle are routinely delayed, in turn slowing sales or exports. And a law from earlier this year requires producers to pay advance collateral to the government to cover future taxes or fines. Karagozoglu described producers having to go to their banks to ask for guarantees of millions of Turkish lira — hundred of thousands of euros — which eats deeply into their credit limits and, as a result, their ability to invest in their own businesses. Some smaller producers haven’t been able to do so, leading to their licenses being canceled. “When you add all of these obstacles together, it’s really difficult to operate,” Karagozoglu said.
Under these conditions, changing the fate of Turkish wine “might seem impossible to do,” Camlica said. “But it can be done.” For one thing, a majority of Turkey’s indigenous grapes grow on old vines planted 50 or more years ago, a characteristic that is sought after in wines worldwide. Furthermore, vineyards in Turkey were never treated to repel phylloxera; in Europe, the fruits of an untreated vine can be incredibly desirable. The Bordeaux wine Liber Pater, the most expensive in the world — a 2015 vintage sells for more than 45,000 dollars — is made from grapes that grow adjacent to vineyards whose wines sell for 20 to 25 dollars. The main difference is that phylloxera skipped over Liber Pater’s vines as it destroyed everything else around them.
Progress can also be measured in the diversity of the grapes that are actually vinified. The comprehensive, 1,300-hundred-page book “Wine Grapes,” which Robinson co-wrote in 2012, lists 26 Turkish grapes as suitable for making wine. Ceviker told New Lines that that number is now up to at least 68. Most of the difference comprises ancient, nearly forgotten indigenous varieties. Even if their rediscovery hasn’t been enough on its own to bring Turkish winemaking monetarily closer to its potential, it has, in an important way, expanded its bounds.
“This is heritage,” Turgut Tokgoz, the founding president of the Turkish Society of Wine Experts and Educators, told New Lines. “As we evaluate the importance of everything the earth offers to human beings for ecological balance and wealth, that includes these plants.” He added, “Losing them from the planet would mean, in the end, losing some of that richness, little by little.”
Ceviker put it in terms of a duty, not only to Turkish people and lands but to the entire wine-drinking world. Anatolia and its neighboring regions to the east are “where all grape varieties were domesticated before they spread to the West,” he said. If you were to go back generations in the DNA of practically every grape variety around the world, “you would inevitably find the DNA of the varieties here.” He compared it to Gobekli Tepe, an active archeological site in southern Turkey home to one of the world’s oldest-known megaliths, which predates Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. Just as its discovery was critical in the understanding of civilizational history, he said, protecting indigenous grapes in Turkey is vital to understanding the history of wine.
Some years ago, Julia Harding, another co-writer of “Wine Grapes,” sent Ceviker an email inquiring about a Turkish grape she’d heard of called Sungurlu, and asked if he knew whether wine was made from it. The area for which the grape is named is situated in the northern Anatolian steppe, a couple of hours east of Ankara and less than 20 miles from Hattusa, the Hittite Empire’s Bronze Age capital. Ceviker grew up between Ankara and another town in the region, but hadn’t heard of Sungurlu. He called a contact at Ankara University’s agriculture department, who said it was a very valuable grape at the time of the republic’s founding, but that it was slowly lost. He wasn’t sure if it was grown anymore. He connected Ceviker with a former student who had researched it, and together they went scouting. They found it was still grown in the area, but not for wine. It stayed in Ceviker’s mind.
Later on, in 2017, Yaban Kolektif convinced Urla Winery, on Turkey’s Aegean Coast, to make the first modern Sungurlu wine. Once Yaban Kolektif began making its own wines, it came out with a Sungurlu, too. Though neither make it anymore, there are now two other producers consistently working with the grape, ensuring its survival for a little while longer. They are doing it in the only way possible in Turkey: by putting it to practical use.
Ceviker said he felt ashamed at not knowing anything about Sungurlu when Harding first contacted him about it. Finding such grapes is his passion, and this one was so close to where he grew up and continues to live. But the book on Turkish wine is being written every day, unlike those for France or Italy or Spain, which were largely finished long ago. Its authors, naturally, don’t know what remains to be written.
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