Saturday, September 30, 2006

Turkish Fun, Turkish Wine.

Fun Stuff:

Claudia and I just got back an amazing vacation in Turkey. Actually it's Saturday now, and we got back on Monday, so it has been five days. This vacation replaces my vacation in Mexico as my new favorite vacation. This vacation was great! Claudia, I, Sinan, Sarah, Michele, Jason, and two of Sarah's friends, Sue and Paul went to the southwest coast of Turkey and got on a 20 m (65 ft) sailboat called Sardunya to sail around the coast for a week.




We were on the boat for seven days and there were only two crew members, the captain and the first mate, both part owners of Sardunya. The captain "sailed" the boat and did some other light work, while the first mate worked his ass off. We never raised the sails because it would not have been conducive to getting where we were going. Anyway, none of us on the boat really cared.



The first mate used to own a restaurant in Turkey, and he cooked us three amazing meals per day, plus he made tea for us everyday at 5 PM. We weighed anchor at a new beautiful cove each day, and all we, the vacationers, did was; wake, eat, read, tan, chill, swim, eat, drink, Tea Time!, swim, chill, eat/drink, sleep. It was GREAT!



Wine Stuff:

When we went shopping for our food (for the boat) we filled two shopping carts full of alcohol, and four full of food. The alcohol was mostly wine and beer, but we had stuff to make white russians two.

I had tried greek wine in the past, but it was a loser and have avoided it ever since. This made me a little worried about Turkish wine.

Turkish wine is pretty good in general. The majority of turkish wine tasted like any average wine you might buy at the grocery store. With respect to price, we bought mostly in the mid-range, so I cannot speak about the high-end stuff. Interestingly there were some very different wines among our stash. One was corked, so that does not count;) The other was just... different.

Note: I think that wines from different countries, in fact from different regions, should taste very different. Sommeliers spend years learning how to taste the difference between Margaux and Medoc, okay that one is easy. the point is that wine should have a special flavor that you can only taste from a certain place

Getting back to my Greek wine experience, the "interesting" Turkish wine we had had very similar flavors to the Greek wine I had once. It was very dry, but otherwise hard to describe. It was musky, green, and tanic. Maybe if I could put those flavors in the right proportions you could start to get the idea... but I can't. Anyway, it was interesting stuff worth trying. Incidentally, Turkey is very arid and probably does not have a lot of diversity in growing regions. The grapes I saw most often were Syrah, Sauvignon Blanc, and Semillion.

happy drinking,
-PMo