Ahval News
March 2 2019
“Wine is the most democratic drink,” says Turkey's wine expert Levon Bağış
Wine has been a part of our lives for thousands of years. It adorns our dinner tables, and many decisions that changed the world have been made over a glass of wine. War victories are celebrated with wine; the drink has been the subject of countless poems, and many great loves have started and ended with a bottle of wine. In mythology, wine is indispensable as an elixir, and almost every culture in the world has a god of wine.
Wine expert Levon Bağış feels that Turkey’s wine culture is sorely lacking.
“The French have a nice saying, which is that wine needs time,” Bağış tells Ahval. “But in Turkey when we say this, it doesn’t seem right. Why? Our land is the motherland of wine. Put a compass into Mount Ararat and draw a circle around it; within that region—Georgia, Armenia, and Eastern Anatolia—these were the first places to grow grapes. Wine’s history is thought to be 8,000 years old. There’s been a wine culture in Turkey since ancient times. Some regions were world famous for wine going back to the Ottomans, and to the Byzantines before that.”
A Turkish fine dining restaurant in Istanbul.
Although it varies from year to year, Turkey produces approximately 50-60 million litres of wine a year.
Turkey’s coastal areas along the Aegean and Mediterranean, mostly known today as holiday spots, have always produced wine and sold it around the world. In Roman times, the wine from Tenedos Island (Bozcaada, off Turkey’s north-eastern coast) was world famous.
So what happened to Turkey’s deeply rooted wine legacy?
“This started happening around 1915, with the Armenian genocide and the population exchanges following the First World War. We lost a big part of our wine culture along with the non-Muslim people disappearing from Anatolia because under the Ottoman system, the Greeks and Armenians were the ones producing and selling the wine. During the systematic murder and removal of Armenians and Pontic Greeks, 8,000-year-old vineyards were cut down,” Bağış explains.
The events of 1920 were the death knell for wine in Turkey. One of the first actions during the 1st Parliament was to ban wine production. This law remained in place for six years. After 1926, according to Bağış, the nascent state’s approach to wine underwent some major changes. Wine-tasting houses started to appear, and the Vinikol Winery in İstanbul’s Galata neighbourhood became Turkey’s first winemaker, supported by grape growers across Turkey’s interior.
“There was a logical reason for this,” according to Bağış. “All over there were these huge vineyards with no owners, and the state couldn’t generate any income from them. But wine is tremendously profitable. After 1926, wine production was subsidised by the state because the industry was so lucrative. You need one kilo of grapes to make a bottle of wine. If this bottle is good quality, people want it and it’s a very valuable product.”
Climate change is also negatively affecting Turkish agriculture, its vineyards in particular. Bağış points out that changing climate conditions are changing the quality of wine and increasing its alcohol content.
“We’re a hot country, but much of what we’re facing now is our own doing. Backwards politicians came up with ideas like ‘We’ll bring the sea to Central Anatolia’ and then built a giant dam. After the dam, the colour of Turkey’s longest river, Kızılırmak, changed. It’s just still water now. The climate is different, too. It used to be that there was no humidity in Cappadocia, but now the wine producers there are struggling with the damp. Famous winemakers all over the world are talking about using different grapes because of climate change.”
There are a few up and coming domestic brands producing wine; labels such as Eski Bağlar of eastern Turkey’s Elazığ, Maadra from northwestern Turkey’s Kaz Mountains and Asmadan from Eceabat in northwestern Turkey are increasingly finding their way on shelves.
At 44 litres per person each year, France leads the world in wine consumption. Although Turkey is the world’s sixth-leading producer of grapes, the annual Turkish wine consumption rate hovers around just 0.07 litres per person. Bağış points out that actual per capita consumption is actually less, however.
“The sad thing is that about half of the wine consumed in Turkey is at the seaside tourist resorts. Food and drink culture has become fashionable here, but people have been drinking less wine in Turkey because of various government policies over the last decade. Alcohol is heavily taxed, and it’s much harder to get a license to open a liquor store or sell alcohol at a restaurant. We know alcohol won’t get banned. We know how much people drink in countries where alcohol is illegal—bans just make it more attractive. For us, a ban would be too difficult. Instead, they raise the price and make it hard to access, and this is effective enough,” he explains.
The expert notes that in Turkey, there’s some confusion about the difference between alcohol and alcoholism.
While it’s natural for a government to take on alcoholism, he says, fighting alcohol and fighting alcoholism aren’t the same thing, adding, “They forget how valuable wine is. We talk about how we’re a tourist country, but walk down a main street in Istanbul or Budapest and you can’t even tell you’re in a different country. It’s the cuisine that makes them different, the different flavours and delicacies. Wine isn’t just wine. It’s our wealth and our cultural heritage.”
I asked Bağış if he’d ever seen a Turkish politician with a glass of wine.
“I don’t know of any that drink wine,” he answers. “Our concept of wine is a bit strange. We’ve been drinking bad wine for such a long time that we now associate it with being unpolished or uncouth. We think of things like low-quality rotgut wine. We call people ‘wino’ to humiliate them or call their character into question. That’s why I’ve seen politicians drinking rakı but never wine—they’re afraid people will start talking about their religion or ethnicity. But I don’t think you can say that wine is good and rakı is bad. They both have their place. Wine is a drink of the working class and the aristocrats because there’s always a wine that suits what you can pay. If you buy it and drink it, it’s good wine. The best wine of all is the wine in your glass.”