So I went to Turkey for 5th European Wine Bloggers’ Conference. I tasted 200 Turkish wines including from the big commercial wineries and from the smaller boutique wineries. Now I can hear you saying: “OK, these are probably nice wines, but nice just for being Turkish”. The sort of wine you’d drink happily during a holiday on the beach, but that cannot compare with ‘real’ wines from France or Australia.
Well, the opposite is true about Turkey. There are certainly several world-class estates in this emerging country. And one winery that would be just as exciting if it operated in Italy or Spain is Paşaeli. I’ve been really impressed by these wines, and would gladly drink them more often.
Paşaeli was founded in 2000 by Seyit Karagözoğlu, a successful businessman who also set up a wine import company. The first 5 hectares were planted in Kaynaklar near Izmir, in the warm Aegean region of Turkey that specialises in rich red wines. This was followed in 2003 by another vineyard near Tekirdağ, an important viticultural area on the European shore of the Marmara sea: this area is cooler, allowing for a longer ripening of grapes, and making some good white wines too.
Paşaeli is fascinating, and representative of modern Turkey, in the way it reconciles the local and the imported. The flagship 2008 Paşaeli, blending Cabernet Sauvignon, Franc, Merlot and Petit Verdot with 2 years in oak, is a monster competition wine with a black colour and almost solid concentration that could just as well come from Australia, southern Spain, or Argentina. It has the advantage of being very fairly priced at 50TL (22€), but is not for the faint of heart. The second label is K2, and there are two wines under the Serena label, 2010Cabernet Merlot and 2010 Shiraz, which are also very big and rather international in style (not necessarily in a bad sense).
https://bonkowski.me/en/2012/11/23/pasaeli-winery-turkish-star/