At the age of 17, Seyit Karagozoglu was far from home. For three years he had been away from his native Turkey at a boarding school in Switzerland. His father, a tobacco dealer, wanted him to receive an international education. One weekend in his third year, Karagozoglu’s father came to visit, and they went out to dinner. His father ordered a bottle of Musigny, and gave the young man a glass.
“It was the first time I had ever had a French wine, and I remember the taste to this day. How could a wine be this good?” says Karagozoglu. “It was a huge discovery for me.”
A couple of years later, Karagozoglu ended up at Pepperdine University on the coast of Malibu. “I discovered that Americans make wine and that they are good! I’ve been a wine lover ever since” he says.
Karagozoglu grew up in the tobacco business, and by all accounts was set to succeed his father in the intricate politics of a business that ran within a state-run monopoly. Even under the Turkish Republic which followed the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 the government maintained control over tobacco, along with beer and spirits (until 2003 when the monopoly was abolished).
As he learned to navigate the relationships that lay at the heart of the state bureaucracy, Karagozoglu understood that these were the players that would have to be involved in getting wine approved for sale in the country. So in 1993, at the age of 27 he started a small company to import foreign wine to Turkey for the first time, working through the machinations of the state monopoly.
https://www.vinography.com/2012/12/pasaeli_winery_izmir_turkey_cu