Book: Everything Wine Book

Everything Wine Book (Turkish version)

There are only a few books about wine written in Turkish. There are many books written in English, but those are rarely translated into Turkish. This one is one of the few Turkish translations about wine. It is written by Barbara Nowak and Beverly Wichman and translated into Turkish by Elif Demir. It starts with basic information about wine and continues with characteristics of wine depending on regions and countries, with history of wine and even with the unexpected incidents such as desaeases or prohibiting which wine business had experienced.

The book contains short explanations each with their titles, so you don't need to read it like a novel, but you could easily use it as a reference book or could browse it through whenever you wish to read whichever page attracts your attention.

The negative things for me are that the book does not contain any pictures and that its writing style is a little boring. These are not enough reasons to not to buy the book of course. The book can be an alternative for those who look for a book about wine in Turkish language.

Kocabag Kalecik Karasi (2008)

Wine like a candy! Seriously, this wine has so sweet aromas I doubted that it was a dry wine. When you smell this wine, you fell like smelling a desert with strawberries and cherries. I also smelled a little fume, which was a nice thing balancing the sweetness.

Kocabag is a winemaker in Kapadokya, the home of Kalecik Karasi. This wine is a soft, thin bodied, typical Kalecik Karasi wine with almost no tannins at all. If you like fruity and easy to drink wines, you make like this wine.

Camlıbag Cabernet Sauvignon - Kuntra 2009

Çamlıbağ Cabernet Sauvignon - Kuntra 2009

Camlibag is one of the well known winemakers in Bozcaada. I didn't try their wines when I was Bozcaada but I had the chance of tasting this one thanks to onlinemahzen's store in Atasehir.

I know Cabernet Sauvignon has a strong taste but I thing this wine is mostly shaped by Kuntra, as in the case of most Bozcaada wines. I have tasted 3-5 Bozcaada wines in the past year and their common characteristic was that their taste was a little too sharp and bitter.

To be honest, I'll remember this wine's too sharp and alcoholic and fruity smell. It stayed 3 days in hour refrigerator and I tasted it each day. I liked it best on the third day. Its aromas were milder and taste was softer, but it still had a full and tannic taste.

In short, this wine has not become one of my favorites, but just because of curiosity and also because I like Bozcaada, I'll continue to taste Bozcaada wines and also Camlibag wines with the hope of discovering something new one day.

How to open a wine bottle

I am going to show you that opening a wine bottle is not difficult or complicated at all and that a women can do it without help of men. After you learn it, you may still let the men do it and let them feel strong and clever :)

You need a corkscrew in order to open a wine bottle in a decent way. There are ways to open a wine without them but they are not as "decent" as my way :) A corkscrew can look like the one above or the one below. They both serve the same purpose, but I usually use the upper one since it is more comfortable to use it.

The common part of all corkscrews is the part that looks like a screw and that you can stick into the cork. Let's see how these things work.

First, you put the bottle on a table or another flat surface. There is something that covers the upper part of the bottle. I don't know what it is called :) It is something like a hardy paper that covers the top of the bottle. Whatever its name is, you should get rid of it. I usually scratch it with the sharp end of the corkscrew so that I can grasp it with my fingers and take that cover out.

Now you can see the top of the cork in which you can stick the corkscrew. You put the corkscrew into it and turn it cloclwise until you can't turn it anymore or until you believe that it is enough. The corkscrew's arms should be looking up. Hold those arms and take them down :) The cork should be out now.

That's all! As you see, there is nothing to be afraid of. Don't deceive yourself saying that you don't know how to do it or that you can't do it :) Just try !

Chateau Petit Bois (2003) Lussac Saint-Emilion

Chateau Petit Bois (2003) Lussac Saint-Emilion

Last weekend, we were invited to a barbacue party to celebrate a friend's birthday. Instead of wine, we brought a huge bottle of tequila with us. I forgot to take pictures of the tequila bottle, but I can assure you there is not much to talk about it :) It was my first time of tasting tequila, and I believe there is nothing to taste in tequila. It's salt and lemon that makes us think as if it has a taste :) Anyway, I don't think that people drink tequila for its taste.

Coming to our subject, the wine in the picture was one of the wines in our friend's mother's wine celler. We didn't ask for her permission, so I passed Chateau Margaux bottles and tried to choose a wine that she wouldn't notice easily when dissappeared :)

As I mentioned in my previous post, most of Bordeaux wines don't provide much information on their label. Therefore, I can't tell you about this wine's grapes or producer this time, but I'll tell you something else. Let's first start with the taste of wine. I tasted it without aerating and it had a nice but a little too strong taste, moderate tannin and medium body. Its color was a clear and vivid bordeaux as if it was a young wine, altough it was a 2003 vintage.

Aerator

Then I thought the wine would get better after a little aerating and I asked for a dekanter. Instead of a dekanter, my friend brought the device in the above picture. I saw it for the first time and honestly, I didn't believe first that it would work. In a few seconds, I was the biggest fan of this device! You pour a wine with sharp and intense taste through it and the wine that is filled into your glass is a well aerated, soft, and well rounded wine as if it was aerated in a dekanter for 20-30 minutes.

I couldn't understand how this thing works but it really works! This one is bought in UK and I saw that it can be bought from internet. Coming back to the wine, it is also worth to try, it was a very very nice, soft wine especially after we poured it through the aerator.

Chateau Peyre-Lebade (2008)

Once again, I'm going to tell you about a French wine. French wine bottles provide information on bottle labels in a different way compared to Turkish wines. Let's see what we can get from the bottle.

Chateau Peyro-Lebado gives its name to the wine. It is the name of the place where the wine is produced in Haut-Medoc. Haut-Medoc is a part of Medoc area, which is located in Bordeaux, France. This chateau - the vineyard is acquired by Baron Benjamin de Rotschild in 1979. The bottle in the above picture is from 2008.

French wine are subject to a classification which is still a little complicated to me. I mentioned before that there is a classification dating back to 1855 which defines certain vineyards of Bordeaux as grand cru, which is the highest level. I tasted once a Grand Cru wine and mentioned it here.

I have read here that there is another classification in Medoc, which classifies wines as cru bourgeois exceptionnel, cru bourgeois superieure, and cru bourgeois. The wine I'm going to tell you about is a cru bourgeois, which is the third among those levels. I noticed that the pictures of this wine on the web show that the expression "cru bourgeois" is usually written on the label, but it's not written on my bottle. I don't know if this means anything (does anyone know?).

I think this is enough for classification. Let's talk about what is inside of the bottle. As in the case of most of French wines, there is no information on the bottle about the grapes of which this wine was made. Thanks to google, we can learn that the wine is made of mostly Merlot and also Cabernet Sauvignon.

We were 4 people sharing this wine on dinner and I can tell you that everybody loved it! It is a well balanced, round, very delicious wine with still noticeable tannins. This was brought from France as a gift to me, so I'd like to say thanks again!