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.

Wine in Pavyon*

A few days after I talked about how a good wine serving should be (or should not be), I encountered once more with a wine glass that was filled up to the top. Do they try to train me or what?

Once more, I drank my wine silently, smelling almost no flavor at all. Since the place was in the form of pavyon (yes, I went to pavyon! Actually, I was brought to, but I really had fun. I guess the range of ambiances to which one can accomodate widens as one gets older.) my expectation was to pretend as if I am drinking the cheap wine served there. Once I had the first sip, it appeared to me that the situation is much better than I had expected. After a while, the wine bottle was left on our table and we had the chance to see what we were drinking.

Leona Merlot-Kalecik Karası 2008

We were drinking Kayra Leona Merlot - Kalecik Karası, which is moderately priced blend of Kalecik Karası, one of the most popular local grape varieties, and Merlot, a universally known and popular grape variety. If I can not stick my nose down in the glass, if I can not concentrate in anything but the loud live music, then this would be a good choice. It is easy to drink, has soft tannin and fruity taste, was enough to let us enjoy that night.

*Pavyon is the name we use in Turkey for a specific kind of night club. It is an old, traditional kind of night club, which is conceived as low quality/cheap, since it serves cheap drinks and the live music is mostly performed by unpopular local musicians. The one mentioned in this post is a modern and fancy version which aims (as far as I understand) to regenerate the spirit of payvon in a more decent and high quality environment.

Kavaklıdere Kalecik Karası Syrah 2009

Kavaklıdere, Kalecik Karası Syrah 2009

We opened this bottle of Kavaklıdere Kalecik Karası Syrah 2009 to add joy to an ordinary dinner at home. It has a lively burgundy color, red fruity (cheery mostly) and spicy aromeas, soft tannins and moderate acidity. These all make it a light and almost sweet tasting wine. It does not stay long on the palate, but this does not prevent it from having a lovely ending. This was a good choice for our end.