Idol Smyrna Shiraz @ Nardis

Idol Smyrna Shiraz 2009

We were at Nardis again last Saturday to celebrate a friends birthday. Sibel Köse was performing that night. We saw our old firends and drank nice wine, so, it was a nice evening.

I think Nardis is a very nice Jazz club. A nice atmosphere, nice waiters, nice bar, nice drinks, acceptable prices and nice music. I have to admit that I like to hear Jazz music but it is not my favourite. I could have liked it much better if I did not have to be silent whenever someone is performing at Nardis. They have a very serious policy asking you to be silent during the performance, but I can't help thinking that Jazz is a music that I should hear behind other voices while I'm having my dinner or so.

Anyway, I still like it there. I would have liked it more if they served their wines a little cooler. They serve red wines around room temparature, that makes it around 20ºC.

We ordered a cheese plate and Idol Smyrna Shiraz 2009. We asked them to put the wine in an ice bowl for a while. It got better then. It is a full bodied wine with very strong fruity aromas. I read from the bottle that it had choclate aromas. My husband said that it is certainly true, but I was just thinking that it has some sweet aromas, that's it. So, I guess what I call sweet aroma is choclate aroma.

I would prefer not to mention the price because it is more than three times of what I would pay when I bought it from a wine store. It is sold around 25 TL at onlinemahzen.com. I wonder if it is also like this in other places in the world. Do people always pay more than twice of the normal price whenever they order a wine at a night club or at a restaurant?

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.

How Wine Serving Shouldn't Be

A few days ago, I had a dinner with someone that I like very much in a restaurant, which she liked very much and which I was curious about. I was being too optimistic when I thought I could have a meal and a glass of wine there considering that I rarely have dinner after 8pm, especially when I am not hungry. However, I was tasting different combinations of wine & cheese only half an hour ago at Wine & Cheese seminar, even after everyone else had given up trying the wine & cheese combinations and immersed in in conversation. I was really very confortable there. So, I thought there should be something wrong here and I decided to blame the serving of wine in the restaurant.

We both ordered some kind of macaroni and a glass of Frontera Merlot, which was one of the two wines that one can order in glass. While we were waiting with concerns arising from the fact that we ordered wine in glass instead of ordering a bottle, something very surprising form me happened. That nice waiter brought us our wines in glasses that are a little bigger than water glass and that are filled up.  When I say filled up, I mean literrally a full glass of wine. I believe even someone who never drinks wine may have noticed that wine is not served in a fully filled glass. The point in serving the wine in glassess filled up to the half (or even less) is to enable you to smell the wine and to sence the aromas in it. I understood this better when I could not enjoy the wine and prefered water beside my meal. I already had noticed that and had mentioned here that I drink wine with my nose, not with my mouth. This proved my theory to myself.

In short, you do not serve wine in a glass that is filled up to the top. If you do, someone like me can criticise you badly and in fact, that one may be not as polite as me and spread your name everywhere. Since I could not think of warning the waiter in that evening (now I notice I also did not think of taking pictures to show you), I do not want to name the restaurant here. I think complaints about a restaurant should be conveyed to that restaurant first. I may have behaived too nice since the person invited my to there liked the restaurant very much :)

House Wine = Home made wine?

Kitchenette Narince 2008

I had a lovely dinner with friends that I have not seen for ages at Kitchenette. I did not choose the wine but I supported the choice only because the expression "house wine" was included in the name of the wine: Kitchenette House Wine Narince (2008). Not that I know what it means, it is only due to curiosity!

I certainly was not expecting something similar to the one in Bozcaada, a wine served in a plastic bottle that was originally a water bottle of a well known brand (it was a very delicious wine by the way). That would be inappropriate considering the fancy concept of the restaurant. Nevertheless, I expected something like boutique style production at least. At the end, it appeared that I was quite unfamiliar to Kitchenette's concept. I captured the point only when I saw this sentence by Doluca (major wine producer in Turkey) on the bottle: "Produced in our facilities in Mürefte-Tekirdağ".

Kitchenette Narince 2008

The wine was fine. It was a refreshing white wine with flawory and fruity aroma. I understand the bitter feeling of high acidity which I encounter in most of the white wines is not very strong in wines made of Narince (a generalization computed from one exapmle only!).

So tell me, what does House Wine means at the end? Please enlighten me, because for some reason I did not remember to ask the waiter!