My guest for this episode is Gizem Duyar of Kerasus Wine. Gizem lives and makes wine in Turkey solely from “married vines" that are over a century old. A married vine is a vine that has been wrapped to a tree, grown with the tree, and lives symbiotically with a tree as its support structure. It is likely the most ancient form of viticulture because it simply mimicks how vines grow naturally without human intervention. This was the original vitiforestry. Because of this relationship with its partner tree, the vine gets many benefits that Gizem discusses.

There’s something so special about this relationship that Gizem has committed to making a very traditional form of natural wine in amphora that she has altered to include a unique technique for keeping the wine amber or orange wine while including both white and red grapes. She adds nothing and removes nothing to the wine so that it can reflect that special expression of the relationship between the vine and tree. She calls the wine Melez, which is the Turkish word for hybrid. It describes her winemaking process, but it also takes on a much more literal meaning when you discover that the red grape she blends with is a hybrid grape from America that has been living in Turkey for over 100 years.

Turkey has an ancient winemaking tradition that has fallen out of popularity lately for social and political reasons. It is home to thousands of indigenous varieties of vitis vinifera, and it has also lost thousands of acres of vineyards in recent years. Turkey’s neighbor, Georgia, gets a lot of attention in US wine circles, and it should, but once you start digging into Turkey you’ll find as much as three Georgia’s worth of wine culture… It’s incredibly rich in wine history. After all, both countries have been at it for about 8000 years, from times before the borders or the names Georgia and Turkey meant anything.

A special thanks to Gizem and her translator Elif for conducting this conversation in English!

@kerasuswine

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