In professional tastings of the wine industry, we also meet new wines under the guidance of seasoned wine experts. Oz Clarke, the tasting leader at the CMC Challenging Master Class event organized by Gustobar in Istanbul in June 2023, is also a well-known name in the wine world with his books. As we approached the end of the tasting, the findings he shared were very meaningful. In summary, he said: “We have been doing a wide variety of tastings in many countries over the years, and we encounter very good wines in almost all of them. But the tastings in Turkey have a very important difference from the others: we come across grapes that have never been wine made before. These discoveries excite us the most.”

Oz Clarke's points actually make us laugh or cry. Because if we lived in lands where wine is valued, the probability of encountering these discoveries would be very low, but we would have become a place that enjoys wine, benefits from its abundance, preserves and develops its treasures, but we have not been able to. However, instead of lamenting, let's take care of these hidden values that we have uncovered, albeit late.

WAYANA, you know, is our wine house in Kadıköy, Istanbul. We only serve Turkish wines. We include more than 400 kinds of wines produced in almost every region of our country in our menu. We have an exceptional service that we proudly offer and you can't find anywhere else: you can buy all our wines by the glass or by the bottle. For this reason, the number of wine-loving foreigners who want to get to know Turkish wines is very high among our guests at WAYANA.

Let's get to today's grape. Patkara is a grape that is open to versatile processing and matures earlier than other grapes, and it takes its name from this: 'grape that ripens and instantly turns black = pat-kara' (in Turkish, we use ‘pat’ for sudden changes; kara means black). Wine grapes generally have a skin and seed structure that is not suitable for consumption on the table. Patkara, with its high sugar structure, is suitable for eating on the table and is prone to making and drying molasses. When you add the wine making feature to this, a perfect example of competence comes to you.

Two of our producers on the Mediterranean coast are on the WAYANA menu with Patkara wines. Tasheli, one of these two producers, produces fruity, soft tannin, medium acidity red wines with aromas of blueberry, cherry, leather and pine inspired from Patkara grapes grown in their vineyards at an altitude of 1,200 meters in the foothills of Taurus.

Selefkia is another producer of our Patkara grape. Selefkia's portfolio includes raspberry, mulberry, mahaleb flavored red wine with slightly higher acidity, which is one of the 80-year-old vines that grow in its vineyards with limestone and clay soil on the slopes of the Taurus Mountains at an altitude of 1,150 meters.

Both Selefkia and Tasheli also produce rosé versions of Patkara and blend variations they blend with other grapes. It is clear that there will be many more alternatives that Patkara will offer us. We expect surprise Patkara wines from Tasheli and Selefkia as well as from new wine producers who have not met Patkara yet.

Also sharing a link for Patkara wines by Andrea Lemieux:

https://thequirkycork.com/patkara-stepping-out-from-the-shadows/