History of Wine in Turkey

Murat Yankı is a wine instructor and a sommelier, he has been conducting research on the history of wine for the past 10 years and teaching in various seminars and universities ever since. Yankı is also a professional tourist guide and spends a large part of the year in his own vineyards around the Cappadocia area.

This is his second time hosting a seminar at YESAM, and this time he presented in English and reached a different audience.

He introduced the topic of his seminar with the following words;

“This will be a presentation on the history of wine, mainly in Anatolia and Thrace. However, to draw the origins further back, we have to go beyond Turkey, and we will start from more remote origins of wine and then we will come back to the Republic period. So it will be a very quick flight on the history of wine because what we are covering is a subject that is about 4000-5000 years old, and when we speak of the grapes and the seeds, that history goes back even further”

Mr. Yankı continued talking about the history of wine, and how Hittites were the first ones to categorize wine in history, based on taste.  Mr. Yankı also explained why wine is categorized as divine;

“Wine was a divine drink. Because at the time humans did not know how the making of wine took place. For instance, beer is almost as old as wine. However, for beer, there is a need of intervention by men. There is a process that needs to be followed. For grapes there is nothing. You don’t even have to squeeze the grape juice.  It’s enough to just stack the grapes on one another in a vat and fermentation takes place on its own. Therefore wine was holy, and belonged to the divine class, the higher class.”

Mr. Yankı continued with slides of antique wine containers and other findings related to wine. He then explained the grape varieties of Anatolia, the characteristics of each grape and the type of wine they yield. Towards the end of the seminar, Mr. Yankı talked about wine making and consumption during Ottoman and Republic periods.

After the seminar the participants got a chance do a small wine tasting with Mr. Yankı involving different types of wines made with local Anatolian grapes.

20 February 2015