Since this has turned into the "Week of the Weird" here at BWR, I figure I might as well wrap things up with a strange wine that was actually quite nice. The name you see on the title of this post is not a typo, it's Turkish: land of the superfluous umlauts. While looking around the Whole Foods in the University Heights neighborhood of Cleveland, I found the 2003 Kavaklidere Öküzgözü d'Elaziğ. $15. This comes from the Elaziğ province of eastern Turkey on the Anatolian plateau. Öküzgözü is the name of the grape and means "ox eye" in Turkish. Oddly Turkey is the fourth largest producer of grapes in the world but only a tiny percentage is converted into wine. I've never had a wine from a nation where the per capita consumption is less than one bottle a year. (The average American drinks ten bottles a year, the average French or Italian person drinks a little over sixty bottles a year.)
Bright red cherry aromas, crisp, slightly tart flavor with a mild finish. Much lighter than expected, kind of like a mellow Merlot. Totally different from what I expected--I was thinking something aggresive like a Spanish red to stand up to the robust cuisine of the area.
