Kuzubağ Kalecik Karası 2025
£14.95
The wine
A refined plum colour, a blast of forest fruit on the nose and clove notes on the back palate, with tannins balanced by lively acidity and a long finish. IWC judges have described the grape as Turkey's answer to red Burgundy, and its fragrant elegance suits Mediterranean and Anatolian cooking particularly well.
Kalecik Karası takes its name from the town of Kalecik near Ankara. By the 1970s it had fallen to a handful of surviving vines and was effectively extinct as a commercial variety, before researchers at Ankara University propagated what remained. It is now one of Turkey's most planted quality reds, and it has adapted readily to the terroir of çal.
The producer
Kuzubağ
View all Kuzubağ winesKuzubağ was founded in 2007 by Salih Kuzu and his daughter Aslı Kuzu, who planted vineyards in their hometown of çal in Denizli province, inland from the Aegean coast of Turkey.
They then waited. The vineyards were given thirteen years to mature before a winery was built, a 3,000 square metre building discreetly embedded into the landscape at the heart of the estate, and the first vintage was released only in 2021. That patience is unusual anywhere and almost unheard of in a young wine industry.
Turkey has the fourth largest area of vineyard in the world and produces very little wine from it: the overwhelming majority of its grapes are eaten fresh or dried into sultanas. It also holds an extraordinary genetic inheritance, with something between 800 and 1,200 indigenous varieties, since Anatolia is one of the places where the grapevine was first domesticated some 6,000 years ago. Kuzubağ work çal Karası, Kalecik Karası, öküzgözü and Narince alongside French varieties.
