Tasted 12^th March 2024

Those of you who are familiar with your Bible will remember that, in the book of Genesis, it is recorded that Noah was the first man to make wine, following his survival in the flood, and the ark which he had built settling down at Mount Ararat.  (Sorry to everyone out there who believes it was the Georgians who got there first.)  

In a corner of southeast Türkiye, a little to the southwest of Ararat, the river Tigris runs.  In the area there are three Christian villages, whose populations speak Aramaic (the language of Jesus in the New Testament of the Christian bible).  One of these villages, Midin, is making its own wine – as it has done for millennia.  In the region there is another mountain, Cudi, and the legend is that after the Ark settled near Ararat, it came down the river Tigris and Noah moored it in the valley below the peak, a bend in the river right on the modern border with Syria.  This is where Noah first made his wine, after he had released all the animals from the boat.  The name of the wine – Tamnath in Aramaic, Haştan in Kurdish and Sekizli in Turkish – means ‘eight’ – and comes from the eight people in the Ark: Noah, his wife, his three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, and each of their wives.  This place therefore can claim a continuous use of wine ever since it was first found by its discoverer, and the wine is dedicated to him and the other seven members of his family.  

Its produced predominantly from Boğazkere, a fairly widespread grape in this part of Turkiye, whose name means ‘throat scratcher’ or ‘throat burner’ (which says something of its tannic nature).  As one would expect with a name like that, this is a deep-coloured and fairly full-bodied wine with distinctive tannins.  There is some attractive black fruit however, much of it of a dried character – plum shading to prune.  A warm finish.  Not a wine for the faint-hearted, it must have been reviving (perhaps shaking Noah and his family out of lethargy) after the traumas of a flood and time in a huge ark keeping all the animals from fighting each other.  

The recent rejuvenation of wine production in Midin, including the development of commercially successful wines, has been pioneered by Markus Ürek.  His progress into the world of wine is not a typical one.  He has a PhD, has been an academic at Harvard, worked at the US Congress and, by his story, was persuaded to go back to Midin to plant grapes by his wife, who came from the village (‘she got me into this trouble’).  It hasn’t been easy, but he has won the support of the local people by has commitment to the place, so that now there are 23 people employed in different ways contributing to the wines he makes.