Beyond the bottle

Years ago, during the harvest season, I was strolling in the streets of Kalecik, a small town close to Ankara, when I noticed a strange handwritten note on a box of grapes for sale. It wrote "şişe kaçkını," with a rough translation meaning "escaped from the bottle." Of course I said to myself, just the right wording; these were the grapes that were not good enough for the bottle. After all we were in the town that gave its name to the now infamous indigenous grape variety named Kalecik Karası, a favorite of many wine producers. 

Turkey is a country that has a strange relationship with grapes. First of all, grapes for many are the ultimate fruit. When fully ripe, they adorn the late summer tables with grace and often chilled to give off a cloudy frost before devoured by the bunch. The reality is that most of the grapes grown in Turkey end on tables, not in bottles. Turkey must be the biggest consumer of grapes as a fruit, and if not eaten fresh, most grapes are either dried or turned into pekmez - grape molasses. There are countless ways of preserving grape juice in the most unusual ways; boiled-down reduced grape juice is turned into fruit leathers and sweetmeats enjoyed in wintertime as a nibbling snack. Sucuk is the generic name given to dry sausages in Anatolia, but it is also the name given to a wonderful sweet innovation, threaded walnuts encased in grape juice jelly. Made in the fashion like making candles, dipped several times in thickened grape juice, these long sweet sausages are crazily tasty. In many cases the grape is further thickened with starch to create another sweet delight that is cut into bite-sized pieces. The more rural and archaic ones are thickened with finely ground bulgur or semolina as a rougher form of starch, and poured into...