All posts tagged: Istanbul

Turkish wine USCA

Sommeliers’ Selection Turkey 2018

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Beside repeated barrel tastings at the winery, there are some exciting official wine tastings lined up this year, and I’ll share them as they happen. First, let’s start with Sommeliers’ Selection Turkey 2018 I attended a week ago. The event, organised by Gustobar, was held in The Marmara Taksim and there were about 200 wines by 50 Turkish producers. It’s been a while since I last bought any Turkish wines, which had drifted away naturally in the course of time. So I was delighted at the chance to reconnect with them. I went to only the Sunday tasting and masterclass, and I’ll share my observations with you. Let’s start with ‘Walk Around Tasting‘. #1, Open Your Wine Horizons And feed your curiosity. The rule number one is always first try the wines you haven’t tried before. I don’t normally drink white wines so tasting events are a good opportunity to try them. My first sip was Sevilen Isabey, which had been raved by many people. It was indeed a delicious and lively white, similar in style to NZ Sauvignon Blanc. …

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Korean New Year Feast and Chamlija Wine Tasting

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I’m back home after finishing the three-day Korean New Year Feast event and spending extra days catching up on personal affairs in Istanbul. The event was great, especially the part of meeting new amazing people, which is why I love what I do. Here I’ll share the atmosphere and delicious foods we ate and the special wines we drank for those who couldn’t join us. As promised, I presented 4 good wines from Chamlija (Papaskarasi is missing in the photo). Many thanks to Ozkan Uner from A2A Photography for excellent photos. He’s a very talented and respected photographer and, though his expertise is in aviation photography, he takes great food photos as well. By sheer coincidence, two chefs were in matching red to celebrate the year of Rooster. Really, I didn’t think of it when I decided to put on my red skirt. Anyway, since it’s a special day, for one of the starters, I offered a royal dish, which goes by the name of ‘Gujeolpan – Nine Delicacies‘. We started with the colourfully arranged little delicacies with seasonal vegetables and home-smoked trout and …

An Innocent Cook, Cheated…

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Ok, I’ve taken the involuntary absence from the blogging sphere as a sort of excuse to stay away from the computer and instead doing some reading to prepare myself for the upcoming wine course. But it’s about time I broke the silence. So here I am, quite puzzled by what is happening here politically and disappointed that I’ve been so complacent about the freedom in social media and the internet law. Yes, I’ve heard and read about it but somehow my little heart always hoped that it wouldn’t affect me and my life. But I’ve been proven wrong, which makes me think how other journalists cope with this unjust law since it concerns their job. I haven’t been able to access any WordPress blogs, including mine, for a week now. Many posts are waiting in the queue, many guests have come and gone and many foods have been shared. At first, I thought it was a temporary technical glitch but, when I saw a message saying ‘This site has been blocked by the court decision.’, …

Lokanta Maya

Lokanta Maya (closed down July 2016)

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I’d never had it in mind to write restaurant reviews in Istanbul so I hadn’t really paid attention to or taken photos of the restaurants I had tried here. Another reason I don’t have photos of restaurants and cafes here is that in Turkey, the food served in restaurants is almost identical so I didn’t feel it necessary to make a record of the places I visited. After some time in Istanbul, I started yearning for different flavours and dining experiences, oh, come on, even if dolma, mezze and kofte  are nice, you get tired of the same food and want something new, don’t you? As I was realizing that the chance of stumbling upon places that serve Turkish food in more interesting styles mixed with world cuisine by chance, let alone international cuisine restaurants, is almost zero, I had to search for them myself. And during the research, I realised that such places are not cheap. Well…excited and disappointed all at once.