How many different wine grape varieties have you tasted?

I learned about this 'Club' a couple of years ago and I have been on a crusade since that time, some times more vigorously than other times (my enthusiasm wanes when I seem to lose sleep from the red wines...)  I can't claim that I can actually discern each grape I have tried, but my husband has been a really good sport about buying wines just to try a grape to add to my list. I am counting backwards and I have twelve more varieties to try before I can submit my application.

Here is a label for the addition of two grape varieties to my list, from Turkey, a lovely rose:



I took this article from the Washington Post website...

By Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg
Wednesday, April 18, 2007

We'll bet that your list includes chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon, two of the world's most popular wine grapes. It might also include some or all of the other four that make up the "noble" grapes, so named for their use in creating the finest wines: merlot, pinot noir, Riesling and sauvignon blanc. But that's a small fraction of the thousands of grape varieties that exist.
The Wine Century Club was created two years ago to encourage wine lovers to explore the diverse array of wines around the globe. The sole criterion for membership -- which is free, and earns you a proverbial "certificate suitable for framing" from the club's London headquarters -- is to have tasted more than 100 grape varieties. The club's online application featuring a checklist of 185 varieties can be found at http://delongwine.com/century.html. Although it has been downloaded more than 6,000 times, only 3.5 percent have actually been submitted.
The club's mere 211 members represent a cross section of wine lovers around the globe. In the United States, 15 are based in Williamsburg, Va., the site of the club's first local chapter, which launched last year.
Georgetown University philosophy professor Henry Richardson has been the District's lone member since November 2005 -- and he'd enjoy a little company. "I am sure that there are a good number of people who already qualify, if only they've kept good notes," says Richardson, who had tasted 160 varieties at last count.
We wish we'd kept better notes of all the wines from such places as Slovenia and Lebanon we've been served while researching our last half-dozen food books, because we suspect that each of us has easily tasted more than 100 varieties. However, now that we're completing our WCC applications, we've decided that if we're not positive we've tasted a grape, better to taste it again. (What's the downside in that?)
"Most people in the wine business or advanced amateurs can get to 50 to 80 grape varieties fairly quickly, but then the work begins," says Steve De Long, a London-based architect and wine enthusiast who co-founded the Wine Century Club with his designer wife, Deborah, after they had tasted 188 varieties. They're now at 216. "In this way, membership isn't really free at all. It also helps to explain why the club isn't bigger than it is."
De Long offered some insider tips to those interested in expediting the process. No. 1: It's fair game to have sampled grapes as part of a blend. One taste of Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the famed Rhone red that features up to 13 grape varieties, can take you 13 percent of the way to membership.
A single taste of port can take you as much as 40 percent of the way. However, it's often tough to determine which grapes are part of the blend, because European labels generally do not disclose it.
Heather Hatcher, general manager of the Wine Seller in Williamsburg and head of the WCC's local chapter, suggests exploring the robust red blends of Portugal's Douro region. "The Portuguese grow an array of different grapes that aren't often used in other areas of the world," says Hatcher, who has tasted 124 grape varieties.
Richardson says that many unusual grapes are cultivated in France, Italy and Spain, especially outside the best-known areas. "Consider wines from the Loire and Corsica, from Friuli and Sicily, and from Galicia and Basque country," he advises. However, for exotic grapes, he, too, recommends turning to other countries such as Greece and its excellent, well-priced imports. "These range from the Xinomavro reds, which are like Malbecs with slightly brighter fruit, to wonderfully fresh whites like the well-priced Biblia Chora, a blend of half sauvignon blanc and half Assyrtiko," he says.
As you inch toward your own 100-grape milestone, don't overlook the interesting varieties being cultivated in the United States. Veritas Vineyard's Kenmar (Virginia, $25; http://www.veritaswines.com), an award-winning dessert wine, is made from Traminette, a cross between Joannes Seyve and Gewürztraminer. And check out some blends, including Sonoma's Bucklin Mixed Blacks (four grapes, including Alicante Bouschet) and Oregon's Sokol Blosser Evolution (nine grapes).
We hope you'll join us in tasting at least 100 grape varieties -- and pushing yourself out of any wine rut you might find yourself in. E-mail us about your experiences, and we'll share comments in a future column.
Membership is on the honor system, but beware: The club's Web site threatens a curse of the Roman wine god Bacchus on cheaters.

Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, award-winning authors of "What to Drink With What You Eat" and several other books, can be reached viahttp://www.becomingachef.comorfood@washpost.com.

The Myth of Big, Bad Gluten

I know I feel better and lose some belly fat when I remove white flour from my diet, (sugar and white flour can go hand-in-hand, so is it the flour or the sugar?) but there are more and more of these types of articles. I will not argue with the fact that something else could be going on with our bodies, I mean the sickness in our children alone sends up that red flag. Obviously the Standard American Diet is a real problem for everyone who eats it.

I had to look up Karelia; a map is included below for your ease, dear reader.

I took this from the New York Times on-line.


By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF
JULY 4, 2015

AS many as one in three Americans tries to avoid gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Gluten-free menus, gluten-free labels and gluten-free guests at summer dinners have proliferated.

Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-gatherers, not bread-eaters. If exposed to gluten, some of us will develop celiac disease or gluten intolerance, or we’ll simply feel lousy.

Most of these assertions, however, are contradicted by significant evidence, and distract us from our actual problem: an immune system that has become overly sensitive.

Wheat was first domesticated in southeastern Anatolia perhaps 11,000 years ago. (An archaeological site in Israel, called Ohalo II, indicates that people have eaten wild grains, like barley and wheat, for much longer — about 23,000 years.)

Is this enough time to adapt? To answer that question, consider how some populations have adapted to milk consumption. We can digest lactose, a sugar in milk, as infants, but many stop producing the enzyme that breaks it down — called lactase — in adulthood. For these “lactose intolerant” people, drinking milk can cause bloating and diarrhea. To cope, milk-drinking populations have evolved a trait called “lactase persistence”: the lactase gene stays active into adulthood, allowing them to digest milk.

Milk-producing animals were first domesticated about the same time as wheat in the Middle East. As the custom of dairying spread, so did lactase persistence. What surprises scientists today, though, is just how recently, and how completely, that trait has spread in some populations. Few Scandinavian hunter-gatherers living 5,400 years ago had lactase persistence genes, for example. Today, most Scandinavians do.

Here’s the lesson: Adaptation to a new food stuff can occur quickly — in a few millenniums in this case. So if it happened with milk, why not with wheat?

“If eating wheat was so bad for us, it’s hard to imagine that populations that ate it would have tolerated it for 10,000 years,” Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies lactase persistence, told me.

For Dr. Bana Jabri, director of research at the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center, it’s the genetics of celiac disease that contradict the argument that wheat is intrinsically toxic.

Active celiac disease can cause severe health problems, from stunting and osteoporosis to miscarriage. It strikes a relatively small number of people — just around 1 percent of the population. Yet given the significant costs to fitness, you’d anticipate that the genes associated with celiac would be gradually removed from the gene pool of those eating wheat.

A few years ago, Dr. Jabri and the population geneticist Luis B. Barreiro tested that assumption and discovered precisely the opposite. Not only were celiac-associated genes abundant in the Middle Eastern populations whose ancestors first domesticated wheat; some celiac-linked variants showed evidence of having spread in recent millenniums.

People who had them, in other words, had some advantage compared with those who didn’t.

Dr. Barreiro, who’s at the University of Montreal, has observed this pattern in many genes associated with autoimmune disorders. They’ve become more common in recent millenniums, not less. As population density increased with farming, and as settled living and animal domestication intensified exposure to pathogens, these genes, which amp up aspects of the immune response, helped people survive, he thinks.

In essence, humanity’s growing filth selected for genes that increase the risk of autoimmune disease, because those genes helped defend against deadly pathogens. Our own pestilence has shaped our genome.

The benefits of having these genes (survival) may have outweighed their costs (autoimmune disease). So it is with the sickle cell trait: Having one copy protects against cerebral malaria, another plague of settled living; having two leads to congenital anemia.

But there’s another possibility: Maybe these genes don’t always cause quite as much autoimmune disease.

Perhaps the best support for this idea comes from a place called Karelia. It’s bisected by the Finno-Russian border. Celiac-associated genes are similarly prevalent on both sides of the border; both populations eat similar amounts of wheat. But celiac disease is almost five times as common on the Finnish side compared with the Russian. The same holds for other immune-mediated diseases, including Type 1 diabetes, allergies and asthma. All occur more frequently in Finland than in Russia.



WHAT’S the difference? The Russian side is poorer; fecal-oral infections are more common. Russian Karelia, some Finns say, resembles Finland 50 years ago. Evidently, in that environment, these disease-associated genes don’t carry the same liability.

Are the gluten haters correct that modern wheat varietals contain more gluten than past cultivars, making them more toxic? Unlikely, according to recent analysis by Donald D. Kasarda, a scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture. He analyzed records of protein content in wheat harvests going back nearly a century. It hasn’t changed.

Do we eat more wheat these days? Wheat consumption has, in fact, increased since the 1970s, according to the U.S.D.A. But that followed an earlier decline. In the late 19th century, Americans consumed nearly twice as much wheat per capita as we do today.

We don’t really know the prevalence of celiac disease back then, of course. But analysis of serum stored since the mid-20th century suggests that the disease was roughly one-fourth as prevalent just 60 years ago. And at that point, Americans ate about as much wheat as we do now.

Overlooked in all this gluten-blaming is the following: Our default response to gluten, says Dr. Jabri, is to treat it as the harmless protein it is — to not respond.

So the real mystery of celiac disease is what breaks that tolerance, and whatever that agent is, why has it become more common in recent decades?

An important clue comes from the fact that other disorders of immune dysfunction have also increased. We’re more sensitive to pollens (hay fever), our own microbes (inflammatory bowel disease) and our own tissues (multiple sclerosis).

Perhaps the sugary, greasy Western diet — increasingly recognized as pro-inflammatory — is partly responsible. Maybe shifts in our intestinal microbial communities, driven by antibiotics and hygiene, have contributed. Whatever the eventual answer, just-so stories about what we evolved eating, and what that means, blind us to this bigger, and really much more worrisome, problem: The modern immune system appears to have gone on the fritz.

Maybe we should stop asking what’s wrong with wheat, and begin asking what’s wrong with us.

Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a science writer and the author of “An Epidemic of Absence.”

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 5, 2015, on page SR6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Myth of Big, Bad Gluten. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Hanimeli Kapadokya Restaurant, Mustafapaşa, Turkey - A Review

What a fun experience to be in someone's home and have someone personally teach you to make the indigenous cuisine. Even my husband was delighted with the experience - and he does not cook. (He does enjoy eating well, though!)



Perhaps we helped make tomorrow's dolmas for the restaurant... if they were well made, at least. (Perhaps the ones I made went to the family's dinner....)

On a genealogical note, my friend indicated I was a natural at rolling the grape leaves.... we decided it was because I have a great, great grandfather on the Kirkpatrick side who was a cigar maker in the 1800s. I somehow acquired the skill. :)

After learning we enjoyed a wonderful lunch on the terrace. I would recommend this restaurant/home to other visitors if they feel comfortable.

BTW, we learned that the owners were a family effected by the 'population exchange' in the 1920s. You can learn more about this event in Turkish and Greek history here. The upheaval is pretty incredible to contemplate, and I don't think I had ever heard about it until this trip.

Our delightful hostess

Location Bias in Restaurant Reviews

So, I heard an interesting story about on-line review sites on the radio the other day. Apparently, if seeking reviews on restaurants one should place more weight on a local's review than a visitor's review. And why? Because a visitor might be more 'forgiving' of shortcomings because the visitor is in a new place and may think that deficiencies are just local variations and different in this town than where they are from. Failings in service or quality might be a local novelty rather than a shortcoming.

Hmmm. Perhaps I should include more reviews of my local restaurants, because I can absolutely say that sometimes, when traveling, it is the entire experience that gets wrapped up in the review. For example, I have no memory of the food I ate at one restaurant, but check out this view. You know I was enchanted as I dined. (Oh, except for that incredibly loud family that showed up after our appetizers and proceeded to punch each other and giggle and bellow about how the kabobs are better at home. Suddenly my meal wasn't as appetizing, but that is not the fault of the restaurant.)

Sunset and a storm - our view at dinner in Cappadokia.

Beware the Dropped Shoe Brush in Istanbul

Beware the shoe shine guy who drops his brush in front of you in Istanbul... suppress your natural desire to be helpful and ignore the brush and just keep walking. Yes, we were had. We thought we were being helpful, but we were lead away from the security cameras and his 'cousin' joined him and we were separated from about $20 or $40, we don't actually know...

This happened to us outside the Grand Bazaar.

But, as we were walking in front of the Dolmabache Palace someone tried to do it to us again. This time at least we were smart!!! We just kept walking and then laughed about it with incredulity.

Now that we know, we found a web site about this very subject.... And, in my 'Long Trip Debrief' I have added a note to check for large city scams. I am not going to be duped again! (Famous last words.) Or at least I am going to try and remember that if people eagerly engage you in conversation, they might be seeking something from you. If you, however, initiate the interaction, you are probably pretty safe. I mean, our experience was that the people were all really lovely.

Who Do You Think You Are Resumes

on TLC at 9 pm Eastern time on 7/26. So very excited!

http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/who-do-you-think-you-are/

Bring Greenies to Turkey and Greece

Should I ever return to Greece or Turkey I am going to load up on Greenies in my suitcase (and make room for more souvenirs as I spread the Greenie love.)

I am not trying to advertise for Greenies, but I do know that my cat will seek out and tear a bag open, so I figure she likes them. Whether they are actually good for her, I have no idea, I just know she's a fan and I am a fan of her.

I noticed on this trip that I can not concentrate on what I am being told if there is an animal around - and this is particularly true if that animal is a water buffalo or a cat. And seeing as there were no water buffaloes in this area of the world, it was cats. And were there ever cats.... Everywhere. And frequently very healthy looking.

Let us begin with my friend at home - full name: Free-to-a-Good-Home, also known as Freeda. She was out all night, the camp counselors tell me, and this is her 'bugger-off' face in the morning when she went to bed.



Here we have an attractive little feline laying on a column capital from the Greco-Roman period now found at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum:


And a friend from the museum, hanging out at the little cafe, who will even jump in your lap if you let him - very sweet and soft, but eager for food


Sleeping contentedly in the Yildiz Palace park


Beautifully colored and fluffy cat parading along Çirağan Caddesi (yes, that is my foot, so you can get a sense of how friendly the cat was)


Jumping back in time, and to Greece... On the beach in Leros


In Kalimnos, Greece... one can see how my traveling companions might have thought them pests.... but I was thrilled.


Just a small sampling of the cats I wanted to put in my bag to take home.

We only saw one pregnant cat - at the Istanbul Archaeology Museum - and only a few litters. We did see many tipped ears, though, so attention is being paid to the animals.

I guess I am not particularly a dog person, but there are plenty of dogs around as well - and well-behaved and fairly clean and healthy looking. Many had tags on their ears, but they too are living an contemplated-in-the-US life on the streets.

3,000 Views

Ha! We made it to 3,000 page views today! How fabulous is that? I swear it isn't only me.

So, who is this person who keeps +1'ing me? I would welcome a comment to know who you are (I think.)

Sira Restaurant, Uçhisar, Turkey - A Review

I wish I had taken some photographs of the restaurant. I just didn't expect it to be so nice. It was especially nice after the previous dinners we had had at another nearby restaurant where we were surrounded by large touring groups. Some of the other guests at the other hotel restaurant seemed to have trouble keeping their voices down, which meant that we could not even hear ourselves think! Tough for a romantic dinner that way.

But Şira was lovely and small, with no huge round tables where the guests shout at one another from across the table.

The manager, Kâmil Koparal, asked us our names when we entered and then continued to address us by them all evening... which was unsettling... He has an eidetic memory. Unsettling in an interesting way... we felt like idiots not remembering his name. Another table asked him his name and we latched on to it.

Anyway, we enjoyed our dinner very much and would recommend the restaurant to others. It was too cool to eat outside, but the dining room was intimate with only a few tables. They do wine tastings at the hotel, so we found some nice local wines on the wine list and found a nice one to accompany our dinner.

I'd go again if in Uçhisar.

Happy Independence Day!

Tying my trip to Turkey with Herb's Life in WWI

I had to post twice today to capture both the events happening on 7/3...

On July 3rd, when the Commanding Officer is writing his letter to the Chief of Service U.S.A.A.S. with French Army about the Ambulance Corps, the Sultan, fighting on the side of the Germans, was dying.

I took this blurb from the History Channel's web site for this day.

On this day in 1918, with Turkish forces in the final months of fighting against the Allied powers during World War I, Mohammed V, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, dies at the age of 73.

Born in 1844 in Constantinople, Mohammed ascended to the throne in 1909 after the forced abdication of his elder brother, Abdul Hamid, under pressure from the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a rising political party known as the Young Turkey Party, or the Young Turks. Bent on modernizing the fading Ottoman Empire and stopping European powers from taking Ottoman territory, the Young Turks fomented a rebellion within the Ottoman Third Army in 1908 and forced the sultan to meet their demands and restore the Turkish constitution. The army, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (later known as Ataturk, he became the first president of Turkey) consolidated power for the CUP the following year, forcing the sultan to abdicate in favor of his brother Mohammed.

The leaders of the CUP, particularly Enver Pasha, effectively dictated the course of events over the next decade, as the new sultan, a gentle man, was little able to exert much of his own will on the throne. The results were not good for the empire: over the course of 1912-13, it lost virtually all of its remaining European territory during the two Balkan Wars and an unsuccessful war with Italy over Tripoli. In November 1914, Turkey entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary, against Britain, France and Russia. Though he had initially opposed his country’s participation in the war, Sultan Mohammed now exhorted his army–as well as all Muslims, including those living in Allied countries–to fight exhaustively against the empire’s enemies, proclaiming that “Right and loyalty are on our side, and hatred and tyranny on the side of our enemies, and therefore there is no doubt that the Divine help and assistance of the just God and the moral support of our glorious Prophet will be on our side to encourage us. I feel convinced that from this struggle we shall emerge as an empire that has made good the losses of the past and is once more glorious and powerful.”

By the time Mohammed V died, on July 3, 1918, Turkish forces had endured nearly four exhausting years of war, including a full-scale Allied land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula and aggressive Allied incursions into Mesopotamia, and were teetering on the brink of defeat. Within six months of the sultan’s death (he was succeeded by his brother, Mohammed VI), Constantinople itself was occupied by the Allies, and the once-great Ottoman Empire was in shambles.

On our second to last day in Istanbul, I went to the Pera Palace Hotel and viewed the room which Mustafa Kemal Ataturk used. Here is a photo I took of him as a young man. (Talk about a nice looking man...)