Last week I went on a day trip to Şirince, a little tourist town near Selcuk and Izmir. Şirince is famous for şarap, or wine, made of almost every kind of fruit you might want. My two traveling companions and I tasted a dizzying array of fruit wines, listed more or less in order of agreed-upon deliciousness, from most to least:
black mulberry (karadut),
melon (kavun),
cherry (vişne),
quince (ayva),
strawberry (çilek),
peach (şeftali),
raspberry (ahududu),
blackberry (böğürtlen),
apple (elma),
pomegranate (nar),
blueberry (yabanmersini).
We really wanted to like blueberry, but it was just sour and strange. A word to the wise- trying the same wines in different places is a good idea, because we hated the first strawberry wine we tasted but the second one was amazing. We tried a little regular wine of the grape (uzum) variety as well but after the myriad sweet fruit flavors our palates could not really taste "real" wine properly. Fruit wine, at 12TL, or 6Euro, or 8-ish dollars a bottle, is the most economical non-Efes (most "popular" Turkish beer) way to get your drank on in Turkey. (Aside: Turkish beer is pretty terrible. Ask any Fulbrighter.)
Being three Fulbrighters, my traveling companions and I have all been in Turkey almost six months to date. This clearly gives us the know-how to gauge the authenticity of Turkish towns, and we decided that Şirince is one of the most genuinely Turkish-feeling towns we visited. Later we learned it is currently populated mostly by immigrants and that a lot of the village's quaint buildings are leftovers from Greek times. Sounds pretty Turkish to me, actually.
Thanks to my Fulbright companion for these pictures, because goodness knows that as per my normal habits I did not even remember to bring my camera.
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