I bought this bottle a week and a half ago at a vineyard bearing the entirely divine name of Arcadia, and had no idea at the time that so worthy an occasion for opening it would present itself quite so soon. We have a new Pope! 🇻🇦
And in the glass: Papaskarası. It sounds very nearly like a papal title, but it is in fact an ancient indigenous grape of Eastern Thrace. The name means “the priest’s black”—from the Greek παπάς, ‘priest,’ and the Turkish kara, ‘black,’ after the colour of a cassock—and its family history is suitably ecclesiastical. It is held to be a natural crossing of the Balkan Prokupac with the Romanian Alba Imputotato, itself an ancestor of the grapes behind Tokaji. Papaskarası in its turn is reckoned an ancestor of the Hungarian Kadarka. In Türkiye it grows in the province of Kırklareli—formerly Kırkkilise, “forty churches.” Which is precisely where I got hold of it.
Connoisseurs may raise an eyebrow: how can this be a blanc de noir, a white from a black? The grape is red, after all. Quite so. But the winery, making no claim to turn water into wine, has contrived to make a white one out of dark grapes. Also a miracle, surely.
And the result is exquisite. On the nose, a spring meadow—lightness and freshness. On the palate, a fine floral citrus.
So I raise my glass: to the health of the newly elected, to peace, and to good wine.
One for the Pope, and so to bed. Work in the morning.
