10:46
In a nutshell, there was a great deal of wine making in this region, Anatolia, and wine was enjoyed by both Christians and Muslims. But in the 1920s came partition. The Greek families who lived in this part of Turkey were told to pack their bags and go back to Greece. Similarly, for the Muslims who lived in Greece, the same story. The trouble here was that it was generally the Christians who made the wine and tended the vineyards. So, the vineyards became overgrown, then useless, and finally lost. We talked about grape, but we never tasted it. Would you like to taste? I would. So sweet. Absolutely bursting with flavor.
The grape should be tasty and delicious to make good wine. But I thought I heard somewhere that it didn't matter with wine grapes. They don't taste like table grapes do. They are very different, [clears throat] and I believe they are more tasty. If it is not tasty, you can never make a good wine. You make the wine in the vineyard, not in the winery. So, every time I taste your wine in the future, I'll be back here. You are always welcome. Uh the best wine is the wine that you enjoy. I hope you will like it. I'm thinking deep, dark velvet, tobacco, licorice, all that sort of thing. How am I doing?
Excellent. Now, tell me what I should be saying. The most important thing is if the wine is good or bad. Good. Thank you. Very nice to hear that. Cheers again. I got the feeling that Jan keeps pretty much an open house here at the vineyard. There were women cooking really good stuffed flatbreads for the wine buyers and the visitors. I just watched those two ladies make these gozlemes, they're called, and I've actually watched them about five times because it's just so mesmerizing watching them do it. While I was watching them, I was thinking like when you're a child and
you watch your mother making maybe just some shortcrust pastry, it has that same sort of effect. There's something incredibly comforting and really reassuring about people, particularly women, I think, making something like these. It just I think that's where my love of cooking came from originally. It was just watching my mom cooking cuz that's the same feeling I get watching them. And this. I've watched them make save savory ones, but this one with some tahini and some sugar. Oh. Now, I just want a little glass of tea.
This is a food journey, but I had to come to the exquisite ancient city of Ephesus. Well, everybody does, it seems. Lovely sweet figs here, perfect for a hot day. And I like old ruins, especially if I can find any distant reference to food. This was a rich, comfortable place to live. It was Greek, but then the Romans turned it into one of the most prosperous ports in the Aegean. My mom sent me a postcard from Ephesus when I was away at boarding school. A big postcard, and I remember, I think it was one of the amphitheaters, and I thought, "Oh, I've got to go there sometime." The thing that interests me
is over there, there's that plane, there's the cars in the distance, the trees, and all of that was sea a thousand years ago, and gradually it silted up. Now, in Padstow, cuz I have to put this on a human scale, we have a dredger going up and down the estuary every day trying to keep it clear and succeeding for small boats. But imagine if you were here, and this was one of the biggest ports in the Mediterranean in Roman times, and gradually seeing it all go, all fade. How awful would that be? Fate, inexorable fate, would be taking its toll of your life. Before the sea went away, people would have lived very well. Many would have been rich, and the food would have been exotic.
They had cookery books, I suppose to be more accurate, cookery scrolls. How to cook lamb stew with garum or roasted flamingo in aspic for your mates after a day at the Colosseum? Look at that. A pomegranate tree with ripe fruit. Isn't that beautiful? What could be more splendid than that? And they would have had pomegranates a plenty, oranges, lemons, grapes, olives, herbs, lovely green vegetables from Anatolia, fish, goats, lamb. They would have done all right.
