Title: Wine Complexities: Post-Industrial Production and Sentiments in Turkey
PhD Supervisor: Shaila Seshia Galvin
Expected completion date: 2023
The “Wine Complexities” research project narrates the different phases of creation and various aspects of valuation of the quality-wine in Turkey. By focusing on the country’s first oenotourism route, Trakya Bağ Rotası, this dissertation portrays how the market of quality wine comes into being in Turkey via bureaucratic infusions and complications in defining taste and quality. Through post-industrial entrepreneurs and their motives, the oenotourism route they established to create a market for their bottles, and grape cultivation and winemaking-related legislations, this thesis provides an extensive discussion on political, cultural, and economic processes of shifting from industrial to post-industrial in Turkey’s wine market. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic research during which I worked as a cellar worker in a winery in Turkey’s Northwest, my dissertation primarily discusses how the notions of taste and quality conditioned and configured.
1. Candar, Serkan & Uysal, Tamer & Ayaz, Atak & Akdemir, Uğur & Korkutal, Ilknur & Bahar, Elman. (2021). “Viticulture Tradition in Turkey,” in Viticulture Studies. 1. 39-54.
2. Ayaz, Atak. “In Pursuit of Quality and Taste: Post-Industrial Entrepreneurs,” in Open Access e-monograph, AAA, 2022 (forthcoming).
Visiting Fellow - Cornell University, the ILR School - January 2022-May 2023