In the May 2018 issue of Şalom Dergi, Dalia Maya gave her column “İsimsiz” over to my mother Müjgan Yurtseven and me. It is not an interview about my work in wine: it is the story of two intertwined paths, of a kitchen, and of a palate that took shape in it. The full text now sits on the author’s own site.
You have to start with my mother. Müjgan Yurtseven was very nearly born hungry to learn; in her own words, “my whole life has been spent learning something, and it still is.” She took language courses while following jewellery courses like a full-time school, right through to the diploma; her pieces sold in France and the United States. Then for a while she helped out in my father’s textile business. When things settled and she was told “you have worn yourself out, you are free now,” a gap opened up.
I got involved in that gap. I told her a food blog would come out of her kitchen culture, and I kept at it for about two years; by then I was already photographing her tables and posting them with the location tag “annemde / chez maman.” Before the blog even existed, Sofra magazine came knocking: “We would like to give you six pages, would you lay us a dinner table?” Then Maria Ekmekçioğlu asked her for a recipe for a magazine in Greece; my mother and her recipe made the cover. The blog finally opened, and I named it: Chez Maman (annemde). By the time of the interview she was nearing 17,000 followers on Instagram and writing the food column for HT Hayat.
Where does that kitchen come from? From the elders, and from watching. On her paternal grandmother’s farm, with the Kızılırmak running through it, she spent every summer watching her aunts milk the cows and churn ayran while su böreği was being rolled out on the other side; she has the Diyarbakır table from her aunt’s husband, who was from there, and Rumelian cooking from the bakery her maternal grandmother ran in Zara. Today she cooks Italian, French and Far Eastern food alike: “Chez Maman means that whatever is cooking in my mother’s house is cooking in my kitchen.” There is no single region.
You would expect a child raised among all those smells to love food; with me it was the other way round. I was a scrawny child who neither ate nor drank, and my mother would leave chocolate on my pillow so that I would eat something. But the little I did eat had to be exactly right: the white cheese would be full-fat Ezine goat’s cheese, or I would not touch it. I had not broken a single egg until I left to study in France. The one job my mother gave me in the kitchen was rolling dolma: “your fingers are thin, you roll them.” That, and içli köfte.
Wine came into the house through my father. He would say, “if you are going to drink, drink at our table, next to us”; he would put a glass in front of me and announce “our daughter will choose the wine,” and two minutes later I would be back on the soft drinks. My university years in France kept wine and cheese permanently on the agenda, but none of it was deliberate: the event at my first internship belonged to a wine company, I toured vineyards in San Francisco, my first big trip was to Tuscany. Back in Turkey, my first job was product manager at Paul; the girl who did not eat was making macarons and proving dough at home.
A week after leaving my application at the French Chamber of Commerce, I was assistant brand manager at Turkey’s largest wine importer. Figen Adıgüzel threw me into the ocean: I had to learn, and the appetite grew. I began studying outside work, sat the WSET Advanced exam and passed with merit, and a month later became the first woman to compete in the Turkish Sommelier Competition, where I placed. In 2010 I represented Turkey at the Young Sommeliers competition in Spain. So as not to be tied to a single brand, I founded Vinipedia in 2011; in 2012, in Liverpool, I took the Court of Master Sommeliers certified sommelier programme, the first person in Turkey to do so, and afterwards helped bring the programme to Turkey.
There is one more thing I pressed in that interview, and it still holds: sommellerie is still taken for waiting tables. It is easy to go around calling yourself a “taster”; it requires no training and no diploma. A sommelier, by contrast, practises a real profession, one you are certified in. In my case the sharpness of the palate comes even before the profession: I travel a great deal and I eat a great deal, but if a dish is not good I cannot eat it. That is probably why I did not eat as a child; it is also why pairings and nuances of aroma matter to me out of all proportion.
My mother and I also filmed together for French television. Persuading her was not easy; “out of the question, I have guests,” she said, and in the end there was a day out in the city and a day cooking at home. The programme still airs in France: that year, on a tram, a young woman sitting opposite her recognised her and said, “the reason I am in Istanbul right now is you.” The piece ends on two sentences. From my mother to daughters: “Have your own gold bracelet. And not according to what others will say; trust yourself and do the work you love.” From me to mothers: “Be friends with your daughter.” Dalia Maya adds her own: despite the speed of city life, food culture is spreading among the young again through Chez Maman: “may wine culture be next.” That is the sentence I keep.