A spectacular Turkish red

2014 Kayra, Kalecik Karasi Red, Turkey (£12.39, Strictly Wine, 01235-364536, StrictlyWine.co.uk; £12.42, Great Wines Direct, 01293-734664, GreatWinesDirect.co.uk).

My wife and I travelled over to Istanbul for a long weekend and immersed ourselves in the food and wine scene. After scouring innumerable guide books and leafing through mountains of reviews, we drew up a plan and without fail one immutable fact held true throughout our stay. This was that the more we spent on food and wine, the less pleasurable the outcome.

The finest food we tasted was found in cafs and markets. In the smarty-pants restaurants the wines were almost always awful and the food was fussy, over-thought and lacked integrity. We will try again, of course, because we love everything else about this great city, but I wanted to at least find a few noteworthy wines and a failsafe restaurant which delivered the classics in style.

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Disgruntled, I have kept my eyes peeled for fleeting sightings of Turkish wines in the UK and I have, at last, found a stunner. Source your finest kebabs, dners, kftes and mantis from your best local Turkish deli and open this spectacular red. Strangely, it's made by a Californian winemaker in what he describes as a "Beaujolais-style", but this amazing wine is finer than anything I tasted in Istanbul by a very wide margin.

Matthew Jukes is a winner of the International Wine & Spirit Competition's Communicator of the Year (MatthewJukes.com).