Yasemin Baran writes Yasemin Baran is a Turkish wine educator with a master’s degree in Oenology and Viticulture. She has made wine across three continents. In 2023, she founded BulgariaByGlass, a project dedicated to sharing the wines, indigenous grapes and stories of undiscovered regions Central Eastern Europe, Anatolia, Caucasus with an international audience through tastings, content and education. If someone said three years from now, she’d leave Bulgaria more in love with it than when she arrived, she would have called them crazy. Who knew?
In my Misket era
16 May 2026. Like every year, I am watching Eurovision. This year feels different. Dara has just won for Bulgaria, the country I have called home for the last three years. I can hear people screaming with pride and joy, my WhatsApp groups exploding. I had a skin-contact Vrachanski Misket in my glass, jumping with my friends in joy trying to salvage my wine. Once the heat of the moment passed, I focused on my glass. It tastes like what the last three years made me.
2003. I am a little girl in Turkey, screaming and crying over Sertab Erener’s victory on Eurovision. She is barefoot, she is ecstatic as much as we are. She existed on that stage as if she had always owned it. Whenever I remember that moment there is one Turkish saying that comes to my mind: ‘genç kız neşesi (girlish joy)’. The uncomplicated brightness of girlhood, before the world starts asking you to make yourself smaller. The things women love that get dismissed. Sertab on that stage was genç kız neşesi at full volume, in front of all of Europe and all of us young Turkish girls. As Yasemin from the future, I can pair that moment with Bornova Misketi (Turkish expression of Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains): roses, jasmine, orange blossom, ancient, Aegean, luminous. A pairing between a very fragile aroma and her fragile joy.
2017. My first introduction to wine in USCA Winery, Turkey. I had my first internship as a winemaker. This is when, as a young adult, I became a part of the magic called: winemaking. I learned how hard winemaking actually is. But it feels like a playground. Demanding and magical at the same time. As a young woman in a serious professional environment, I had to work twice as hard. I knew that. I stayed anyway. Because at the end of it, I could put my joy in a bottle. I tasted Bornova Misket properly here. Roses and jasmine in the glass. A wine with delicate aromas and an ancient secret. I recognized how this wine made me feel. Anytime I ask for recommendations, this is all I hear: “Ladies love this wine”. Mostly, again with an under-looking innuendo. Because of its aromas, people thought of it as fragile and easy to produce. Misket has survived in Anatolia for centuries. It takes a lot of hard work to actually express these fragile aromas. I worked twice as hard to be taken seriously, and I looked down on everything other girls liked, including this variety.
2023. I moved to Bulgaria. There I was, in a country I had never visited, and I was staying. To my surprise: Turkey and Bulgaria are more alike than either country admits. Both ancient wine histories. Both indigenous grapes of extraordinary character. Both fight quietly for recognition without the infrastructure of prestige. I felt at home in Bulgarian wine because it reminded me of where I came from. During the three years I stayed here, something changed. I realized acting stronger or fitting into men’s world was not the solution. I started to fight for my delicate side, my girlish joy. That was when I realized accepting that side was actually bringing me more. Structure. Depth. In winemaking, skin contact changes a wine by keeping the juice on the grape skins for longer than usual. The grape doesn’t become something different. It becomes more fully what it already was. Bulgaria was my skin contact. That is when I found Vrachanski Misket. Still floral. Still luminous. But now with herbs, honey and something earned underneath.
Let’s focus on today again. Anything loved primarily by women is still easier to dismiss. Aromatic wines. Pop music. Romantic comedies. Female ambition. Anything done by a woman is held to a different standard. Misket reminds me of that. Floral, expressive and frequently underestimated.
Misket with skin contact sounds like a strange idea to people who have already decided what Misket is for. But the grape has more in its skin than anyone stopped looking for.
Let’s get back to that girlish joy: I am older now. Old enough to celebrate and understand female joy is not returning to girlhood. It is insisting that the brightness was never wrong. That the roses were always serious. That wine can be aromatic and floral and complex and structured at the same time. These things are not opposite.
Back at Dara’s win. My Vrachanski Misket still in the glass. Dara, a young woman from Bulgaria, who is also undervalued, many only criticize went to Vienna and won Bulgaria’s first ever Eurovision. She did it her way and refused to become smaller. The twenty-three years between Sertab and Dara. Two women. Two moments where a woman stood on the biggest stage in Europe, unapologetically themselves. And both times, I felt seen. The same feeling, the same grape family, different terroir, different vintage, the same brightness underneath.
I am now leaving Bulgaria, after 3 years. I am done with my skin-contact, orange enough. The years that made me more myself. I don’t know yet what I would taste like in the bottle. But I know what’s in my skin now. And I know, because strong woman taught me, that dreams don’t wait for permission.
Eight hundred kilometers separate these two regions. The same grape family, rooted in different soil, shaped by different hands. I moved between these terroirs. From the Aegean coast, where I learned winemaking, to Bulgaria, where I learned something else: that the aromas I had quietly been ashamed of were the most valuable thing in my skin. A new terroir doesn’t erase what you are. It shows you what you were always capable of becoming. For everyone who said “ladies love Misket” as if that were a reason to look away, I think about that now. If the women were right about this grape all along, I wonder what else they were right about.
Published unedited and in accordance with the rules of the competition published here.
