Turkish Food Deserves Better Than Caymus
Downtown · Bloomington · Turkish / Mediterranean · Visit Website ↗
Reviewed by the RagingWine Tasting Desk · July 10, 2026
RagingWine reviewed Anatolia Restaurant’s wine list and gave it The Wild Card — RagingWine’s Vibe-Check rating. How RagingWine reviews wine lists →
Wingman Metrics
When you sit down at a Turkish restaurant in Bloomington, Indiana, you're not expecting a wine list — and yet here's Anatolia with 41 labels and 27 by-the-glass pours, which is genuinely impressive for a $20-entree Mediterranean spot. The list skews heavily American, which is a little ironic given the passport-stamped menu, but there's at least one Turkish wine in the mix that signals someone was paying attention. The overall feel is a neighborhood restaurant that decided wine mattered, even if it leaned on the safe choices to get there.
The backbone of this list is California — Caymus, Rombauer, Sonoma Cutrer, Belle Glos, Justin — the Mount Rushmore of crowd-pleasing American bottles that show up on every mid-range restaurant list from here to Tampa. There's a nod to Burgundy with Jean-Claude Boisset's Bourgogne Pinot Noir and the Jadot Pouilly Fuissé, plus a Gigondas Syrah from the Rhône that's the most interesting thing on the board. The real sleeper is the Kavaklidere Cankaya from Turkey — a white wine from one of the country's oldest and most respected producers — which takes exactly zero convincing to order when you're eating lamb shish kebab. The gaps are real though: no Italian reds to speak of, no Spanish wine, and the Argentina and New Zealand mentions feel thin.
Twenty-seven by-the-glass options is a lot for a room this size, and the $7–$14 price range keeps things accessible. The pours cover bubbly (La Marca Prosecco), whites, reds, and the Turkish Kavaklidere Cankaya, so there's genuine range here even if the picks skew commercial. Rotation appears nonexistent — this looks like a set-it-and-forget-it program with no evidence of seasonal swaps or staff-driven additions.
Jean-Claude Boisset Bourgogne Pinot Noir, Burgundy — $65/bottle
Actual Burgundy on a Turkish restaurant list in Bloomington is a minor miracle. Boisset's village-level Bourgogne typically retails around $20–25, so the markup is still real, but at $65 you're drinking a legitimate Côte d'Or négociant wine that holds its own next to anything on this list.
Kavaklidere Cankaya, Turkey
Almost everyone skips this and orders the Rombauer out of habit. Don't. Cankaya is a dry, crisp Turkish white from one of Anatolia's oldest wineries — it's made to drink alongside the food on this menu, and you're not going to find it at most restaurants in Indiana. Order it, especially with the falafel plate.
Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa
At $157 a bottle, you're paying a serious premium for a wine that retails around $80–90 and has become the unofficial house wine of expense accounts everywhere. Nothing wrong with Caymus, but there's no world in which this is the right call at a Turkish restaurant when the Gigondas Syrah exists for $87.
Gigondas Syrah, Rhône + Lamb Shish Kebab
Gigondas is built for this — it's a Southern Rhône wine with dark fruit, savory herb notes, and enough structure to stand up to charred lamb without steamrolling the spices. This is the most culinarily aware pairing on the entire list.
🎲 The Bottom Line
Anatolia is a Wild Card not because the list is adventurous top to bottom — it's mostly not — but because a Turkish restaurant in a college town with 27 glass pours, a Gigondas, a Jadot Pouilly Fuissé, and an actual Turkish wine from Kavaklidere is doing something more interesting than the Caymus-heavy lineup suggests. Come for the food, skip the safe American blockbusters, and let the Kavaklidere or Gigondas do the heavy lifting.
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