Armenia: Stepping back and forth through time

The world’s most ancient wine-producing region, with 6,000 years of history, is barely a decade into a modern winemaking renaissance. Unlike neighboring Georgia, whose wine production has continued unbroken for millennia, Armenia’s ill-fated wine culture was drowned by successive waves of inclement historical events. Yet thanks to the country’s extreme climate, phylloxera-free volcanic soils, abundance of highly promising, literally antediluvian grape varieties - the ancestors of all wine grapes, and a growing number of diasporan Armenians with ambition, national pride and a commitment to help rebuild the country through resurrecting its wine industry, small but mighty Armenia is scratching out some territory on the Historic World wine map.

Journey to Areni-1

Mount Ararat’s eternally snow-covered peak looms large over most of the country. Although it lies outside of Armenia’s present borders in western Turkey, the stately, strato-volcanic peak is the country’s national symbol, a sacred mountain and spiritual lighting rod that has grounded Armenia for millennia. For wine historians, too, Ararat is a freighted landmark; on its slopes, Noah first set his Ark upon solid ground after the floods, planted vineyards, made wine, and got drunk.

While the Biblical story may be apocryphal, what’s certain is that I’m on my way to see the world’s oldest known winery, uncovered recently in Vayots Dzor, a region in the Armenian highlands in the country’s southeast. It’s one of the most fascinating journeys I’ve made. The thrill of finding the earliest origins of one’s chosen passion is like nothing else, how I imagine a computer scientist might feel upon finding the world’s first Abacus, or an Italian linguist sitting at the desk where Dante wrote the Divine Comedy. It’s the beginning of time. 

Mount Ararat watches over us for most of the journey to the archeological site called Areni-1, a cave near the village of Areni. Although less than a hundred kilometers from the capital city of Yerevan, it takes us well over two hours to get there by car. Roads are generally poor, seemingly as ancient as Yerevan itself, which recently year celebrated 2800 years of existence, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. 

The route takes us across scrubby, rocky, sun-parched land offering a narrow palette of honey browns, and dilapidated dwellings standing still in time. Makeshift roadside stands appear from time to time, where scarf-clad locals with leathery skin offer pomegranates and big juicy melons to infrequent passers-by. 

More sinister, we pass a long stretch of man-made sand dunes following the disputed border of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory recognized internationally as part of Azerbaijan, but historically Armenian and with a majority-Armenian population. The dunes are in place to thwart a feared tank attack by the Azeris, and the border is hot; I learn that only a few days earlier an Armenian solider had been killed by an errant bullet. It’s a reminder of how deep conflicts run in this part of the world, and how wars and occupations have directly shaped Armenia’s wine history over thousands of years.

Further up the road we cross into Vayots Dzor province and reach the small village of Areni, where the stunning discovery of the winery was made. The entrance to the archeological site is marked by little more than a small shop selling handicrafts and a small sign in Armenian, English and Russian.  An American-Armenian team of researchers and archeologists first discovered what has been dubbed the Areni-1 cave in 2007.

It took several years to excavate, but by 2010 evidence had been uncovered indicating that the cave had been used for making wine as early as 6,100 years ago, setting proactive winemaking by humans back a thousand years earlier in time than previously known. Although older vessels containing traces of what is believed to be fermented grape juice have been unearthed in neighboring Georgia and Iran, Areni-1 is so far the oldest site unearthed where wine was conclusively not only stored, but also actually made. 

Since grapes naturally ferment without intervention, it’s possible that the older vessels contained merely ‘spoiled’ grapes. The difference here is in intention; Copper Age vintners, it appears, crushed grapes the old-fashioned way, by foot, in a 1-meter-long purpose-built basin made of hard-packed clay. The juice was then funneled by gravity into a 60-centimeter-deep clay vat buried next to the basin, where it would have fermented under ideal, cool, stable temperatures. Wine was then moved into clay amphoras called karas for storage, similar to the qvevri used in neighboring Georgia.

The World’s Oldest, Orphan Grape

Particularly exciting was the discovery of traces of a red grape variety - seeds, stems and grape cells, plus the red colour pigment malvidin - on shards of pottery found at the site. Called areni after the village, the cultivar, evidently domesticated back in the mists of time, is so old it has no ancestors. “It’s an ‘orphan grape’” as Zorik Gharibian of Zorah winery nearby describes it. 

It’s a thrilling find because DNA studies have linked ancient areni to a grape which still grows both wild in the region today and cultivated in Armenia’s present-day vineyards. Amazingly, areni is in fact the country’s most important red wine grape variety, the protagonist in Armenia’s current winemaking renaissance. A new link has thus been forged between not only the most ancient and the most post-modern winemaking techniques, but also between the world’s most ancient wine grape and one of it’s most exciting future ones.

Cradle of Wine

The Caucasus region, between the Black and Caspian Seas, has long been known to be the cradle of winemaking, and indeed of vitis vinifera, the species of grapevine still used most often today for wine production. Vahe Keushguerian, one of the important figures in the current winemaking renaissance in Armenia, refers to the area as the Historic World, distinct from the Old and New World categories commonly used today. Keushguerian includes Georgia, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, as well as Cyprus and Greece, in addition to Armenia, in the Historic wine world. “Western Europe didn’t get into the game until 3,000 years later”, he says. The evidence to support Keushguerian’s idea is that the region has truly indigenous grapes, like areni, which in many cases are found nowhere else.

Troubled history

Armenia’s troubled history explains why the world’s oldest winemaking territory is practically unknown to wine lovers today. “You have to go back 1500 years to find the last Golden Age of Armenian wine”, says Frunz Harutyunyan, deputy director of the Vine and Wine Foundation of Armenia, a statement I’m sure no other country could make. According to Harutyunyan, 500 BCE to 500 C.E. was the last heyday of Armenia’s wine production. After that, wine traditions were lost with the decline of the Bagratuni line of kings, further compounded by the occupation of alcohol-disdaining Ottomans, which lasted until the early 19th century. 

In 1828, Armenia became part of the Russian Empire, and grape growing and winemaking, and especially distillation, were re-developed. Brandy houses began to appear in the late 1800s, as it was easier to transport distilled spirits across Armenia’s inhospitable mountainous land than wine, being both more stable and capable of delivering more bang for the effort.

After a brutal genocide carried out by the Ottomans starting in 1915 (as of 2020, only 30 countries, including Canada, recognize the killing of 1.5m Armenians as a genocide), Armenia enjoyed a short-lived independence following WWI, only to be absorbed again into the Soviet Union in 1922. The Armenian’s reputation for distillation led Stalin to designate the country as a brandy producer under the Soviet’s Command Economy, a system in which the central government collectivizes industries and dictates production. Georgia, Stalin’s home country, was named a wine producer.

Armenia became the brandy and vodka supplier to the Soviet Union. Wine production plummeted. Grape varieties were developed through crossings to yield wine suitable for distillation – high-yielding and neutral - and vineyards were replanted to maximize production. Wine consumption also plummeted, unsurprisingly, and wine culture was all but lost. 

After 1991

The situation did not improve much after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Armenia was left a very poor nation. “I remember back in the early nineties when even in Yerevan [the capital], there were revolving blackouts and water was switched on and off”, recalls Kevork Kataroyan, a Canadian-Armenian an importer of Armenian wines, Canada’s leading specialist. Back then, Kataroyan had no intention of importing Armenian wine into Canada. Indeed, there was hardly any wine produced, and certainly none worth exporting. Vineyards were in terrible shape and many had been abandoned.

The Rebirth

The first sparks of re-birth appeared in the late 1990s. While still working on projects in California, Chianti and later Puglia, winemaker Vahe Keusgheurian tentatively bought some land in Armenia in 1997. He planted the country’s first new vineyards in the post-Soviet era and created a nursery to grow and study indigenous vine varieties. Keusgheurian remains one of the most knowledgeable experts on local Armenia grapes, and his Yerevan-based winery, WineWorks, functions both as a playground for own wines, as well as a “winery incubator”, essentially a custom crush facility with currently about a dozen clients. But in addition to winemaking services, Keusgheurian also offers viticulture services as well as strategic winery and marketing management support, all with the aim of fulfilling the company’s mission statement, “to work with both farmers and producers so that together we can contribute to the growth of our nation’s wine industry.”

Other expat Armenians followed Keusgheurian’s lead, often as a way of bringing money and jobs back to the struggling country. Zorik Gharibian and his wife Yeraz first established a clothing factory in Armenia in 1998 to supply their successful Milan-based fashion business while also providing employment for locals. An impassioned wine lover, Gharibian scrapped plans to set up a winery in Tuscany when he spotted the potential for winegrowing in his home country. “With another Chianti, what would we be achieving?”, he asks rhetorically. “But here…”, he points to the shockingly stony soils in his vineyards nearing 1400 meters in the Vayots Dzor region, “here we can do something special.”

It was merely a hunch; Gharibian had no experience in the wine business, and there were no local wines to show the way. To confirm his intuitions, he invited celebrated Italian oenologist Alberto Antonini to Yerevan. After a tasting of local wines, which Antonini described unpromisingly to Gharibian as, “the worst tasting of my life”, the two travelled up to the proposed vineyard site in the Armenian highlands near the village of Areni. Antonini looked at the piles of limestone and the lack of phylloxera, considered the extreme climate and elevation, the local, perfectly adapted ancient grapes, and flatly declared, “it would be impossible not to make great wine from this site.” 

University of Milan Professor Attilio Scienza was then called in to conduct detailed soils studies, and the first vineyards of mostly areni were planted in 2000. Yet even with all of the background research completed, it still took a decade of experimentation to release a wine, the 2012 vintage. “I’ve made several mistakes along the way”, Gharibian says without embarrassment, pointing to one failed plot of high density, bush-trained areni.  

But he remains undaunted and the efforts and tribulations have clearly paid off. Gharibian’s wines under the Zorah label have become Armenia’s flagships, especially the silky and perfumed Yeraz, a pure areni sourced from century old vines reminiscent of elegant Barolo, and the textural, white flower and honeyed-scented Voski, a blend of voskehat and garan dmak that could pass for one of the Douro’s finest high elevation whites. 

Experimentation continues. The Areni noir Karasì (meaning “from karas”), for example, is fermented in concrete vat before moving off the skins and into old karas. Karas are clay pots, the Armenia equivalent of Georgian qvevri, though slightly different in shape. The results are lovely, preserving areni’s delicate perfume that is so easily subjugated to wood-derived flavours. 

Sadly, the karas-making tradition has been lost over the last century. There are no artisans left with the know-how to make them, so Gharibian has had to scavenge nearby villages to assemble a collection of pots from the early 20th century, or older, to put to use.  But here, too, there is a plan. Gharibian’s wife Yeraz, a potter, intends to open a school on the property to revive the ancient art of karas-making, thus further boosting the local economy and satisfy future winery needs.

Gharibian plans to keep production small at around 100,000 bottles, while another diasporan Armenian, the Argentina-born billionaire Edoardo Eurnekian whose great grandparents fled the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, has implemented much grander plans. Eurnekian, who now owns several Armenian banks as well as the airport in Yerevan, in addition to Bodegas Fin del Mondo and Bodegas NQN in Patagonia, bought land in 2004 to invest in the fledgling Republic of Armenia and create jobs. 

The initial intention was to produce brandy, and after two years of taming the basalt-rich soils of the Armavir region between Mount Ararat and Mount Aragats, Eurnekian planted nearly 400 hectares of vines such as the Cognac varieties ugni blanc and folle blanche, Georgian rkatsitelli, and the soviet-era crossing called kangun (chardonnay x rkatsitelli), among others. Yet the changing market and potential to make quality wine soon led to a shift in philosophy, and vineyards have slowly been converted to wine production, for which more than half of total acreage is now dedicated. Consultant Michel Rolland was engaged, and the company, officially Tierras de Armenia but trading under the brand name Karas, was born. (Yes, there is confusion and controversy surrounding the trademarking of the word Karas, of which there are only a few token examples at the winery, currently being disputed by Zorah and others.)

Eurnekian’s Argentine viticultural and winemaking team found themselves surprisingly at home in Armenia, given the similarities to Argentina. The almost dessert-like conditions of Armavir make irrigation essential, while strong winds require wind breaks; plantings of poplar trees line the vineyards here as they do in Patagonia. High elevation – 1,100 meters – means strong UV light exposure and an acid-retaining, big day-night temperature swing. The major threat is hail, too, as it is in Argentina. Where conditions diverge is wintertime, so cold in Armavir that most varieties must be buried to keep fruiting canes alive as vintners do in Québec.

Unlike most recent start-ups, Karas has focused mainly on non-indigenous grapes like syrah, malbec, cabernet franc, petit verdot and tannat, along with sensible oddities like montepulciano and marzemino. Though even here there is growing interest in local grapes. Viticulturalist Gabriel Meghruni points to khondogni (aka sireni) as a particularly promising, deeply coloured variety, useful for blending with lighter areni. 

ArmAs winery to the north of Armavir in Aragasotn Province is another large-scaled operation aimed at both reviving the local economy and the family’s winemaking heritage. Founded in 2007 by Armenian-American entrepreneur Armenak Aslanian, ArmAS is an impressive, completely isolated site surrounded by the 15km-long “great wall of Armas” as daughter Victoria Aslanian describes it, now running day-to-day operations. She also describes the monumental labour to move thousands of tons of volcanic rocks and boulders even to just establish vineyards, planted to a number of indigenous grapes like the perfumed, deeply-coloured teinturier variety karmrahyut (“Karmir-hyut” means “red juice” in Armenian) and honeyed-floral specialty voskehat. The range of wines produced by Italian winemaker Emilio Del Medico is impressive overall.

Varuzhan Mouradian was also undaunted by Armenian rocks. Moving back from California with his family in the mid-2000s, Mouradian scouted several regions before settling on Ashtarak in Aragasotn to establish the Van Ardi winery. It was not only the proximity to Yerevan, about 30 minutes by car, but also the rocky volcanic soils under Mount Ararat that compelled him to clear and plant nine hectares here in 2008. A commercial, off-dry white is made from the soviet-era crossing called kangun (chardonnay x rkatsitelli), formerly used mostly for brandy production, though more interesting is the dry, citrus-botanical mskhali white, and a hibiscus and candied currant-flavoured, light but surprisingly grippy areni reserve sourced in part from Vayots Dzor as well as estate vineyards.

American Paul Hobbs is another international consultant with more direct involvement in an Armenian project, focused exclusively on local varieties. The unlikely partnership between Hobbs and Viken and Vahe Yacoubian arose through a chance email correspondence. Curious enough to explore, Hobbs became convinced, after a lengthy visit in 2005, that the country had the potential to produce special wine, especially in the region of Vayots Dzor. A partnership was struck in 2008, and today, a few hundred cases each of a floral, white pepper-scented white blend of four local varieties - voskehat, khatuni, qrdi, and garan demak – and two pure areni cuvées, a violet and dried red fruit, stainless-only version, and the denser, polished barrel-aged Sarpina, are produced at the WineWorks winery in Yerevan. Grapes are sourced from the villages of Rind and Aghavnadzor, though production will soon increase as Yacoubian-Hobbs's own vineyard near Aghavnadzor, planted in 2014 at over 5,000 feet, comes into production. 

But the re-birth of Armenian wine is not owed entirely to expats and flying winemakers. Natives Ararat and Alina Mkrtchyan launched Voskeni Wines in 2007 in the Ararat Valley, reconnecting with great-grandfather Smbat Meteossian’s winemaking history extinguished in 1925 when his vineyards were appropriated by the state in the Bolshevik era. 

Another Armenian, Armen Khalatyan, planted 4 hectares in 1998 and launched Old Bridge Winery, named for the genuinely old bridge that crosses the Arpa River in Vayots Dzor along the Silk Road. The more ambitiously scaled Armenian Wine Co., Armenia’s largest exporter founded by the Vardanyan and Mkrtchyan families, produces both wine and brandy out of their nouveau Soviet-style winery built in 2008, less than a mile from Van Ardi.

There are now over 40 commercial wineries. Although Armenian brandy output still outstrips wine by a factor of three, grapegrowing, and local wine appreciation, is slowly shifting to reflect the country’s distant past. Wine bars are popping up across Yerevan and consumption is increasing. 

Stepping back in history again, into the dark Areni-1 cave where it all began, one can’t help but think that those pioneering Copper Age vintners would be just as excited by the future as I am.

Text and Photos by John Szabo, MS