Stories that enrich our own.

“It hasn’t always been this way.” And it may not stay this way, either”, Emmerich Knoll answers gravely, with an emphatic pause between sentences. We’re driving along the north bank of the Danube River a couple of hours west of Vienna.

Auvergne: an island in the middle of the hexagon. This is how local Auvergnats consider their ruggedly beautiful piece of central France. The main city of Clermont-Ferrand is at its heart, 400 kilometers due south from Paris, 330 kilometers north of Marseilles.

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.