Wine & Spirits - June 2019 - 36

prosperous and, more recently, stormy times, before the
current renaissance. "You have to go back 1,500 years to
find the last Golden Age of Armenian wine," says Frunz
Harutyunyan, deputy director of the recently formed Vine
and Wine Foundation of Armenia. According to Harutyunyan, 500 BCE to 500 CE was the last heyday of Armenia's
wine production. After that, wine traditions faded, especially under the Ottoman occupation that lasted from the
early 16th century until the beginning of the 19th century,
and returned in the early 20th century. Later, when Armenia was part of the USSR, Stalin designated the country as
a brandy producer under the Soviet Command Economy,
dealing a decisive blow to the wine industry. By 1991, when
the Soviet Union collapsed, Armenia's vineyards had long
been focused on neutral, high-yielding grapes for brandy
and its wine culture was all but lost.

ahe Keusgheurian was consulting on winegrowing projects in California and Chianti when he
planted vineyards in Armenia in 1998, the first
new vineyards of the post-Soviet era. He also created two nurseries to grow and study indigenous vine varieties-"to see if we find a jewel"-work that has earned
him the nickname "the Godfather of Armenian grapes."
By searching out parcels of ancient vines that miraculously
survived both phylloxera and Stalin's decree, he and his
compatriots have so far identified some 300 varieties in the
country's 42,000 acres of vineyards.
36

WINE & SPIRITS

JUNE 2019

CLOCKWISE FROM
TOP: THE VIEW FROM
THE ARMENIAN WINE
COMPANY; VAHE
KEUSGHEURIAN
OF WINEWORKS IN
YEREVAN; ANCIENT
KARAS UNEARTHED IN
ARENI-1, THE WORLD'S
OLDEST KNOWN
WINEMAKING SITE

More than a dozen years passed before Keusgheurian
would produce his own wine ("It took a while for my skills
to catch up with my dreams," he laughs); in the meantime,
he consulted on other start-up projects. Today, his Yerevanbased urban winery, WineWorks, functions as a playground
for his own production and as a "winery incubator," a custom-crush facility with about 12 clients. Several successful brands have emerged out of WineWorks, notably Koor,
Kataro and Yacoubian-Hobbs, a joint project between Viken
and Vahe Yacoubian and American consultant Paul Hobbs.
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. 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 radically stony soils in his vineyards at nearly 4,500 feet in elevation in Vayots Dzor. "Here
we can do something special."
Gharibian invited celebrated Italian oenologist Alberto
Antonini to confirm his early intuition. After a tasting of
local wines, which Antonini described to Gharibian as "the
worst tasting of my life," the two took the long road into
the Armenian Highlands, the same that the archeologists
traveled to reach the Areni-1 cave. When they arrived at the

Wine & Spirits - June 2019

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