- Winemaking in the area that is now Armenia has a history going back 6,000 years.
- However, the practice nearly vanished from Armenia during the Soviet era, in the 20th century.
- Wine producers in Armenia are now working to rebuild their craft, establishing “vertical” vineyards in mountainous provinces like Vayots Dzor.
- Many producers employ organic farming techniques to protect neighboring ecosystems, such as using cover crops instead of fertilizer to restore soil nitrogen.
AGHAVNADZOR, Armenia — It’s 6 a.m. as the rising sun illuminates apricot-colored cliffs in central Armenia. It’s so still that even the distant buzz of a bee can be heard. Coca-Cola bottles filled with homemade wine for sale line the narrow road leading to acres of grapes growing quietly in an unusual vineyard.
At 1,300 meters (about 4,300 feet) above sea level, Trinity Canyon Vineyards seems like it’s flirting with the sun. Located in Vayots Dzor province, where winters are bitterly cold and summers hot, Trinity Canyon and other vineyards use “vertical viticulture” to grow grapes among the mountains.
Unlike many other wine-producing countries, where vineyards are cultivated horizontally on more level ground, in Armenia vineyards rise from 1,100-1,600 m (3,600-5,250 feet), with elevation affecting climate, soil and harvest timing. With the country’s rocky terrain, even terracing is difficult.
“As a result, most Armenian vineyards, including those in Vayots Dzor, are planted on [natural] plateaus — flat elevated areas that allow the vines to thrive despite the challenging terrain,” Artem Parseghyan, the head winemaker at Trinity Canyon, tells Mongabay.
Parseghyan spends his life on the road, driving between Yerevan, the capital, and Vayots Dzor. Born and raised in Russia, Parseghyan studied viticulture and enology (the science of winemaking) in France and Germany. In 2013, when Trinity Canyon was established, Parseghyan came to Armenia to work at what was then one of the country’s few vineyards.
Regrowing a lost tradition
Winemaking in the area that is now Armenia has a long history. In 2007, archaeologists uncovered an ancient winery in a Vayots Dzor cave complex that they dated to around 6,000 years ago, making it the world’s oldest known winery. But the Soviet Union, preferring brandy to wine, devasted viticulture in Armenia during the 20th century. Many grape varieties intended for winemaking were removed from the country, hampering the practice here for decades.
Because of this setback, Armenia’s rekindled wine industry did not benefit from decades of academic knowledge and formal training that other winemaking countries had invested in during the 20th century, according to Parseghyan.
“Winemakers knew how to make wine without knowing what it was made from, while the viticulturist grew grapes without knowing what they would ultimately become,” Parseghyan says.
Trinity Canyon was the first winery in Armenia to receive international organic certification in 2016. However, Parseghyan says the vineyard chose not to continue the annual process for certification renewal, due to its complexity, which requires monthly inspections, detailed record-keeping and significant financial investment.
Still, the winery continues to grow organic grapes, according to Parseghyan.
“Organic is not marketing for us. This green logo doesn’t give us anything in terms of … value, because before getting the certificate and up till now, we do everything in organic standards,” Parseghyan says.
He says Trinity Canyon continues its commitment to organic growing in order to protect soil and local biodiversity. The team works to protect local biodiversity by using cover crops to enrich depleted soil and improve its composition, instead of relying on synthetic fertilizers. Despite avoiding chemical inputs like pesticides and herbicides, Parseghyan says diseases are absent in Trinity’s plots while neighboring vineyards experience problems.
“When we manage our entire plot, the last four rows that touch the neighbor’s land are not treated as organic,” Parseghyan says, noting that those rows may be tainted by pesticides from adjacent farms.
“You have to harvest them separately, discard them, sell them or dry them. This is the buffer zone that protects your vineyard from neighboring interference,” he adds.
Wine is made from cultivars of the common grape vine (Vitis vinifera), a plant native to the Eurasian region that encompasses Armenia. At the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia (NAS RA), a team of researchers at the Laboratory of Plant Genomics has been studying native grape varieties in the hopes of determining how best to conserve and manage them in the face of climate change.
The team has collected and sequenced more than 3,400 grape samples since the lab’s inception in 2012, despite limited genetic resources.
“Winemaking wasn’t so popular in Armenia when we began this process,” says Kristine Margaryan, who heads the lab. “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collections had completely disappeared.”
Margaryan tells Mongabay that in order to collect samples, she and her colleagues traveled across the country, gleaning information from historical botanical records of the grape varieties that had grown in the various regions of Armenia prior to the rise of the Soviet Union.
Adapting to a changing world
Margaryan says that in Vayots Dzor, the temperature has increased by around 1.3-1.4° Celsius (2.3-2.5° Fahrenheit) over the past century. If this trend continues, she warns, agriculture will need to move higher, including wineries. That’s why grape diversity is crucial: it allows the vines to perform well not just at 1,000 m (3,300 ft), but even at 2,200 m (7,200 ft).
To meet this need, Margaryan and her team established Armenia’s first high-altitude vineyard at 2,080 meters (6,824 feet) in cooperation with Maran Winery to test the different varieties. They found that many of the local Armenian varieties thrived, while those from Western Europe did not.
The next step, according to Margaryan, is determining why Armenian varieties are better able to tolerate high-altitude conditions.
“I hope that in the coming years we will have enough data to study this high-altitude vineyard’s grapes in detail; specifically, to sequence them and understand how gene expression has changed under these conditions,” Margaryan says.
Climate change isn’t the only threat to Armenia’s reawakening wine industry. Grape phylloxera, a small invasive insect from North America, attacks grapevine roots and foliage. In Europe, phylloxera infestations have wiped out entire vineyards in just five or six years.
“We must know how to extend the life of vineyards,” says Zaruhi Muradyan, CEO of the Vine and Wine Foundation of Armenia and founder of the EVN Wine Academy. “Various measures like specific irrigation methods, non-drip systems, and air circulation can help mitigate the negative effects, but we must be prepared.”
In recent years, Muradyan says, large wineries have begun establishing their own vineyards to increase consistency and manage impact by fully controlling the process rather than depending on other farmers.
Muradyan says Armenia’s wine industry is also hampered by a shortage of karas, the clay amphorae used for fermenting and storing wine and which are at the heart of Armenia’s winemaking heritage. Muradyan’s solution to the shortage is to establish a dedicated karas-making school.
“This could become an attractive tourism direction as well, showing visitors how karas are made, offering masterclasses, and at the same time supplying the industry with locally produced vessels,” Muradyan says.
While the focus on traditional methods like karas highlights Armenia’s rich winemaking heritage, there’s also growing attention on the impacts of vineyards on the surrounding environment. Muradyan says she doesn’t prefer the term “agroecology” as she doesn’t fully believe it’s possible to achieve a completely “pure” system in a polluted environment.
Still, she says, many wineries are beginning to move in that direction, introducing techniques to reduce environmental impact, such as minimizing waste, protecting soil health, and improving sustainability, though these are not yet widespread.
“Recently, we met with an international partner who proposed a project to map vineyards more precisely identifying where they are located, which grape varieties are planted, and what kinds of production environments exist around them,” Muradyan says. “The goal is to guide future investments toward the most suitable regions. Winemaking has a long history in Armenia, yet it requires tremendous work.”
As the sun sets over the mountains of Vayots Dzor, the vineyards fade into the rocky landscape. In a tiny country like Armenia, dialects shift from region to region just like its native grapes, each carrying the accent of its soil. Rooted in ancient traditions yet open to new challenges, these grapes preserve the memory of the land.
Banner image: Harvesters carry baskets full of grapes at an Armenian vineyard. Image courtesy of the Vine and Wine Foundation of Armenia.
Better wines among the pines: Agroforestry can climate-proof grapes, French researchers show
Citation:
Barnard, H., Dooley, A. N., Areshian, G., Gasparyan, B., & Faull, K. F. (2011). Chemical evidence for wine production around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern highlands. Journal of Archaeological Science, 38(5), 977-984. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2010.11.012
Feedback: Use this form to send a message to the editor of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
