One word, three meanings#
Drive south from Yerevan for just under two hours and the M2 drops into the Arpa valley in Vayots Dzor, Armenia’s wine province. The first village with vines on both sides of the road is Areni. Roadside stalls sell homemade wine in plastic bottles, and the grape in those bottles is Areni. The label on a bottle in a Yerevan wine bar says Areni too. So does the cave up the side road where the oldest known winery was dug out of the floor.
“Areni”, then, is a village, a grape and, on labels, an origin statement for wine from Vayots Dzor. Armenia has no appellation law in force, so that third meaning carries no legal weight yet; I say “labelled as Areni from Vayots Dzor” and leave it there. This article is about the second meaning: the grape, called Areni Noir on export labels and Areni Sev, black Areni, in Armenian. I have been pouring it for years, first in restaurants and now at tables in the valley itself, and I still think it is one of the most underrated reds between the Alps and the Caspian.
The cave above the Arpa#
At the mouth of the Amaghu canyon, on the road that climbs to Noravank monastery, a limestone cave opens above the river. Archaeologists call it Areni-1. Between 2007 and 2010 a team co-directed by Boris Gasparyan, Gregory Areshian and Ron Pinhasi excavated a Late Chalcolithic layer and found a shallow clay basin about a metre long, set so that liquid drained through a hole into a jar buried beside it. Around it lay storage jars, grape seeds, pressed skins and dried vine stems.
Chemical analysis published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2011 found malvidin, the pigment that colours red wine, in the pottery. The installation dates to around 4100 BC, which makes it the oldest known complete winery: treading, fermentation and storage in one place, some six thousand years ago. The same cave gave up the oldest known leather shoe, from about 3500 BC, which gets more attention from guests until they see the basin.
The seeds are Vitis vinifera, the wine vine, and they are often described as resembling the Areni grown in the valley today. I treat the direct line from that jar to the glass in your hand as a good story rather than a proven fact. What is proven is that people in this exact valley were making red wine before the pyramids were built, and that the grape they grow here now is a native that never left.
Six thousand years, with gaps#
The record after the cave is not continuous, but it is long. In the first millennium BC the Urartian fortress of Teishebaini, Karmir Blur in today’s Yerevan, kept rows of clay karas sunk into its storeroom floors. Xenophon, marching through Armenia around 401 BC, described villages storing wine in buried jars. After Armenia adopted Christianity in 301, monasteries kept vineyards and cellars; Noravank, founded in 1205, stands a few kilometres up the same canyon as the cave.
The modern break came with brandy. Yerevan has distilled since 1887, and under Soviet planning Armenia became the brandy republic of the USSR. The Ararat plain was planted with brandy grapes, and the vine that mattered was the one that yielded most spirit per hectare. Areni Noir kept its foothold in the villages of Vayots Dzor, where households never stopped making their own wine, but for most of a century Armenia meant brandy. Then the anti-alcohol campaign of 1985 to 1987 cut the reported vineyard area by more than a third.
Independence in 1991 brought collapse first and family wineries second: Maran’s first wine in 1992, the Areni Wine Factory in 1994, Old Bridge in Yeghegnadzor in 1998. The new wave arrived between 2008 and 2013, with Yacoubian-Hobbs and Trinity Canyon Vineyards in Aghavnadzor, Zorah’s first vintage in Rind in 2010, and in 2013 Keush’s traditional-method sparkling, described as the first from native Armenian grapes. Every one of them works with Areni Noir.
The grape in the vineyard#
Areni Noir is a late-ripening red with thin skins, and much of how it tastes follows from where it grows. The Vayots Dzor vineyards sit between 1,000 and 1,800 metres: Areni village at about 1,000 to 1,100, Aghavnadzor around 1,300, Rind at 1,400 to 1,600, Khachik between 1,500 and 1,750. These are among the highest vineyards in the northern hemisphere. Rainfall is 250 to 400 millimetres a year, summers are hot and dry, nights are cold, and that swing between day and night keeps acidity in a grape picked in late September and October.
The soils are mixed: limestone and calcareous clay, volcanic tuff and basalt, iron-rich red earth, sandy alluvium along the Arpa. The high valleys are widely described as free of phylloxera, and many older vines grow on their own roots rather than on grafted American rootstock, which is rare in Europe and worth walking out to see. Zorah’s Yeraz comes from own-rooted vines at about 1,650 metres that the estate describes as centuries old.
The whole province has only about 1,200 hectares of vines. Areni Noir is also planted in Aragatsotn and on the Ararat plain in Armavir, where it ripens earlier and comes out softer and rounder. When I want to show guests what altitude does, I put a plain-grown Areni beside one from Rind. The grape is the same. The wines are not.
The grape in the glass#
A young Areni Noir is mid-ruby, never opaque. The nose is red cherry and sour cherry with white pepper, sometimes a dried-herb note off the hillsides. The acidity is fresh, the tannin fine and moderate, the alcohol usually between 12.5 and 14 percent. The comparison made most often is with Pinot Noir, for the colour and the weight, and sometimes with Nebbiolo, for the way tannin and acidity carry the finish.
Both comparisons are useful for about two minutes and then get in the way. Areni has no documented relation to either grape. What it has is its own combination: Pinot’s transparency with a peppery edge and a grip that Pinot rarely shows, and none of Nebbiolo’s tar or rose. I ask guests to taste it as itself first, and only then tell me what it reminds them of.
Four ways to make it#
Because the skins are thin, Areni Noir rewards a light hand. The first style is the simplest: fermented in steel, no oak, bottled young. This is the wine at the roadside stalls, and in its serious form it is what a small family cellar such as Old Bridge in Yeghegnadzor does with five hectares of Areni Noir and Voskehat: sour cherry, herbs, a fresh, firm finish, about 15,000 bottles a year.
The second is clay. At Zorah in Rind the wine ferments in concrete and large old casks, then ages in karas that Zorik Gharibian bought from village families and buried at the winery. The fruit stays bright, there is no vanilla, and a fine grain appears in the tannin that steel never produces. Trinity Canyon Vineyards in Aghavnadzor ferments and ages its Ancestors line entirely in karas and names its main line 6100, after the age of the winery in the cave. If the vessel interests you, I have written about qvevri, karas and amphora separately.
The third is oak. Many estates make a Reserve aged in barrel, and the good ones use it as a frame rather than a flavour. The fourth is bubbles: Keush makes a traditional-method rosé from Areni grown at 1,500 to 1,750 metres near Khachik, with more than two years on the lees, and it is one of the best arguments for the grape’s acidity that I know.
At the table#
In Yerevan restaurants the standard pairing is khorovats, meat grilled over wood coals, with a young or karas Areni Noir. It works because the acidity cuts the fat and the pepper meets the char. At village tables the same wine goes with tolma in grape leaves, with plates of tarragon, basil and purslane, with fresh cheese and lavash from the tonir. Serve it cooler than a heavier red, around 14 to 16 degrees, and it will sit happily next to lamb, duck or mushrooms at home in Brno or Vienna.
On tour#
I build my Armenia route around this grape. We walk into the Areni-1 cave in the morning and stand over the basin, drive up the canyon to Noravank, then come back down for lunch at a karas cellar in Rind. On the two cradles tour an Areni Noir from clay meets a Kakhetian Saperavi a few days later, so you can taste what two neighbouring traditions did with red grapes and buried jars. If you can time it, the Areni Wine Festival fills the village on the first Saturday of October, with grape-treading at midday.
For the geography behind all of this, read my guides to Vayots Dzor and to Armenia as a whole. Then come and taste the grape where the record starts.
