The road west from Yerevan runs flat for an hour. Past Etchmiadzin the orchards give way to fields, the fields to vines, and the vines do not stop. Mount Ararat stands on the left the whole way, 5,137 metres of it, close enough that you keep checking whether it has moved. It has not. This is Armavir, the Ararat plain of Armenia, and the estate at the end of the road is Karas Wines.
I first drove out here alone in April 2024, a week ahead of a group, for a simple reason: I wanted to see what 400 hectares of vines look like in one piece. In Moravia a vineyard row ends at a forest or a village. Here it ends at the horizon. The whole of Vayots Dzor, the valley where Armenia’s most discussed reds are made, has about 1,200 hectares of vines. One estate on the plain holds a third of that.
An Argentine-Armenian family on the Ararat plain#
Karas is the project of Eduardo Eurnekian, an Argentine-Armenian businessman, and his company Tierras de Armenia. Planting began in 2004 on land between 900 and 1,100 metres, the first commercial vintage came in 2010, and today the estate is the largest single wine property in Armenia. The family also makes wine in Patagonia, at Bodegas del Fin del Mundo, which explains a few things about the grape list here.
The person who runs it is his niece, Juliana Del Aguila Eurnekian: CEO, vintner and sommelier. Michel Rolland has consulted here and has been described in public as her mentor. I mention that because it tells you the school of thought: ripe fruit, a clean cellar, French oak used with intent, wines built to travel.
Juliana met me in the tasting room with the afternoon light coming off the mountain. Two sommeliers in a room find a working language quickly. We talked about the plain for half an hour before either of us picked up a glass.
Volcanic soil, Araks water and forty-degree Julys#
The plain is the hottest and driest corner of Armenia. Rainfall is around 300 millimetres a year, sometimes less, and July afternoons reach 35 to 40 °C. Nothing grows here without the canals that draw on the Araks river. The ground is sandy loam and stony river deposits over volcanic rock, and the plain has its saline patches, so choosing where not to plant matters as much as where.
What saves the wine is altitude and the night. At a thousand metres the temperature drops hard after sunset even in August, and the vines get a rest that a plain at sea level would never give them. Harvest begins in August and runs into September, a full month before the high villages of Vayots Dzor pick.
The grape list is long and deliberately mixed. Syrah, Malbec and Cabernet Franc carry the reds, with Montepulciano and Ancellotta, both Italian, beside them; Chardonnay joins the whites. Alongside them stand the natives: Areni, which ripens softer and rounder here than at 1,400 metres, and Kangun, a Soviet-era crossing bred for brandy that turns out to make a fresh citrus-and-apple white when it is picked for wine rather than for the still.
Steel, French oak and a row of restored karas#
The cellar is what you would expect from an estate built for export: stainless steel with temperature control and rows of French barriques. As in any classic cellar, sulfur is measured and added where such a cellar adds it, so that a bottle opened in three years tastes like the one Juliana approved. This is not a low-intervention estate and does not claim to be. It is a precise one.
And then there are the karas. The estate took its name from the clay vessel that Armenians have buried in the ground for thousands of years, and it has restored a number of old ones for fermenting and ageing a part of the production. They are shown on every tour, and I like that they are shown honestly: a row of clay jars in a cellar of steel, an acknowledgement of where this country’s wine came from rather than a claim to be making it that way. In Rind the karas is the method. In Armavir it is the footnote, and a good footnote.
“I taste our wines the way I was trained to taste other people’s: as if I had paid for the bottle.”
She said that over the first glass. It stayed with me.
Karas Classic Red at 16 degrees#
We tasted through the range, the Kangun-based Classic White first: pale, green apple and lemon peel, a clean line, the sort of wine that disappears from a table of herbs and cheese in ten minutes. Then the Areni, then the Reserve. The wine I chose to write down is the one most people will actually meet.
Kyufta, lavash and a table facing the mountain#
Lunch was on the terrace with Ararat in front of us. The plain has its own dish and it arrived first: kyufta in the Etchmiadzin style, beef pounded to a paste, boiled as one large meatball, then sliced and buttered. Lavash from the tonir, still blistered; a plate of tarragon, purslane and coriander; fresh cheese; pork khorovats from the coals. The Kangun went with the herbs and the cheese. The Classic Red went with the meat, as it was designed to.
I asked Juliana what she wished visitors understood about the estate. Her answer was about the vines, not the numbers: that every row here had to be planted, irrigated and kept alive in a place where 40 °C is an ordinary Tuesday, and that walking them in August is a different kind of work from admiring them in April. I have walked vineyards in August. I believed her.
Karas Wines on tour#
Karas is a half day from Yerevan, about an hour each way, and I place it on purpose. On the Areni tour we come here before we turn south, so that the group has seen the plain, the steel and the French oak before they meet the karas cellars of Vayots Dzor. The contrast is the lesson. On the two-cradles route it does the same job on a larger scale: a modern, export-minded estate on one side, the qvevri cellars of Kakheti on the other, and the group forms its own opinion somewhere in between.
I pour classic and natural wine with the same respect, and I have written about why I take neither side. Karas is my clearest Armenian example of the classic case: a family that planted 400 hectares on a plain known for a century as brandy country and showed that it can make a serious table wine. If you want the wider picture, the Armavir guide covers the plain and its neighbours, and the Armenia guide sets it beside the mountains.
On the way back to Yerevan I watched the rows go past the window for a full ten minutes before they stopped. In the high villages I have learned what Armenian wine remembers. On the plain I saw what it is prepared to become.
