A towel over the label#
I met Vahe Keushguerian the way I meet most people who make a wine that puzzles me: I asked who was behind the bottle. It was a list in Yerevan, years ago, and the line read traditional-method sparkling, Voskehat and Khatouni, Vayots Dzor. Armenia does many things very well. Until 2013, traditional-method sparkling from its own grapes was not one of them, and Keush was the first.
So on an October morning I was standing in WineWorks, the winery Vahe founded in Yerevan in 2013, with six glasses on a steel table and a bottle wrapped in a kitchen towel. He wanted me to name the grape before I saw the label. I said Voskehat, because the quince was there under the citrus. He said I was two-fifths wrong, which is how I learned the blend.
From the Bay Area to Tuscany to Yerevan#
Vahe has spent about thirty years in wine, and the route is not a straight line. He ran an import company and a restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tastevin Imports and Lalime’s. Then came roughly fifteen years in Italy, making Chianti for export in Tuscany, with a spell in Puglia. In 2009 he came to Armenia.
We speak Italian together, which is a small pleasure for me and, I suspect, a relief for him: Tuscan cellar talk has words that exist in neither Armenian nor English. It also explains something about the wines. A man who has made years of Sangiovese vintages for a demanding export market does not hurry, and he does not romanticise. He measures.
In Armenia he built the infrastructure first. Semina Consulting began as an equipment supplier and turned into a consultancy. WineWorks opened in 2013 as an incubator where small labels could make their wine on shared equipment, and more than a dozen of them did within a few years. He co-founded the EVN Wine Academy and keeps two nurseries for indigenous vines. Keush, his own sparkling label, arrived in the same year as WineWorks, the first traditional-method sparkling made from native Armenian grapes.
Khachik, 1,750 metres#
The grapes come from Khachik, a remote village at the south-western edge of Vayots Dzor. The vineyards sit between 1,500 and 1,750 metres on limestone and volcanic soils, more than a kilometre higher than any vineyard in Champagne. Vahe says they are the highest vineyards in the northern hemisphere used for traditional-method sparkling. I have no way to check that and I have stopped trying; the altitude does what he needs it to do.
What altitude does, for a sparkling base, is keep the acid. A base wine for the traditional method is picked earlier and leaner than a still wine, at sugar levels that would make a thin table wine, because the second fermentation in the bottle will add alcohol and the years on lees will add everything else. At 1,700 metres in a dry continental climate, with hot days and cold nights, Voskehat and Khatouni ripen slowly and keep their acidity long after the Ararat plain has finished picking. That is the whole argument for Khachik in one sentence.
Some of the vines are old, 100 to 120 years, and own-rooted, because the high sites of Vayots Dzor are widely described as phylloxera-free. Voskehat is the flagship white of Armenia, textured and quince-scented. Khatouni is a local white of Vayots Dzor, and in the glass I read it as the acid spine, with Voskehat bringing the flesh. Areni Noir, the region’s red, goes into the rosé and a blanc de noirs.
The cellar work is classic. Second fermentation in bottle, then time: Origins Brut spends 22 months or more on lees, the Rosé Extra Brut 24 or more, the Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut 36. Dosage is low, four to five grams a litre. This is the classical side of my cellar, and I mean that as description, not as a grade: the method exists because it works, and Vahe applies it with patience. If you want the other kind of bubbles, the single-fermentation kind, I wrote about pét-nat separately. The two are cousins, not rivals.
There are no shortcuts. Quality is made in the vineyards. Respect nature.
That is the stated philosophy of the house, and for once the sentence on the website matches the man at the table.
One glass, paid attention to#
Basturma and gata#
Sparkling wine in Armenia has its own table, and it is not the one you know from Reims. That day Vahe put out basturma, air-dried beef cured under a fenugreek crust and sliced thin enough to read through, a plate of chechil, the salted string cheese, and tarragon, purslane and warm lavash. The Brut cut through the fenugreek the way it cuts through anything.
We finished with gata, the sweet layered pastry, and the Blanc de Blancs, 36 months on lees, extra brut. I would not have chosen it. The locals do, and they are right: the wine has enough richness from the lees to meet the butter, and enough acid to make you want another slice.
On tour#
On my Armenia tour we taste Keush at WineWorks in Yerevan, usually on the first or last day, because it is the clearest way I know to show what Armenian grapes can do in a classic frame before or after a week of karas cellars in Vayots Dzor. Khachik itself is about 30 kilometres from Yeghegnadzor on mountain roads. Whether we drive up depends on the season and the state of the road, and I decide that week by week, not in a brochure. On the two-country route with Georgia it is the wine I open on the Yerevan evening, before the qvevri begin.
If you are reading this to understand where Armenia sits on the map of wine, this is the bottle I would hand you first. Not because it is the most Armenian thing in the country; the karas are that. Because it proves that the country can play the most exacting game in wine at 1,750 metres and not miss a step.
Vahe still puts a towel over the label when I visit. I still say Voskehat first.
