The karas hall at Voskevaz is the coolest room in Aragatsotn on a September afternoon. Outside, the thermometer in the minibus read 29 °C, which is ordinary for Armenia in late September, and the flagstones of the yard were too hot to sit on. Inside, three steps down, the air smelled of wet clay and old wine, and I watched a guest from Brno lay her palm flat on a karas and leave it there, like someone warming her hands on a radiator in reverse.
We were 35 kilometres north-west of Yerevan, on the southern slopes of Mount Aragats, in a village whose name means “golden bunch”. Voskevaz lies just beyond Ashtarak, the small capital of Aragatsotn, where the Kasagh river has cut a gorge deep enough that two medieval monasteries, Saghmosavank and Hovhannavank, stand right on its lip. This is the home country of Voskehat, the “golden berry”, the most serious white grape in Armenia, and it is why I bring every Armenian group here, either on the way south to the Areni valley or on the way back.
A state winery from 1932, a family since 1997#
Voskevaz Winery was founded in 1932 as a Soviet state winery, in the years when Armenia was being made into the brandy cellar of the USSR. Kangun, the white crossing you still see all over the Ararat plain, is a Soviet-era grape bred for the still rather than the glass. The buildings carry that history plainly: thick stone walls, long halls, a scale nobody would build from scratch for a family estate today.
Since 1997 the winery has been run by Davit Hovhannisyan together with his brothers, Gagik Oganesyan, an artist and architect, and Armen Oganesyan, a metalworker. Davit’s children have since joined. What they have made of the old plant is a place you can spend half a day in: a museum of the winery’s own past, a restaurant, tastings that run to five wines, and a karas hall holding what they describe as the largest collection of working karas in Armenia.
The first time I drove out here was on a spare afternoon between two days in Vayots Dzor, alone, because a sommelier friend in Yerevan had told me the hall was worth the detour. She was right, and the detour is now a fixed point in my Armenian week.
Fermenting Voskehat in clay#
Karas is the Armenian word for the large clay wine vessel. Rows of them, sunk into the floor, were found in the Urartian storerooms at Karmir Blur on the edge of Yerevan, from the seventh and sixth centuries BC. Xenophon, marching through in 401 BC, noted villages keeping their wine in buried jars. I have set out how karas differ from Georgian qvevri and from Italian amphora in a separate article; here the question is narrower. What does the vessel do to Voskehat?
The Karasi Collection is the estate’s top line and its technical heart. The Voskehat for it comes from growers here in Aragatsotn, where the vineyards sit on stony volcanic soils of basalt and tuff at roughly 950 to 1,400 metres, and the grape is picked in the second half of September. The must ferments in karas, and the wine then moves to oak to mature. That order is a decision. Zorik Gharibian at Zorah in Rind does the reverse, fermenting in concrete and large casks and ageing in buried karas. Two serious houses, two opposite answers, and you can taste the choice in both glasses.
The cellar hand who walked us through has plainly answered the question about clay and air a thousand times, and he answered it well.
“Clay is not a barrel and it is not steel. It does not give you vanilla. It gives the wine a little air, slowly, and a little of itself. Then the oak tidies up.”
The other lines are made in steel and oak, and the house does not use the word natural. I would not use it for them either. Voskevaz is a classic house that happens to keep the oldest kind of wine vessel in the country in daily use, and I find that more interesting than a manifesto. It is also why a guest of mine who dislikes “funky” wine can drink karas Voskehat happily: the fruit is clean, and the texture comes from clay, not from oxidation.
Voskehat, Kangun and Areni on one table#
The tasting room is above the hall, and the glasses were set out in fives. We opened with a Kangun from steel: pale, citrus and green apple, the kind of white you drink at 11:00 without a second thought, which is the highest compliment I can pay a grape bred for brandy. Then the Karasi wines, and the room went quiet in the way rooms do when people are working.
The Karasi Collection Areni Noir followed, light ruby, red cherry and a dusty, peppery edge, its tannin rounded in a way a steel-and-oak Areni rarely manages. Then the Karasi Collection Haghtanak, the deep-coloured Soviet crossing usually given Saperavi as one parent, dark-fruited and built for the grill. If you know only the light Areni of the mountain villages, Haghtanak is a useful shock.
Lunch above the karas#
The restaurant gave us a long table by the window with Aragats in the frame, its summit already dusted white. Lavash came first, warm from the tonir, then the herb plate that no Armenian table skips: tarragon, basil, purslane, coriander, spring onions, with a slab of salty chanakh cheese. The Voskehat with that is the pairing the region does without thinking, and it is correct. Tolma in grape leaves next, then khorovats of pork and grilled peppers off the coals in the yard, with the Karasi Collection Areni Noir.
We finished with coffee and gata, and one guest asked for the last of the Voskehat with the pastry. I told him it would not work. It worked.
Voskevaz on tour#
Voskevaz is 40 to 50 minutes from Yerevan, which makes it my favourite first or last cellar of an Armenian week. On the Areni and Vayots Dzor tour we come after a morning on the gorge at Saghmosavank, walk the hall, taste the five wines and eat here before the drive. On the Armenia and Georgia route I use it as a hinge: the group meets karas here, in a classic frame, and a few days later stands in a Kakheti cellar looking at qvevri mouths in the floor, and six thousand years line up in a way no lecture could manage.
Bring a layer for the hall, even in September. And leave room; the restaurant does not do small portions.
The village is named for a golden bunch, the grape for a golden berry, and the wine spends its first weeks in grey clay. Aragatsotn fits in one glass.
