The road from Areni up to Rind climbs about twelve kilometres and gains the better part of four hundred metres. You leave the Arpa river and the roadside stalls with their plastic bottles of homemade wine, the cliffs go from red to grey, and the air changes. It was the first week of October, harvest time in Vayots Dzor, the high wine country of Armenia, and at 08:30 the thermometer in the village read 6 °C. By noon it would be 24. That gap, repeated every day of the growing season, is most of what you need to know about wine up here.
Zorik Gharibian was waiting by the winery gate with two crates of black Areni at his feet, not for me, for the press. He shook my hand, looked at my shoes and said we would walk to the vines first, while the light was still cold. I have learnt to do what winemakers say in the morning.
From Milan to a village at 1,400 metres#
Zorik came to wine from the Armenian diaspora in Italy, where he worked in fashion in Milan. He first visited Armenia in 1998, acquired land above Rind around 2000, and spent the following years planting Areni Noir from cuttings taken off old vines. The first vintage was 2010, made with the Tuscan consultant Alberto Antonini, who had earlier worked for Antinori and Frescobaldi. Zorah today farms about fifteen hectares.
I met the wine before I met the man. Someone opened a bottle of Karasì for me at a table in Yerevan years ago, and I remember thinking it tasted like a Pinot Noir that had grown up somewhere with more sky. It is not a place you drop in on; the winery is small and receives visitors by appointment, which is part of why I bring groups here rather than pointing them at the gate.
Areni Noir, own-rooted, at the top of the valley#
The Zorah vineyards sit between roughly 1,400 and 1,600 metres, on a shelf of limestone and calcareous clay with volcanic stone mixed through it. Rainfall is somewhere between 250 and 400 millimetres a year, winters are hard, summers are dry, and the nights, as I said, are cold. The vines are Areni Noir first, then Voskehat, with smaller plots of Garan Dmak and the rare local white Chilar.
The high sites of Vayots Dzor are widely described as free of phylloxera, so many old vines here stand on their own roots. That is most obvious in the old-vine parcel at about 1,650 metres from which the estate’s rarest red, Yeraz, is made. The trunks there are thick and twisted, and nobody living planted them. Zorik walked me along a row and put his hand on one.
“Nobody planted these for me,” he said. “My job is to not ruin them.”
Areni is thin-skinned and ripens late. The picking here runs from the end of September into the middle of October, and the fruit comes off with around 13 per cent of potential alcohol and a great deal of acidity. It is not a grape that forgives heavy hands in the cellar.
Concrete, Slavonian oak and buried karas#
The cellar is quieter than you expect. Fermentation is with native yeasts, in concrete and in large old casks of Slavonian oak. The first vintage, 2010, was an experiment across steel, barrels, concrete and a few amphorae; from 2012 the pattern settled. Then the wine goes into karas.
A karas is the Armenian clay vessel, cousin to the Georgian qvevri, and I have written about the whole family in a separate piece on karas, qvevri and amphora. The ones at Zorah are not new. They were bought from villages, old already, cleaned, and buried up to the neck in the floor of the winery. Buried clay holds its temperature through the day and through the seasons. It also breathes a little, which is what oak does, without leaving the vanilla and toast that a new barrel leaves.
“I do not want to taste the barrel,” Zorik said, tapping a karas rim. “I want to taste Rind. The clay was here before any of us, and it keeps its opinions to itself.”
Zorah does not call itself natural and makes no zero-sulfur claim. The frame is classic: clean fruit, controlled fermentation, patience. What is minimal is the interference, and what is old is the vessel. The estate’s line is “Six Thousand Years of History in Every Bottle”, and the number is not rhetoric. The Areni-1 cave, about twelve kilometres downhill, holds the remains of a winery dated to around 4100 BC. It is a big line for a small winery, and standing among the buried jars I found it less of a stretch than I expected.
One glass: Karasì 2019#
We tasted in the cellar, cool enough that I kept my coat on.
We also opened the Voskì, the white built on Voskehat, textured, smelling of quince and dried herbs, and a splash of the Heritage Chilar, which is the sort of wine you taste once and then keep asking about. The Yeraz I will leave for another day; there is not much of it.
Lunch in Rind#
Zorik’s team had set a table outside, under a walnut tree that was dropping its leaves into the salad. Lavash came hot from a tonir, the clay pit oven, blistered and folded. There was a plate of herbs, tarragon and purslane and coriander, a bowl of matsun, a soft white cheese, tolma in grape leaves, and then pork khorovats off the coals, which is the pairing Yerevan restaurants make with karas Areni and which, in the village, made complete sense. The Karasì went from the tasting glass to a tumbler without losing anything.
We talked about pruning, about how far up the slope Areni will still ripen, and about which villages still have karas in the ground. Zorik is generous with technical detail, and I took notes until the coffee came.
Zorah on tour#
On my Armenia tour through Areni and Vayots Dzor we come to Rind after the Areni-1 cave and Noravank, so the group has already stood in a 6,000-year-old cellar before they see the modern one. The morning is the vineyard walk, the cellar and a tasting of three or four wines; lunch is at the estate or with a family in the village, depending on the season. On the longer Armenia and Georgia route, Zorah is the karas half of a comparison that ends in a qvevri cellar in Kakheti, and guests notice how differently two neighbouring clay traditions can taste.
Wear proper shoes. The rows at 1,600 metres are steep, and I will walk you along them whether you have the right footwear or not.
I drove back down to Areni in the late afternoon with the windows open, past the stalls, and did not stop for the homemade wine. Some days the question of what Areni can be has already been answered.
