Kimley Winery (Areni, Armenia)

Vagan Garapetsian, winemaker at Kimley winery Areni, Vayots-Dzor region (Armenia)
The village of Areni is, by coincidence or not, not only the location of the oldest proved winery facility in the world, but it is also a village known all over Armenia for its widespread artisanal winemaking resulting in countless improvised stalls along the road selling wine in plastic bottles (see on the left one of them pictured randomly along the road near Areni). These are usually 2-liter Coca-Cola bottles which find here a second life and giving the opportunity to dub the wine sold along the road as coca-wine...
This enduring family winery tradition in Areni, which was strong enough to survive through the communist years, could be explained by the multi-millenium involvement in winemaking, and further diggings in the region or even in the village itself could in the near future reinforce Areni's position as the craddle of wine production.
The visitors from Yerevan who drive through Areni to visit the hilltop monasteries of the area or come back from villages deeper in the mountain range usually stop to fill up on local wine : The wine found along the road is cheap and there's a good chance that it has been made more authenticly than the industrial wine found in the stores.
But Areni also has a real brick and mortar winery (pic on right), complete with a good press, a cask cellar and even a tasting room where visitors can sample the wines before choosing the ones they want to select. It is actually quite rare in countries born from the former Soviet Union to find wineries of this intermediate size : most of the time and up to this day you find either tiny artisanal production sites which operate without clear authorizations, or big industrial plants yielding millions of bottles. This is why I was particularly happy to visit the Kimley winery, also known as the Areni Wine Factory...

The other side of the foudres/cask cellar On the side of the road, not far from several wine shacks selling wine in plastic bottles, there's a grey building with no sign on it. We stopped for a visit with the group of young Armenians volunteers from abroad who spend a few months in Armenia with the help of Birthright Armenia. This was after the Areni cave visit and we needed wine for real after looking at the ancient winery facility...This winery is very close to the European concept of a winery, a similar size, old wood containers and a cellar that smells like a real cellar with all the good molds needed to make wine. Several of us breath this air with obvious pleasure.
Before looking at the cellar we were invited to sample the wines in the tasting room, where winemaker Vagan Garapetsian poured us generously his different cuvées in person (a real winery is indeed when the winemaker himself does all this introduction to the wine...).
There were about ten bottles on the table in the tasting room, among which several fruit wines : Since 2008 they began to produce wine made from fruits like apricots, peaches and cherries, as the region also has orchards.
__Areni dry white wine 2004, with a dark golden color. The whites are made with the Kakhet variety in the region. We first toast with our glasses raised, don't ask me how you say it in Armenian, I'll use the Russian Hа здоровье ! (Na Zdorovie) instead, every one gets it here. But the meaning of the Armenian toast is "to your life", we were explained. Someone says "to peace", a young volunteer says "happy Easter", and the generous pours made us quickly quite joyous... Toasting to us all
__Sun Areni 2005, semi-dry white wine. Not my type of semi sweet, short in the mouth.
__ Dry red wine, 1999. The nose doesn't smell anything but the mouth gets me back on a wine sensation. There's fruit and a surprising tannin feel. Areni is the grape variety here, it bears the same name than the village and it is said to express itself best in the dry, rocky and sunny terroir of this highland valley. Areni is the second village after Meghri for the number of sunny days per year.
__ Semi-sweet red wine. Not my type again, tastes like alcoholized fruit juice. Sweet wines still have the favor of a large part of the population here when they choose to drink wine, like in Russia. Some Armenians say that Armenian women are the main consumers, also because men still prefer to drink hard drinks like vodka in this country. Wine, in spite of the ancient roots of Armenia in winemaking, comes largely behind vodka in terms of sales, and the choice of vodkas in an Armenian shop or supermarket is very large, including locally-made vodkas and Russian brands. The stairs to the cask cellar (with rails for the casks) We were then offered the fruit wines but I only tasted the cherry wine which was fine, but I'm not into fruit wines actually. Then, we walked down to the cellar. It has been built in 1994 and offers good conditions for the élevage, having already its mold covers on the walls and the ceiling. There are casks of various capacity some 480, others 600 liters for example, plus a few large-volume foudres making 4540 for example. There's also a couple of tonnes making 900 liters. The casks and foudres in the cellar are made in Bulgaria. On the street level there are also a few casks (picture on left) that were made in the Narodno-Karabakh enclave, a territory located originally in Azerbaidjan which was the object of fierce battles after the demise of the Soviet Union. The Armenians who didn't want to risk a second genocide under muslim-majority rule virtually conquered it from Azerbaidjan then. There must be more woods in this enclave compared to here because from what I saw of Armenia there seems to be very few trees or forests.
The winemaker says that the dry wines spend 3 years in the foudres while the fruit wines and the semi-sweet ones stay one year in wood.
In its early years (in 1998), the young winery received the assistance of the USDA Marketing Assistance Project with the goal to encourage small-scale wine production in the Vayots-Dzor region. The winery now exports some wine abroad, to Russia (Vologda) and to Germany (Hamburg) and is pretty active in different wine activities in the region.
There are a handful of medium-size wineries like Kimley LLC along the Arpa river, like the Getap winery and the Ginetas winery. Michael Grigorian, manager at Kimley

Kimley LLC winery Areni, Vayots Dzor Marz, Armenia phone +374 81 22 133 or +374 94 29 861

Laying flowers on Armenian genocide day The Armenian genocide remembrance day on april 24 is the occasion to pay tribute the 1 to 1,5 million Armenians who were slaughtered in Turkey in 1915. While now a partly well-developed country, Turkey never aknowledged the huge pogrom that took place then against its christian minority. Similar pogroms against Armenians had also taken place in 1895, killing an estimated 300 000 Armenians. Turkey is now 99 % muslim. The survivors fled to Russia, France and the United States, building up a vibrant diaspora there.

Comments

[Florian]

From what I remember of my trip to Armenia 2 years ago, Armenian wines can be pretty dreadful! The Cornelian cherry and mulberry brandies were much tastier choices.

[Karel]

Great Thank You for informations. I have garden with litlle vitis vinifera, but this 3th of the May frozen all. Look here: www.2az.org/galeria
Karel Jirsa
Grygov
Czech Republic

[Nancy Pearson]

On Our trip to Armenia in Aug. 2014 we tasted delicious red wines. Made in Armenia.