Roadside Wine Production (Areni, Armenia)

Haigaz with daughter in his cellar Areni, Vayots-Dzor region (Armenia)
Areni is foremost known in Armenia as the village where roadside vendors sell their home-made wine to the travellers en route to iconic monasteries of the region or coming back from destinations deep in the mountains like Meghri or the crossing point with Iran. You come across many trucks with Iranian license plates in the region (like the one on the picture on left) and for the anecdote Armenia is visited by quite a few tourists from this country, who come here to escape temporarily from the islamic virtue police, have fun and enjoy drinks.
As I was looking for artisanal wineries on the Internet in France before this trip, I came across Christian Garbis blog and contacted him. He is an American-Armenian and a writer who has been living in Armenia for a few years and married there. He was very helpful and gave me the contact info of Haigaz, one of these street vendors where he used to buy bulk wine when he drove by, for example when driving to Novarank. His wine was a safe choice and Christian had sampled several of his products, including fruit wines. I really wanted to meet someone like Haigaz, an artisan making wine for the common consumer like his forefathers did since immemorial times, and few other places in Armenia was fit for this deep-rooted tradition than Areni... See the wine stall on the right ? There are a few dozens like this one along the road in the outskirts of Areni, this isn't Haigaz's but I chose to show this one here because you can see the mountains and feel the road. I could have stopped at any of these shacks but Christian offered me a shortcut to a sideroad stall with the house/winery sitting just a few meters beyond the road (many of these stalls can be far from their respective facility).

Haigaz's sideroad wine stall The wine-producing village of Areni is not typical of the rest of Armenia, and of what I heard and read, there is hardly another community where people are so much involved in the grape growing, winemaking and retail of the wines. Plus, Areni is also the name of a red variety grown here, and which is said to express itsel only in these hot, rocky canyons. The variety may be grown also in the plains near Yerevan but it will give completely different wines there, thus misleading the public with an Areni label (that's what I've been told). This is why you must buy your red Areni wine in Areni because the Areni-labelled bottles found in the Yerevan shops are probably large-scale bottlings from flatland-grown grapes, and who-knows-what-else if the soviet kombinat culture still endures in this country, which is very likely.
I read an article about Areni by Armenian reporter Tatul Habokyan where he said that a given family with a wine shack along the road here would sell 20 liters a day of red wine along the year, with peaks to 100 or 150 liters on holidays, at a liter price of 1000 Dram, which makes about 1,83 € or 2,7 USD. You can find wine in shops in Yerevan for 900 Dram a bottle but it's a crap that you'll not go beyond an aborted nose. I have got an interesting wine in Yerevan for a mere 1300 Dram but I'm not sure it's very common. While the village seems rather poor on European standards, the article says that people here tend to emigrate less than in other villages; there is work here, and vine growing or winemaking translates into real money.
The pic on left shows Areni as seen from the road. Vines can be spotted at the foot of these housing blocks. The entry to the cellar in front of the house Christian had given me the phone number of his favorite roadside wine producer and we could thus locate him among the many wine shacks near Areni. He was as we guessed fluent in Russian which helped us communicate (Armenian sounds very far from any language I know and speaking with hands wouldn't have brought us very far.... Also, he was there that day and that was great as he could show us his place. He didn't even propose us his wines in coca-cola plastic bottles and he led us immediately to the cellar dug a few years before between the house and the road. That's there, in this square room a few meters under the surface that Haidaz and his family make and age wine. The wine in the shack is the same that we will taste in the cellar/facility (except for the older wines) and using 2-liter plastic bottles or bigger plastic jars is just a way to help the buyers buy in bulk without bothering about the containers. Many tourists or travellers literally fill up here and glass is heavy and would ad up to the price. the cellar There we were in a cool cellar with simple, blue plastic vats which could be used as fermentation vats and élevage vats. The pressing takes place above our head in the garden where the grapes are trampled under the feet in a big metal box, a plastic tube allowing the juice to flow by gravity through the ground to plastic containers in the cellar. They don't have big means for machinery and pressing with the feet is a cheap, seasoned way to do the job.
Haigaz asks us what we want to taste. I ask for a dry red, he says that he has plots of Areni but they have different taste because of the place. He points to different blue containers, some with young wines, some with more acidic reds, some having still some sugar. He has vineyard plots not only in Areni but also in another village in the vicinity. He has another cellar over there, a very dark one which he says is good to keep the wine.
Our guest pours us a glass of red Areni 2010, taken from a blue container. This is lightly tannic, fruity, a young wine with some character, I would say.. There may be a few grams of residual sugar in here too. The winemaker says that he doesn't use fermenti, yeasts to start the fermentation. He says that he drinks his own wine and doesn't mix things in it.
He pours us then a lightly sweet white wine. Asked if he filters the wines, he says some yes, some not. This one is filtered but we'll taste a non-filtered after. He says it's better that way but that it makes the wine less stable. Asked if he puts some sulphur to stabilize the wines, he says that he burns pieces of paper with sulphur on it when the wine is moved from a blue container to another, that's all, and it takes place in his own words when the wine has ceased bubbling (when fermentation is over). If we understood correctly, when the fermentation is over, he racks the wine to another similar vat, burning the improvised sulphur wick in the empty container before filling it. The important thing he says, before doing this improvised sulphur wick, is to be sure that the wine is not working anymore. Also, he fills the container to the top and put the lid so that no oxygen comes in contact with the wine. Pouring from a blue container the racking with the sulphur wick takes place in january and the wine remains there till april or so. Our guest says that the arduous time is when the weather outside hesitates between cold and warm, then the wine tends to be active again. At this stage ha racks another, last time with a burning sulphur paper and that's all.
The white wine he poured us is a 2010, it is made with several white varieties that he grows. It's a simple, rustic wine that would go well as apéritif, I would say. His vineyards are about 30 years old, he says. It had been planted in the soviet years by the kholkhoz and when the socialist system stopped each worker got a small surface, his own lot was 0,5 hectare. He was a tractorist in the kholkhoz. But this white comes from a vineyard that he planted 8 years ago 2 kilometers from here.
He pours us now another white, actually a lightly-rosé wine : this is the same wine but an unfiltered version. I like that, also a hearty white with a bit of residual sugar and a tannic feel, definitely a variety or group of variety that we don't have in western Europe, some being probably with a grey/red skin. Haigaz says that the first white stayed one day in contact with the skins and seeds but the second stayed 3 days and took some color. He says that for the red the contact time is 15 days. Asked about the alcohol level of his wines, he says not very high, about 12 °, I say that it is maybe 13 ° from what I feel, to which he says, could be, as he doesn't have the tools to measure and make analysis on his wine. I ask if he adds some sugar during the fermentation, he says there is no need in this region to do that, this is the natural sugar. I think it's true. With clay containers Haigaz now pours os a 2010 red wine made from grapes harvested in novemver 2010. He was looking for the maximum sugar. He had seen a program on a TV channel about wine made from grapes harvested in winter and he made this try. The wine is a nice semi-sweet late-harvest wine which is rather well balanced.
I ask about the two amphorae-like containers on the side, Haigaz says that he uses these ones in spite of the fact that the wine perspires through the clay fabric. Wood casks are way too expensive, he says, and old casks wouldn't give a wood influence on the wine, so it's useless. He knows some people who bought old casks dating from the 50s' or 60s' (the soviet years) that they get from bigger wineries, but the price to renovate these casks back to useable condition is 3 USD per liter, which makes a lot of money. Plus, there is still a risk that it will leak. He doesn't make wood chips either. Plus, he says, if he used wood chips people would not understand as they know that he has no wood containers in his cellar. The foot-stomping press Haigaz showed us the foot-stomping press in the garden avove the cellar. At harvest time they press the grapes inside this metal container by just trampling on them. There's a small opening that you may spot on the front to which they connect a pipe through which the juice flows directly into a blue container in the cool cellar. As simple as that and so close from the way people did press the grapes 6000 years ago as demonstrated in the Aneni cave findings...
Haigaz tells us that during the soviet years by the way only this village and a couple of others would drink wine because they had been keeping making home wine in the back yard, but everyone in Yerevan would drink vodka and it's still pretty much the same today even if wine has made inroads. He is quite sure that if we asked randomly in Yerevan, many people would admit that they never drink wine. It's only since the last 10 years that wine has made a comeback and that its sales went up in the shops. And what is sure is that northern Armenia is vodka country, not wine. The southern Armenia like here has been making wine for ages and that's where many consumers are, near Areni, Ijivan and near the border with Iran (pomegranate wine). 7-6:10 Vineyards along the Arpa river The article by Tatul Habokyan I was reffering to (found on page 20 of this Pdf document) says that there is a shortage of arable land in the region due to the steep landscape. After the demise of the communist system, land was given to the people and contrary to other regions were plots were sold or swappedn, the agricultural roots of the inhabitants put them quicky back on tracks for a profitable agriculture exploitation. From my modest point of view (I'm not a grower and even less a winemaker) there still seems to be inexploited land here, particularly on the slopes, and Thierry Allemand or Hirotake Ooka would certainly buy (for almost nothing) and make wonders from these intermediary surfaces between abrupt cliffs and water-soaked river banks. That's one reason why this area has still a bright future ahead in my opinion, even if locals think that the best vineyard plots are already known and exploited.
You can see on this picture both a young vineyard and a young orchard (in the background).
I made this visit with my relative, driving here with his car from Yerevan. We asked to someone in the village where the vineyards were as we spotted only a few plots here and there. He pointed to a direction, saying that there were 100 hectares planted in the area.
On the picture on the left, shot near Chiva which is another village nearby, you can see a few rows of vines down below on the green patch, and here also people seem reluctant to plant on the more arid slopes. In the article about the village growers, one of them is cited saying Even though we do not have a lot of land, what we do have is very fertile. I think that the question here is that the Areni people grow two things, to be short : grapes and fruits, and they may consider each type of culture as needing the same type of soil and water reserves. Also, many growers sell their grapes to established wineries, and these ask for volume and weight, not quality of grapes, and the lower fertile grounds may be favored in that regard.

Haigaz and his wife have 3 children, two daughters and a son (the oldest) who is finishing his engineer school in Yerevan. Right now no child seems to want to follow suit at the tiny winery.
A worker in a large vineyard in the plain near Yerevan We stopped en route to Yerevan in the flatland of the plain, there are large vineyards there, probably managed by the major wineries whose wines you see in the shops and supermarkets. This man was a worker checking the young leaves and ties to the wires.
Multiple tissue ties The way the branches are tied to the wires is interesting. It must represent an arduous job but it is probably softer for the plant and doesn't ham it.