Winemaker, Director of Voskehat Educational and Research Center for Enology, Ph.D. in Engineering Science Garush Samvelyan considers winemaking a component of Armenian culture.

Wrapping wine in culture

According to Garush Samvelyan, there is no winemaking and wine without art, cuisine, and traditions.

“If we can present and serve all this in a comprehensive way to the consumer, winemaking will become more valuable and interesting. We ought to work with tourists properly. A Frenchman coming to Armenia does not come to drink French wine, and when we give him Armenian wine, we must definitely offer an Armenian dish to go with that wine. We should wrap the wine completely in our culture,” says the winemaker.

In his opinion, “wine should be served correctly to both foreign and local consumers, so that it is possible to “educate” a more literate consumer.”

Winemaking as heritage

“During my first ever visit to Italy, I noticed something curious: no special names for wines there, mainly surnames of winemakers and under them the history of generations. You study that and find more than 10 generations under one surname. In other words, winemakers gather their skills and knowledge like a snowball, pass it down from generation to generation and strengthen the family business,” tells Garush Samvelyan.

This practice does not exist in Armenia because, as the winemaker says, “we have not passed a single century without a war”. Samvelyan notes that passing mastery down is very difficult, “often interrupted or passed on to strangers.”

Nevertheless, the winemaker is optimistic. According to him, there is a tendency for development of traditional family winemaking in Armenia, as evidenced by the increase in the number of winemaking enterprises that are also family businesses.

Fashion in winemaking

Garush Samvelyan believes there is a kind of fashion in winemaking as well, referring to the wine cradle countries as “trend setters” of sort. Armenia has a special place among these countries.

“The interest in Armenian wine has grown over the last 10 years, along with general attention to the wines of the Old World – from countries like France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. When in Armenia, a place with a long history of winemaking, wine lovers discover new flavors that have not been encountered in any of other countries. This is the most important thing for real wine lovers,” he says.

Arpi Jilavyan

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