Voskevaz Winery is located in the Aragatsotn region, in the village Voskevaz (the same name as the winery) which translates to ‘golden bunch’. It was decided by the government to create a winery here in 1932. So we are situated in the oldest functioning winery in Armenia, and there is a reason for that because the Aragatsotn region was very developed in producing sherry type wines. In all of the Soviet Union, only three countries produced sherry type wines, which were Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia, and mainly in the Aragatsotn region.

Only here was sherry type yeast developed, so it gave us the opportunity to produce the sweet wines which were exported all over the Soviet Union and became very famous. And mostly, of course, at Voskevaz they worked with the Voskehat grape variety, which is the queen of our white grape varieties, the flagship grape of this region. As a family, our journey with this winery began in 1998. Before that, unfortunately, the winery was abandoned because it was not the primary field of interest for the government and so it was abandoned. No production was going on at the winery and they just left it as it was.

So my father David Hovhanisyan, who is the founder of the company, bought the winery. I didn’t quite understand what we would do with this winery because then it was not as beautiful as you can see it is right now. So we didn’t know what to do with it. But he had this vision. He had this dream to show to the international consumer what it is to produce high quality Armenian wines only from local grape varieties.

IAnd our primary goal was to show it to our consumer, to the Armenian consumer, because as you know, there was this separation. Armenia produced only brandy, and Georgia produced only wine during the Soviet period. And this is a shame because Armenia is known as a cradle of winemaking. It has a rich history starting from Noah, and the Areni-1 Cave. It was very developed in our culture to drink wine, and then it was just extracted from our culture. There were no documents. During the Soviet period in Armenia, there was no research, there was no documentary. There was nothing. There was no development in this field.

It was mainly brandy production in Armenia and luckily in our region, Aragatsotn region, we got a bit luckier because we had the Voskehat grape variety, which was very good for brandy production. So they kept the vineyards here, some of the vineyards, but unfortunately, the Vayots Dzor region, the Ararat Valley, and some other regions were less fortunate because there they had mostly red grape varieties.

There are vines that we have in Armenia, old vines that are very highly situated, 1,600 meters above sea level, that were hidden with the help of the farmers that loved their work, loved their craft, and they just hid these vines from the government during the Soviet era separation. And now we still have these beautiful old vines that are situated in different regions.

So we started to revive wine production here at the winery as a family winery, and mostly we concentrated on the autochthonous varieties. This is our main philosophy of the winery, Armenian style. Armenian grape varieties and only Armenian oak are used in our premium range wines and middle range wines.

Also the most interesting traditional technologies we are starting to revive. These are the Karasi Collection wines and kakhani wines. Karas is a clay amphora, which has a rich history of six, seven, 8,000 years that were used not only for wine production but also for different liquid transportation back then. The “kakhani” method is the traditional way of gentle rope-drying of carefully selected bunches of grapes, which creates a very concentrated style of wine. 

We are in love with Armenian winemaking and we wanted to revive it and give a new touch to it. And so we started to experiment and Voskevaz adores experimenting. We are working with our winemakers and we give them these proposed quantities of experiments per year. We decide how many experiments we will do because we have to evolve, we have to do something new as we didn’t have anything to work with in terms of scientific work from the past.

We didn’t know how to combine, how to blend, what Armenian grape variety will look good in different types of wood vessels and how many months should we age wines in each tank. So we started from scratch. By saying ‘we’, I mean not only Voskevaz, but also all the other winemakers, our fellow Armenian winemakers. They started to work with winemaking and started to revive it with us 10, 15 years ago. And what we are doing now as a winery, what we are doing now with winemakers, it is this data, this basis of knowledge, that we are developing so that we can later pass it on to the younger generation of winemakers and they can have this data to start with.