Armenia Is Producing Some of the World’s Most Interesting Wines — If You Can Find Them

Vines in Armenia are old. In fact, some of them are very old, dating back 150 years, and yet are still more than able to produce grapes for wine.

For the last ten years, Kristina Margaryan, head of the research of plant genomics at the Molecular Biology Institute of Armenia, has been cataloging lost and endangered indigenous varieties in every village and vineyard in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor region.

“Interviews with the farmers, and written records saved in the local municipalities and churches, reveal that there are 100-year-old and even older vineyards there,” says Margaryan. So far, she has documented about 3,000 genotypes, 300 of which are considered distinct varieties. To identify the grapes, her group works closely with the Julius Kuhn Institute in Germany, which hosts one of the biggest databases of grape genetic resources in the world.