Vahe Keushguerian’s Armenian wines are available at a half-dozen spots in Houston.
Dale Robertson / Contributor
Having worked in California and Italy, Vahe Keushguerian was already well versed in the world of wine when he traveled with a friend to Armenia to discover his roots. Keushguerian’s family had been part of the Armenian diaspora, living in Syria, where he was born, and later Lebanon, where he grew up. But the trip, taken in 1998, was if anything intended to serve as a respite from wine, not an even deeper immersion.
Keushguerian’s curiosity got the best of him. There he was, about to turn 40 and throwing himself into Armenia’s ancient wine culture, about which he had known almost nothing beforehand. A proverbial light bulb had gone off. Why be just another winemaker in Tuscany or Puglia when he could position himself on the cutting edge in this magical place of his ancestors that was both new and old at once, a place where winemaking is now believed to have begun six millennia ago?
Within three years of that initial foray, he had begun planting vines. By 2009, he’d moved to Yerevan, Armenia’s capital city of more than 1 million inhabitants watched over by snow-capped Mount Ararat, the mythical, nearly 17,000-foot peak just across the border in Turkey.
Today, Keushguerian and his 37-year-old daughter Aimee are front and center in Armenia’s burgeoning wine industry with its sky’s-the-limit potential because of its marvelous terroir. With Aimee minding the store back in Yerevan, he has become the traveling face of Storica, a wine company founded only last year for the express purpose of getting Armenian bottles into American cellars.
It’s working. When Keushguerian visited Houston recently, he found his wines already available in a half-dozen spots. Two sparklers, a white and two reds have turned heads for both their quality and reasonable prices. Montrose Cheese & Wine and Phoenicia offer retail options, and restaurants/wine bars featuring at least one of the wines include Savoir — sommelier Emily Tolbert hosted Keushguerian’s public tasting — 13 Celsius, Nancy’s Hustle, One Fifth, Squable and Tiny Champions.
Lauren Lee, who oversees the wine program at Montrose Cheese & Wine, offers the Keush Origins Brut for $24.99 and sells the Zulal Areni Classic, a red, by the glass ($7 for a 3-ounce pour, $12 for 7 ounces). She praised the Origins for its “lushness,” saying it fits nicely into “the Cremant de Bourgogne niche” but at a markedly lower price. 13 Celsius sells the higher-end Keush Blanc de Blancs Extra Brut both by the glass ($15) and the bottle ($58).
“Sometimes (the customer) looks at you a little quizzical when you say ‘Armenia,’” 13 Celsius’ sommelier Adele Corrigan said, “but it’s delicious and yeasty and reminds people of a nice champagne.”
Both Keush sparklers are made in the same méthode traditionnelle style but are blends of the indigenous voskehat and khatouni grapes. The fruit for the Blanc de Blancs, which spends 36 months on the lees versus 22 for the Origins, comes from 80- to 100-year-old vines growing nearly 6,000 feet above sea level near the village of Khachik in the Vayots Dzor, Armenia’s Napa Valley.
The Zulal, meaning “pure” in Armenian, is a voskehat while the Zulal reds are areni, which thrives in the Areni sub-region of the Vayots Dzor. These are Armenia’s premier go-to varietals, the country’s chardonnay and cabernet, if you will, but Keushguerian says 55 kinds of indigenous grapes spread across seven wine-growing regions have turned up through DNA tasting.
The Blanc de Blancs, the Zulal white and the Zulal reserve red all received scores as high as 9.2 and unanimous recommendations in last week’s blind tasting by the Houston Chronicle’s panel.
“We’ve got the high-elevation fruit that we harvest in October,” Keushguerian added. “So we get both the maturity of the fruit with beautiful ripe flavors and perfect natural acidity, with a low pH.”
Considerable credit for the Storica wine’s strong sales in these parts goes to Chris Poldoian, the former sommelier at Camerata, who has Armenian ancestry of his own and was brought on to rep the wines in Texas.
He remembers his Armenian-born grandmother telling him that the country “invented wine.” He also remembers laughing, assuming that she was just proud of her heritage.
Rightly so, too. In 2011, Armenian archaeologists announced the discovery of the world’s oldest-known wine-production facility. Located in a marvelous complex of caves in Areni, it consists of a shallow basin used to press grapes, a vat for storage and fermentation jars. They also found grape seeds, remains of pressed grapes and dozens of dried vines. The cave’s remains date to about 4000 B.C., or some 900 years before what were previously thought to be the oldest winemaking remnants that had turned up in Egyptian tombs.
By the mid-20th century, however, much of Armenia’s grape crop was going into cognac and brandy sold in the Soviet Union. And little wine made it out of the Soviet block because, frankly, most of it was plonk. Production centered on quantity, not quality, and the winery infrastructure left over from that period proved largely useless when a new generation of capitalist winemakers began applying its skills using modern Western technology.
Poldoian noted that Keushguerian would no more consider making his wines in those old clay pots called amphora than would any of the world’s top-flight winemakers, saying: “When Vahe is asked about amphora, he replies, ‘Would you ask (Burgundian chardonnay sage) Etienne Sauzet why he doesn’t make wine in amphora?’
“The perception before you taste a wine from this part of the world is that it’s going to be very rustic, made in some kind of ancient style. You do think of caves, of amphora. But Vahe’s wines are modern wines that look to the future — it’s all about the viticulture today — while also paying homage to the past.”