Wine Tasting

The cellar lies lower than the yard, and you notice it in your arms before you read it off a thermometer. Thirty degrees outside, fourteen inside, the same fourteen all year round — which is why the wine lies down here.

Wine has been made in Areni long before anyone in Europe knew about it. In the Areni-1 cave archaeologists uncovered a press some six thousand years old: a shallow treading basin, a drain, a fermentation vessel. The layout you see today in a family cellar in the village is the same one, only larger.

Tasting is done sitting down and in an order. The whites from Voskehat first, then the Areni Noir that made the area known: an indigenous red grape that grows above a thousand metres and ripens late because of it. At the end, if the house keeps one, a sweet wine from partly dried grapes.

There is bread on the table between the glasses, and it is there as a tool. After the third wine your tongue stops distinguishing reliably; a bite of lavash resets it. Water does the same thing and gets forgotten anyway.

Some cellars have karas sunk into the floor — bellied clay jars, some of them man-high, used for fermenting and ageing. Where they stand, the room smells different from a cellar full of stainless steel: earthier, faintly of wet clay. Whether you find that again in the glass is an honest question and not a rhetorical one — half the people do, half do not.

Spitting is allowed and is common among people who taste a lot. A spittoon stands on the table and nobody thinks anything of it. Across six samples of a finger’s width each, that is what remembering the afternoon hangs on.

Buying happens at the end or not at all. There is no obligation and the winemaker does not expect one. Questions are what he expects — and the more specific they are, the longer the tour takes.