Armenia Starts Exporting Fabled Brandy

Thick, fragrant brandy, product of a wine industry that legend says began when Noah planted the first grapes on Mt. Ararat, has been Armenia’s national drink for generations.

Now, industry officials want it to be a major foreign currency earner for their newly independent country and are selling it outside the former Soviet bloc for the first time in decades.

The obstacles are great: an energy and economic blockade by neighboring Azerbaijan, France’s claim to exclusive use of the term “cognac” and high taxes on foreign-currency profits.

“If we’re going to describe nations by their traditional drink, for France it’s very natural to drink wine, for Germany and Czechoslovakia maybe beer, and for Armenia it’s cognac,” said Edward Hakopian, director of the Yerevan Cognac Factory.

“Don’t be surprised when we start our day in the morning with a cognac, and we serve it with any dish--with fish, with meat--and we finish the day with it as well.”

“Cognac may become the main resource of Armenia,” Hakopian said in an interview. “It has the potential of becoming the No. 1 export product” after more mundane goods such as clothing, granite and marble.

“Often, people ask us what is the secret of the high quality of Armenian brandy,” he said. “I always answer that there are no special secrets; simply, Armenia is, let’s say, one of the cradles of world-class vine-keeping.”

Armenia grows about 200,000 tons of wine grapes annually, primarily in the Ararat Valley. Half are used for wine and half for cognac. Mt. Ararat now is in Turkey but is visible from Yerevan, the Armenian capital.

Brandy production in Armenia began about 150 years later than in France. Officially, it dates to December, 1887, when an excise document shows Armenia sold 1,200 pails of cognac spirits to Russia.

It survived the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, two world wars and Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, during which some of the finest vineyards were plowed under.

More recently, the industry dodged a legal battle with France over the use of the name cognac by marketing its brandy under the brand name Noyac, an amalgam of Noah and “ac,” Armenian for spring water, which the Yerevan Cognac Factory uses instead of distilled water.

Far more difficult to get around are the economic blockade by neighboring Azerbaijan and a 40% tax on foreign currency earnings the Armenian government uses to pay its share of the former Soviet Union’s foreign debt.

The blockade was imposed after fighting began more than four years ago for control of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan.

Last winter, it left much of Armenia without heat and electricity, which meant Hakopian’s electric bottling machine was useless for months.

Pipes froze in the factory’s tasting room, then burst and destroyed the wooden floors, but the 5,000 bottles of cognac on display were not damaged.

They are part of the factory’s collection of 30,000 bottles of brandy from around the world, for which Hakopian hopes to build a museum. Brandy from Azerbaijan has been removed from the collection.

Hakopian said about 60% of Armenia’s brandy was exported before the 1917 Revolution and was commonly found in exclusive London clubs.

Josef Stalin forbade exports to the West, but gave Winston Churchill a bottle of 10-year-old, 100-proof Armenian brandy before the 1943 Tehran Conference, hoping to soften him up, Hakopian said.