Pomegranate Wine: Armenian Fruit Wine
The European Union has one simple rule for wine: it has to come from grapes. Russia has the same rule and polices it even more strictly. And then there's the Armenian supermarket, where a bottle labeled "wine" stands on the shelf among the red grape ones, and no grape has ever been anywhere near it.
Pomegranate wine (Armenian: նռան գինի) is a semi-sweet fruit wine fermented from pomegranate juice, ruby red, around twelve percent alcohol, and in Armenia people treat it as wine even though most of the world's laws say it isn't. Mine was named after the town of Ijevan and cost less than its grape neighbor one shelf up.
What Nran Gini Means and Where Else They Ferment Pomegranates
Next to the Armenian on the label was the French Grenade, and for a moment I wondered whether it was meant as a warning. It isn't: grenade is French for pomegranate, from the Latin granatum, "grainy" - the hand grenade was named after the fruit, not the other way around. In Armenian the fruit is nur and wine is gini, together nran gini - no proper name, just a plain description of what's in the bottle. In Armenia you'll find it all over the country, but they ferment it in Turkey too, along with Azerbaijan and Israel, where the Rimon winery in Galilee has been bottling it since 2004. In Azerbaijan, though, what made the pomegranate famous was mostly narsharab, a thick unfermented syrup poured over kebab; Armenia has the same thing under the name doshab, and pours pomegranate juice straight into nraneh soup. As for Georgia and Cyprus, which travel websites list among the big producers, I found nothing to back that up: they grow pomegranates there, but they make their wine from grapes.
How Long Ijevan Has Been Fermenting Pomegranates and Why It Can't Say So Out Loud
Armenia has the oldest evidence of grape wine in the world, the Areni-1 cave, and Armenian wine has every right to make much of it. Pomegranate wine just rides on that story: it has no cave and no date of its own, and Armenian sources mention it only in connection with the big wineries. The Ijevan plant in Tavush was founded in 1951 for grapes and brandy, added fruit wines later, and I couldn't track down the year pomegranate slipped in among them - what the papers did announce, and not until 2020, was "the first organic Armenian pomegranate wine." It's a young product, and the "thousand-year tradition" from the guidebooks belongs to grapes. There is one real issue, though: Russian law reserves the word "wine" for grapes, and for the sake of exports Armenia is coming up with a separate label for pomegranate wine - the name settled on is Granatus. At home they go on saying gini. The health miracles it's credited with - blood pressure, cancer, male potency - come from Russian-speaking grandmothers rather than from any clinic, and for a while I believed them too.
How to Drink Pomegranate Wine and What to Drink It With
There are two main ingredients in the bottle. Pomegranate juice brings the color and the tannic bite of the skins; sugar holds the semi-sweet version together and gives the yeast something to work with for those twelve percent. Without sugar the drink stays as sour and tannic as the fruit itself, which is why dry versions are harder to come by than semi-sweet ones. The closest comparison I can make is homemade country wine, the kind somebody ferments from currants in a carboy out at a cottage: it isn't from grapes either, and nobody asks about the vintage. You drink it chilled, after a meal, with something sweet - it goes better with gata than with lamb. Anyone after something drier looks for the word chor (dry) on the label; otherwise you'll get semi-sweet almost every time. And because it costs a fraction of the price of grape wine and the bottle survives a flight in your suitcase, it comes home more often than grape wine does - and it's the one people tell stories about once they're back.
The Bottle Everyone Recommended
I bought my bottle of pomegranate wine in an ordinary supermarket, because I wanted to try something other than grapes and because everyone I asked about what to drink in Armenia recommended it. Ijevan brand, semi-sweet, 2,000 AMD (4.80 EUR) a bottle. Pomegranate on the nose and something earthy underneath; the first sip is as sweet as a dessert wine, the second brings out the tannin of the skins, and that earthiness I could never quite explain stays on your tongue long after you swallow. It didn't bother me; if anything I enjoyed that it tastes of the fruit it's made from. It isn't wine, and Armenians know that better than any European official - it's just that nobody is taking the word off their shelf.
