Two brothers, French stills and a fortress site in Yerevan.

ARARAT is the brandy of the Yerevan Brandy Company, and the company dates its story to 1887. That year, it says, the wine writer Vasily Tairov, founder and editor of a winemaking newsletter, persuaded his brother Nerses Tairyan, a merchant of the first guild, to start making brandy in Yerevan, then part of the Russian Empire. English Wikipedia gives the same founding year and the same two brothers. The company says the brothers installed Charente-type alembics imported from France in a small stone building on the site of a former fortress, working to classical French methods.

The business did not stay with the Tairyans for long. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the company says, the distillery became part of Shustov & Sons, a Moscow drinks firm known across the Russian Empire. In 1900 two men arrived who mattered to the brandy’s later reputation: the distiller Kirill Silchenko and the engineer and blending master Mkrtich Musinyants. Musinyants created a blend the company calls the first vintage Armenian brandy, Fine Champagne Select, sold in Russian as Otborny; the company says it was praised by the jury of an exhibition in Bordeaux, and it marks 1902 as the year of that first recognition. A railway line to Yerevan, it adds, let the brandy reach far wider markets.

War and revolution followed. The company says that when the First World War began, the Russian Empire declared prohibition but the distillery and its vineyards kept working, and that Musinyants personally saved a collection of aged spirits during the upheaval. Armenia’s brandy factories were then nationalised, and in Soviet Armenia the plant became part of a single wine and brandy trust covering the whole industry, according to both the company and English Wikipedia.

Markar Sedrakyan and the Soviet blends.

The figure the company credits most for ARARAT’s style is Markar Sedrakyan, a graduate of the Yerevan Agricultural Institute who began work there in 1937. Over the following years, the company says, he created the vintage brandy Jubilee, then a blend named Armenia, a stronger brandy called Dvin after the country’s medieval capital, and one named Yerevan after the modern one. The company also says a 57-degree brandy was made for the polar expeditions of the period.

The distillery needed a bigger home. In the late 1940s, the company says, building began on a monumental new factory on a hill above the Hrazdan River, designed by the architect Hovhannes Markaryan; English Wikipedia, spelling the name Margaryan, says the building was completed in 1953. The complex is still the company’s base and houses the ARARAT Museum, whose tours pass through a working ageing cellar. English Wikipedia says the museum is a member of the International Council of Museums.

Most of the names on today’s shelves were set in the Soviet decades. The company dates Festive to 1957, Akhtamar and Nairi to 1967 and Ani to 1977, and says that artists of the day were commissioned to design the labels for these new brandies. The plain 3 Stars and 5 Stars became, in the company’s words, country-wide favourites as demand grew across the Soviet republics. The core range now runs from those two up through Ani, Akhtamar, Vaspurakan and Nairi, with Dvin as a reserve, and the company also keeps a vintage collection that includes Otborny, Armenia and Yerevan.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are Armenian brandy houses and Georgian, Lebanese and Israeli wineries: Ararat, Noy, Tbilvino, Teliani Valley, Château Musar, Ixsir and Golan Heights Winery. Brandy and wine brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A brandy or wine brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its brandy or wine is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its brandy or wine is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Soviet trust to Pernod Ricard.

After Armenia regained independence, the factory was sold to the French drinks group Pernod Ricard. PanArmenian, reporting for the Mediamax agency in September 2000, said the Yerevan Brandy Factory was bought by Pernod Ricard in June 1998, and that the company said the ARARAT trademark was bought together with it. The name was contested at the time: in 2000 the rival Great Valley company, which sold brandy as “Great Ararat,” disputed the French owner’s exclusive right to it, PanArmenian reported. The company now trades as the Yerevan Brandy Company, a Pernod Ricard subsidiary, and its brandy is made at its Yerevan distillery.

Where the brandy comes from is written into Armenian rules. English Wikipedia says a national standard introduced in 1999 requires Armenian brandy to be produced in Armenia from locally grown grapes, and the company says it pressed for that rule. The company lists its ingredients as grapes grown in Armenia, barrels of Caucasian oak and water from the Katnakhbyur spring. It says ARARAT is sold in more than 50 countries.

The look has been updated more than once. In 2010 the company introduced a new ARARAT logo with a phoenix spreading its wings behind the name, and in 2011 it revived Dvin, it says. Newer bottlings include the ultra-premium Erebuni series, a blend made with the singer Charles Aznavour, and fruit- and coffee-flavoured brandy drinks. In February 2025 the company launched ARARAT Bourbon Cask, an eight-year-old brandy for the Armenian market that it calls the first Armenian brandy aged in former bourbon barrels, PanArmenian reported. The brand shares its name with Mount Ararat, and it is a separate business from the older factory across the Hrazdan whose brandy is sold as NOY.

For a design guide, ARARAT shows how a brandy can carry a founding date, a stone factory and a phoenix mark through a century of changing owners. Compare Martell, the Cognac house in the same Pernod Ricard portfolio, and NOY, the other Yerevan brandy that claims Tairyan’s legacy. For this guide we use brandy amber, phoenix gold and label cream with a classical serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep ARARAT’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.