The Napa Valley of Central Asia?

ALMATY, Kazakhstan - Yerkebulan Batyrbay never imagined he’d be working in viticulture as a young Kazakh from the town of Shymkent.

“I never thought that I was going to work in the wine sphere," he said. "They really just started, you know, rediscovering it here.”

Batyrbay and the genial staff at Arba Wine, a trendy wine shop with a warm red brick interior located a block’s walk away from Almaty’s bustling Arbat Street, kindly greeted me and two of my professors on a quiet Monday afternoon.

“Drink from left to right starting with the whites,” our host explained, gesturing toward the half dozen pours of wine lined before us.

Two of the grapes –Rkatsiteli and Saperavi– were Georgian varieties popular in the former USSR, while the other four –Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc– were European imports.

I thought the Riesling tasted the best, leaving a fruity sort of acidic aftertaste that stood out from the rest. The final wine, the Saperavi, greets you with a bold oaky taste but has a smooth finish.

My professor, Steve (a more experienced oenophile than I) described it as the biggest and boldest of the bunch, a pleasant surprise in a place miles from California’s wine country.

The grapes were all grown locally in the Assa Valley, in vineyards located at the foot of the snow-crested Tian Shan mountains, which provide an optimal terroir for winemaking.

Batyrbay told me the deep cold winter conditions prevent many of the diseases and parasites that have shown up in European vines from spreading here.

“Something like eighty percent of the vineyards in Europe were destroyed by phylloxera in the 18th and 19th centuries,” Batyrbay explained. “We don’t have phylloxera or other serious grape diseases here.”

To protect the plants from the frost, the Arba Wine staff laboriously fold and bury thousands of vines, covering them with a protective layer of soil. This unique solution was devised by the winery’s founder Zeynulla Kakimzhanov, a former finance minister and consultant to ex-President Nazarbayev.

When Zeynulla took over in 2006, Assa Valley had been practically abandoned for over 20 years. Mikhail Gorbachev’s dry law policies in the 1980s were meant to drive up prices to restrict sale and production of alcohol.

By the end of the dry law in 1988, two-thirds of Kazakhstan’s vineyards had shut down or been destroyed.

The Soviets had grown most of them here after the Second World War in the 1950s, Assa Valley was first opened as a kolkhoz (a Soviet collective farm) during this time.

However, the Soviet Union was not the ancient country’s first experience with viticulture.

“They used to trade with wine here on the Silk Road,’ said a passionate Batyrbay. He explained that evidence of wine consumption dating back thousands of years has been discovered in ancient nomadic burial sites called kurgans –though eventually winemaking declined as religion became more influential.

Getting the country to embrace finer wines has been challenging. Alcohol is haram (forbidden) in Islam, and Kazakhstan is a majority Muslim country. Those who are non-religious typically prefer beer or vodka, popular holdovers from the Soviet era.

However, in part due to Zeynulla and Arba Wines' efforts, wine has started to become more popular in the last 5-10 years, especially in the Almaty region of Southern Kazakhstan.

Arba Wine exports around the world to Germany, Japan, England, Italy and Russia.

“People are amazed, like the foreigners and tourists who come here to taste our wine”… Batyrbay remarked, “like 80-90% of the people, if you offer them the right wine, they’re amazed.”