Armenia must strengthen protections for its brandy and agricultural products abroad, Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan said during a cabinet meeting. Emphasizing the need for vigilance over product quality, he noted that even a single low-quality shipment can negatively affect perceptions of all Armenian exports.
“We talk so much about brandy, and I believe that over 95% of it is high quality,” Grigoryan stated. “But I have seen brandy produced outside Armenia. That kind of product still affects the perception of our quality. We need a mechanism to monitor this. The same goes for agricultural products. I know of markets where non-Armenian goods are sold as Armenian, simply because our products have a good reputation,” he added, according to Pastinfo.
Economy Minister Gevorg Papoyan noted that Armenia exported brandy for years without proper quality testing, due to the lack of domestic laboratory capabilities. While some countries have conducted tests, others have not, fueling speculation that some Armenian brandy batches were not made from grape spirit.
Papoyan announced that in August 2025, Armenia will launch a laboratory for isotopic testing of brandy, enabling domestic quality control independent of foreign verification.
He also stated that the government plans to allocate 98 billion drams toward export promotion by 2030. A key barrier so far has been the absence of domestic laboratory certification, which has undermined the country’s international reputation.
For more than a month, Georgian customs halted trucks carrying Armenian brandy, subjecting them to lab tests, even though the goods were in transit to Russia and other destinations. Minister Papoyan said negotiations with Georgian counterparts led to a mutually acceptable solution for transit procedures.
In the first quarter of 2025, Armenian brandy production dropped by nearly 40%, totaling 3.249 million liters.
