Midyear Meeting 2026 – Malibu, CA

Schedule of Events
Malibu, California
October 9–11, 2026
All times are Pacific Time

Friday, October 9, 2026

6:30 PM–8:30 PM — Opening Night Reception

9:00 AM — Registration and Breakfast

Moderator: Paul Kalemkiarian, Host & President, Wine Talks and Wine Talks Productions

11:00 AM–12:30 PM — Building the Gold Standard: AMCA and the Promotion of Commercial Arbitration in Armenia and Beyond (1.5 hours of California CLE/CPD credit)

Moderator: Grant Hanessian, Hanessian ADR, Co-Chair, Armenia Programs Committee, Armenian Bar Association

Fireside Chat
The Hon. Sharon Kalemkiarian and Pepperdine’s Prof. Thomas J. Stipanowich Discuss ADR, Abraham Lincoln, and the Meaning of (a Lawyer’s) Life (1 hour of California CLE/CPD credit)

Moderator: Hon. Sharon L. Kalemkiarian, Judge, Superior Court of California, County of San Diego
Keynote Speaker: Professor Thomas J. Stipanowich, William H. Webster Chair in Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine Caruso School of Law

2:15 PM–3:15 PM — General Membership Meeting and Committee Reports

Sunday, October 11, 2026

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Speaker Bios

Aimee Keushguerian

Aimee Keushguerian represents a new generation of Armenian winemakers—international in outlook, deeply connected to Armenia’s ancient viticultural heritage, and committed to building a modern wine industry capable of earning global recognition.

Raised partly in Tuscany, Keushguerian grew up surrounded by vineyards, winemaking, and the international wine trade through her family’s involvement in wine in Italy. She later continued her education in the United States, studying economic development and social entrepreneurship—interests that would ultimately shape the way she viewed wine not simply as an agricultural product, but as a catalyst for rural development, cultural preservation, and economic opportunity. She further developed her professional wine education by earning an MBA in Wine & Spirits from the Burgundy School of Business in France, adding a global business and terroir-focused perspective to her practical experience.

Her professional connection to Armenia deepened through Keush, the sparkling wine project founded by her father, Vahe Keushguerian. What began as exposure to Armenia’s emerging wine sector became a calling. Keushguerian immersed herself in production and helped advance Keush as a pioneering traditional-method sparkling wine producer, working with indigenous grapes grown in Armenia’s extraordinary high-elevation vineyards. She also became closely involved with WineWorks, the winery incubator and consulting operation that has helped Armenian producers improve quality, develop brands, and reach international markets.

In 2017, Keushguerian founded Zulal Wines, creating a distinctly personal expression of Armenia. Beyond better-known indigenous varieties such as Areni and Voskehat, she began searching villages and vineyards for rare and nearly forgotten grapes, experimenting with varieties including Chilar, Tozot, Garan Dmak, and Karmir Kot. Her work has helped preserve Armenia’s remarkable viticultural diversity while demonstrating that these ancient varieties have a place in contemporary fine wine.

Keushguerian has also become an important voice in the conversation surrounding the future of Armenian wine. Her appearance on CivilNet’s The Back Label offered viewers more than a winemaker’s story. She contributed the perspective of someone who understands Armenia from both inside and outside its borders—addressing the opportunities, challenges, identity, and responsibility that come with rebuilding a wine culture of extraordinary antiquity for a modern international audience.

Through winemaking, experimentation, entrepreneurship, and thoughtful public dialogue, Aimee Keushguerian is helping move the Armenian wine story beyond its celebrated 6,000-year history. Her contribution is increasingly about what comes next: preserving indigenous grapes, raising standards, strengthening communities, and establishing Armenia as a serious and distinctive voice on the world wine stage.

Vahe Yacoubian

Vahe Yacoubian occupies a distinctive place in the modern Armenian wine story: an attorney and international businessman who recognized Armenia’s viticultural potential well before the country’s wines began attracting serious attention from the global wine community. Together with his brother Viken Yacoubian, he helped turn a personal connection to Armenia and a lifelong appreciation of wine into Yacoubian-Hobbs, one of the projects that helped establish the credibility of Armenia’s contemporary fine-wine movement.

Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, Yacoubian grew up with wine as part of family and cultural life. Visits to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley and his father’s appreciation for European wine helped shape an understanding of wine as something inseparable from food, place, history, and identity. After settling in Southern California, Yacoubian pursued law, earning his B.A., cum laude, from UCLA in 1981 and his J.D. from UCLA School of Law in 1984. His legal career developed around sophisticated international matters, including commercial transactions and arbitration, government relations, telecommunications, aviation, and energy, with particular knowledge of the Middle East and former Soviet states. That international experience would later prove highly relevant to navigating the complexities of building a wine venture in Armenia.

The defining moment came through an unlikely friendship with acclaimed California winemaker Paul Hobbs. After the Yacoubian brothers connected with Hobbs in the early 2000s, they encouraged him to look seriously at Armenia—a country whose ancient wine history was known, but whose modern fine-wine potential remained largely unexplored internationally. In 2005, Hobbs traveled through Armenia with the Yacoubians, visiting six of the country’s ten provinces and examining vineyards, indigenous varieties, soils, elevations, and growing conditions. The experience convinced them that Armenia possessed something extraordinary. Their partnership was formally established in 2008.

Their decision was remarkably early. This was before the discovery of the Areni-1 winemaking complex brought worldwide attention to Armenia’s 6,000-year winemaking heritage and before Armenian wine began appearing regularly in international restaurants, competitions, and wine publications. By bringing a winemaker of Hobbs’ international stature into Armenia, the Yacoubians provided something equally important: outside validation of Armenia’s terroir and indigenous grapes.

Today, Yacoubian-Hobbs focuses particularly on the high-elevation vineyards of Vayots Dzor, producing wines from indigenous varieties such as Areni and Voskehat. Their vineyards lie near the Areni-1 archaeological site, symbolically connecting one of the world’s oldest winemaking cultures with contemporary fine wine.

Vahe Yacoubian’s contribution to Armenian wine therefore extends beyond a single brand. His foresight helped introduce Armenia to one of the world’s respected international winemakers at a critical moment in the industry’s rebirth. By combining Armenian heritage, international perspective, legal and business experience, and a willingness to invest before Armenia’s wine renaissance was obvious, Yacoubian helped demonstrate that Armenia should be viewed not merely as the birthplace of wine, but as a serious wine-producing country with a future on the world stage.

Levon Golendukhin

Levon Golendukhin advises clients in all aspects of cross-border dispute resolution, with a focus on investment and commercial arbitration, transnational commercial litigation, and global asset recovery.

In addition to his advocacy work, Levon is a trusted advisor to multinational enterprises and sovereign State actors on cutting-edge issues of private international law. He serves as a founding member of the Board of Trustees of the Arbitration and Mediation Center of Armenia (AMCA).

Moderator Bios

Paul Kalemkiarian

Paul Kalemkiarian has spent more than four decades at the intersection of wine, commerce, culture, and storytelling. As the second-generation owner of The Original Wine of the Month Club, founded by his father in 1972, Kalemkiarian helped carry one of America’s pioneering direct-to-consumer wine businesses into a new era. He assumed ownership in 1989 and, over the course of his career, has sold more than 17 million bottles of wine directly to consumers.

But the number that perhaps best defines his experience is more personal: Kalemkiarian has tasted well over 100,000 wines. With those wines came something equally important—approximately 100,000 stories. Stories of families, vineyards, migration, perseverance, agriculture, commerce, and traditions passed from one generation to another. That accumulation of experience shaped his enduring philosophy that wine is never merely a beverage. It is an artifact of culture—a reflection of the people, geography, history, food, and circumstances that created it.

That philosophy ultimately led Kalemkiarian to create Wine Talks with Paul K. After decades of producers sitting across the tasting table presenting wines for consideration by the Wine of the Month Club, he realized that the most compelling part of many tastings was not simply what was in the glass. It was the person sitting across from him and the story of how the wine came to exist. He began extending those conversations and created Wine Talks so those stories could be shared with a broader audience.

Wine Talks has since developed into a respected platform for conversations with winemakers, growers, entrepreneurs, critics, marketers, and other figures shaping the international wine trade. It has also become a sought-after guest platform for industry professionals who want their stories told with depth, context, and authenticity. Rather than concentrating solely on tasting notes and scores, Kalemkiarian explores the decisions, risks, cultural influences, personalities, and life experiences behind the bottle.

That idea expanded further with The Back Label, his CivilNet television series focusing on the people and forces shaping contemporary wine culture. Beginning with Armenia, The Back Label reflects Kalemkiarian’s Armenian heritage while examining a country reclaiming one of the world’s oldest winemaking traditions through a distinctly modern lens.

Across his retail career and media work, Kalemkiarian has remained committed to one central idea: wine matters because people matter. A bottle can carry history across borders and generations, preserve traditions, create economic opportunity, and bring people to the same table.

After 100,000 wines and 100,000 stories, his fascination is therefore less about what wine tastes like than about why it exists—and what it can tell us about ourselves.

Grant Hanessian

Grant Hanessian is an independent arbitrator in New York, specializing in international, investor-state and complex commercial disputes, and co-chair of the Armenian Bar Association’s Program Committee. He teaches international commercial and investment arbitration at Fordham University Law School in New York and Yerevan State University in Armenia. Prior to June 2020, he practiced for 33 years at Baker McKenzie in New York, where he served as global co-head of the firm’s International Arbitration Practice.

Since 2023, Mr. Hanessian has served as the first President of the Arbitration Council of the Arbitration and Mediation Center of Armenia; he has been U.S. member of the ICC International Court of Arbitration in Paris, the AAA-ICDR’s International Advisory and Publication Committees, Vice President of the LCIA’s’ North American Users’ Council and was a founding board member of the New York International Arbitration Center. Mr. Hanessian has written widely on international dispute resolution topics and was the editor of ICDR Awards and Commentaries Vols. I and II, and co-editor of The Leading Arbitrators’ Guide to International Arbitration (4th ed), International Arbitration Checklists (3rd ed.), Gulf War Claims Reporter and Baker & McKenzie’s International Arbitration Yearbook (2009-2019).

Hon. Sharon L. Kalemkiarian

Judge Sharon L. Kalemkiarian serves in the Family Court Division of the San Diego Superior Court.  She was a certified family law specialist and partner at Ashworth, Blanchet, Christenson & Kalemkiarian for 14 years.  At the University of San Diego School of Law  she has taught child advocacy, community property, and family law.  

She is the recipient of the California Women Lawyers Fay Stender award, for outstanding service on behalf of underserved women and children,  and was named legal professional of the year by the San Diego County Bar Association in 1997.  She served on the California Judicial Council’s Family and Juvenile Law Advisory Committee from 2000 to 2009.  She is proud to serve as a member of the Armenian Bar Association Board of Directors.

 In 2022 Judge Kalemkiarian was honored by the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, Southern California Chapter, as the Judicial Officer of the Year.  In 2024 she was awarded by her peers an annual award for excellence in judicial teaching in the area of Family Law.  In 2025 she was honored as an outstanding alumni of the USD School of law.

Judge Kalemkiarian graduated from Princeton University in 1979, magna cum laude, and from the USD School of Law 1989, magna cum laude.  She is married to Dr. Rey Galindo, and has three children: Sam, Kay and Rebecca.