A note from Adam Kablanian
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a winery in the middle of summer.
The hard work of spring is done. The harvest is still weeks away. The vines are doing what vines do in July - growing slowly, almost imperceptibly, converting sunlight into something that will eventually matter.
I find myself thinking about that process a lot this month.
We are halfway through July. The Pinot Noir 2024 has been out in the world for some time now. It has been to Brussels. It has come home with a gold medal.
It has been opened at dinner tables I will never see, in homes I will never visit, by people who have no idea how difficult and risky a decision I made to grow Pinot Noir grapes in Proshyan Vineyard, Armenia.
It can. It does. The medal says so, and more importantly, the people who have opened a bottle say so.
I never planned to be a winemaker.
I spent thirty years in technology - building companies, funding startups, sitting in boardrooms where the most important thing was always what came next. Speed. Scale. The next quarter. The next round. The next exit.
The vineyard taught me a different relationship with time.
You cannot hurry a vine. You cannot A/B test a vintage. You cannot pivot when the weather turns. You make decisions to select a vineyard, and you are stuck with it for many years. A bad vineyard punishes you for the rest of your life, and a good vineyard rewards you amply for many years.
That kind of decisiveness - the willingness to act without knowing the outcome, to trust the land and the process and the people around you - is something I am still learning.
Every year, I think I have it. Every year, the vineyard finds a new way to remind me that I don't.
What the 2024 vintage means to me is harder to explain than what it tastes like.
It is the first Pinot Noir we ever made. Not just the first harvest - the first time we planted the variety, tended it through seasons we didn't fully understand, watched it struggle and recover, and finally produced something that a panel of judges, blind-tasting thousands of wines from around the world, decided was worth a gold medal.
That is not a small thing.
Not for Armenia. Not for the team at Proshyan, who wake up early and work in volcanic soil that resists everything you try to do to it.
Not for Jeff Ritchey, who flew from California because he believed this hillside had something to say, even before it had said anything.
And not for me.
If you have already opened a bottle, thank you.
I mean that in a way that is difficult to put into a blog post without sounding like marketing copy, which this is not meant to be.
If you haven't yet - we still have some left. Not many.
When they are gone, that's it until the next vintage, which will be different, because every vintage is different, because that is the point.
The link is below.
And if you just wanted to read about a winery in Armenia and a winemaker still figuring out what patience means, I hope this found you at the right moment.
