I’ve always been a wine lover. Actually, I think I love the vineyards more. It is the love of vineyards and nature. I’ve always had an interest, and appreciated quality wine. So the research with wine is never ending. It is a fantastic way of life.

So at a point in my life, I said, why not try to make a winery and vineyard? Actually, the initial plan was to have one in Italy, but then it happened that Armenia got its independence. For the first time, I visited Armenia in 1998. And from then on, coming and going to Armenia, studying a little bit more about my country’s history and varieties and the traditional aging method, I decided to not make another Chianti in Tuscany and come here to do something from scratch that nobody had ever done before in modern Armenia.

It was about the beginning of 2000. And because our terroir has never seen the phylloxera, the progress here in Armenia, it’s a little bit slow, at least for me. When I decided to work with native varieties, they didn’t have any credibility in Armenia.

As there was no phylloxera here, no phylloxera meant no nurseries. So for 10 years I’ve done all the experiments to create a selection of vines all my own, and I found the grape Areni and I called it ‘Areni Noir.’ And this has taken all these many years because there was no precedent, nobody to follow. It has been a fantastic journey. In the 7th or 8th year it was difficult. It has been a fantastic journey, though it was difficult.

From the first moment, I wanted to make a high quality Armenian wine, promote it around the world and use a traditional aging method. It is nice work, but when you haven’t produced anything and year after year passes, you don’t know if the vision you have is going to be realized.

So one or two years before arriving at my first wine, they were very difficult years. But I was born lucky, even with wine, I have a lot of luck with me, after years of hard work. So from the first moment when my wine was out I have always had journalists like you and Masters of Wine helping to spread the word about my wine, helping it to keep going up.