Explore Neviana Zhgaba's journey in the Wine Industry

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure meeting you.

The first moment I heard about it, I downloaded the app and walked through all of the stories. I felt connected to your other guests and felt like their stories needed to be heard and especially their impact on other people’s lives needed to be felt.

So I grew up in Korca, Albania and along with my sister and my mom and dad. I was born in 1990, just the year communism fell in Albania and I remember my parents had nothing. They practically started their life from scratch. For the first few years until I was in the first grade, I remember there was a civil war in Albania. So, there was another kind of stop to progress. That was the first time that I felt like the country that I was born in was not normal, even though I now know that my parents had it much worse. But I didn’t know that back then. Since I was very young, my mother especially really pushed me to study hard and become the best version of myself. And I was pretty talented, especially in math. From the age of 10 to 14, 15, I used to go to national math competitions. I also studied a lot of languages: French, Italian, English during that period of time as well. As all Albanians, I always learn other languages from watching TV, so I got to learn Spanish and Portuguese. So now I can understand all those people talking back to me. That’s one more reason that I love traveling to those countries because it feels familiar.

No, it was actually much different. So during the Civil War era, my family was supposed to go to Canada and then the application process got interrupted because of what happened there in Albania. So, I went to an English speaking high school called Preca College. It was one of the top two or three high schools in the country. I remember, at that time, I didn’t know where I was going, where that next step would lead me afterwards. There was a competition to get into this high school and I felt like other people would be better than me. Then I found out that I had won the first prize to get into the school. Since then, every year we would have “the prize day” which was given to the best student in the whole class and in every subject.

I don’t really see it as competition. It’s mostly a competition against myself. To me, the other students were my good friends and I knew them for a long time. I truly admired the people around me and I tried to be humble. That’s why whenever I win something or am recognized for something, I feel a bit taken aback because I value other people a lot.

In high school I was really good at almost everything and was top of the class. Then, before I went to college, when I was 17, I met my current husband. I was introduced to him at the time so that’s the first time I met him. That kind of swayed me into where I was going to go to college afterwards. I actually did very well in Italian and French as well. So, I was either going to go to Paris or Rome or maybe London. I hadn’t thought about America, it seemed so far. Then I met him. He was going to college in the US. We fell in love and I followed him.

So we were living together when I moved here, it was kind of like going blind towards another life, because in a way, I was prepared for how to get into a college in Europe but I had no idea how to get one in the U.S. They had different tests so I studied for the S.A.T. out of like a computer office for barely six weeks and then got really high S.A.T. grades, got a scholarship and I ended up coming here.

as a child, you don’t understand the struggles of your parents. You want their attention, their time. It’s hard growing up in an entrepreneurial home. Now I can fully understand and appreciate the sacrifices that my parents made to go from, as I mentioned before, nothing to having a really successful business before they came here. I grew up seeing what hard work was, what sacrifice was, how to get from one point A to point B and and grow as a family with a lot of hard work basically and a lot of innovation. My mom especially was really the head of the business. My father worked alongside her but she had the vision of starting the business and how to innovate and bring new products in and so on. So I grew up with a very strong woman entrepreneur in the family.

Yes, I used to go there almost every day because she was adamant about checking on my homework. So at the time they had three different businesses. I remember when I was little, the first one was the restaurant. My mom would be cooking everything. So I was in the kitchen back there and I used to watch her cook. But to be a professional in the restaurant was different from cooking at home. It’s not that romantic, It’s really hard work. So I used to do my homework in the back of the kitchen while Mom was cooking for the guests. When they had a furniture business there was a lot of hard work because they had to figure out everything. It is hard switching from one business to another because you have to figure out everything from scratch and I saw them try to figure out how to put complicated furniture together, how to transport them especially with the roads in Albania being the way they were at the time.

So, I tend to adapt pretty quickly to new situations. So, I just accepted reality. It was what it was. I had to make my parents proud, basically, because they sacrificed so many years just for me to come and succeed in America which was everybody’s dream in Albania. So I just focused on my studies and finished school in three years. I did a lot of internships from year one, actually. I entered my second year at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, where I helped a lot of other Yale entrepreneurs building their apps.

So after I finished college, within three years, I applied for my third internship at General Electric. At the time, they were headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut. Sometimes a lot of things are luck and chance, being in the right place at the right time. Many other people are great, I tend to value other people a lot as well. They can be just as good as you but you have to be good at the right time when the opportunities are presented to you. So, a few days before Thanksgiving break, wWe had a lot of study and essays to wrap up and this email comes through asking for interns for General Electric. Now, GE at the time was one of the best companies in the world, and their leadership program that I was wanting to apply for was very, very selective. It was like the Harvard of leadership programs. I looked at it and thought that they were never going to choose me but I had a really strong gut feeling, I cannot even explain it. There were many times in my life that I felt that strong gut feeling and I trusted it. I had an essay of 30 pages to finish that night but decided to leave that, even if I ended up getting a lower grade. I really wanted to do that because if I didn’t, I was going to regret it for the rest of my life. I said it to myself and I looked at my husband who was in the same room. He looked back at me and told me to go for it because if I ended up regretting it, he was going to hear about it for a long time. They were asking me to write down a few essays for them as well. So I wrote them up within 4 hours. I submitted my application at midnight, right before it was due. That was done so I got back to my other essay. A few days later I heard from them and they were going to set me up for another interview. I couldn’t believe it. The other interview was very informal. It lasted literally 7 minutes and they told me I was in. I was the only one of the 20 interns who they were hiring for the whole corporate business.

At the time, I didn’t overthink it, I just did it. I decided that I was going to do it and was going to say exactly what I was thinking about the subject, without ruffling it up or anything, I was just going to be me. That’s what they liked, my originality in what I wrote. I wrote exactly about my perspective on the different questions that they were asking me. So I was completely me.

That was kind of not the end of it, because when I had the internship, I still had a green card. I came here with a student visa, I met my husband, but I still came with a student visa, and I was about to get the green card three or four years later and they trusted me and said they would wait for me to get the green card before finalizing the hiring process. They had so many other options but decided to support me. I don’t know, it’s just luck sometimes. So, I got into this leadership program internship. It was a technical information technology leadership program as they called it but the next step changed my life. Then I had to get hired because I had finished college and I had to wrap it up and find a real job. The program that they wanted me to get in afterwards was a rotational leadership program, which was not just an internship. I couldn’t do it because I was married at the time and my sister and grandma had come over and they were staying with me. I couldn’t just leave them to go to other states in the U.S. as that was what the program included. I had responsibilities and I told them that I couldn’t make it. That program was big, CEOs and CIOs of companies came out of that program and I said no.

You’ve got to choose between family and something else that is important, but nothing is more important than family. Then I went straight up and was honest about my situation. I asked if there was a possibility that, if I got into that program, my rotations could be in Connecticut and they said no. I told them that this was probably not going to work out. I remember I had never been as heartbroken as I was when I didn’t get into the program. But then what comes next is a story of resilience and of knowing your worth. I didn’t do much better than people who were in the program before because I applied for a very entry level position at the same company, but in a different business sector. But those positions are very rare because usually, they don’t hire college students right after graduating, you need to get through a program that they will train you on. I got the chance again to interview for this very entry level position. My first manager was a Dutch guy, and when he heard that he could value my journey, when he saw that I had been to this country on my own studying, doing so well, knowing all these languages, he was impressed and he gave me a chance.

At the beginning, because I came from Albania I was a little more humble. It’s not that I’m not humble now, but I didn’t really voice my ideas as much before. I used to think that if you didn’t speak up that much, or if you just did your work, you would be recognized and that’s not the case. I saw many other interns that had corporate experience in other industries before, because I used to intern with entrepreneurs before and that’s a whole different dynamic compared to the corporate offices. They would just talk about things to me but they weren’t not really doing what they were really saying. So I wondered why they were pumping it up and making it such a huge accomplishment. But now I know that’s actually promoting yourself and your ideas and branding yourself. But when you’re in a corporate environment, you don’t think that you have to create a brand. However, even there, everybody has to brand themselves and then I learned that. I’m good at adapting and turning the page and doing things really quickly. So then I started communicating more, communicating about my job in newsletters or getting people together, helping out, my leadership teams’ social media or get togethers with and so on, trying to connect the dots between the different teams and that’s when I got valued by high corporate executives that kind of gave me my next job and my next job and my next job until like my last role at the GE before the companies split, it was transitioning the whole company from one auditing firm to another. So it was a big responsibility.

Well, it wasn’t kind of that organic. So actually, one year after I finished college, I got pregnant with my first son and I was 23 when I gave birth to my first son. Then after he turned one, I got pregnant with my second and when I gave birth to my second when I was 25. We were looking for a bigger space to build our house. We used to live in a small condo which was our first home that we bought in America. My husband grew up in the countryside of Albania, so he wanted to build a house on a small farm. I grew up in the city so I did not know what small meant in terms of farm sizes. I was supportive of him and he found this property which was 40 acres now which I thought was small. I may be good at math, but at the time I wasn’t good at converting acres and that’s a lot. We came and checked out the property in the beginning. We went through an entrance that would lead you through the forest and really small fields. I felt that was manageable. Then, we went through one of the big entrances there and I saw this huge field but the view was amazing. The first step to owning a vineyard is to have the land, but you have to find the land that has beautiful views so people can be attracted to come not just for the wine, but what you offer in terms of hospitality and the nature and it’s really enticing for people to come. Most importantly, we wanted a place for our home and then when we came and checked it out, the view was spectacular. The sunset feels as if you’re holding it in your hand basically every day and we were dumbstruck. We thought it was amazing and we needed to do something with it but we were both immigrants who had just finished school. We had no money, I had just started working at the time and we were asking ourselves how we were going to do this. So either we were going to buy the land and build something to help us grow our finances later, or we were going to build our house and that would be it. We didn’t have too many choices and we chose the path of sacrifice. So, we started building, planting 40 acres of vineyards, a few acres at a time, just me and him.

My husband’s. So, before we had kids and before we bought the land we used to go to all Connecticut State parks, hiking and all the vineyards in Connecticut. We loved going out to vineyards, so it was something that we loved to do. But a lot of people love to be there. being there versus managing it is a completely different world.

Well, the first obstacle we encountered was that three days before buying the land, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My parents both had their own business in Albania and they came here in the US right after I had my first son, which was like three or four months before we found the property. They both said they were going to sell our businesses there.They wanted to come and be with family and help us out to start this thing. But nobody ever thought that it would be this big. We always thought we would just start a small vineyard and maybe some people would come. So basically at that time, I had a baby, a toddler, a new job (for my corporate job) , a property that was to be converted into a vineyard and my father, who I had to take care of with my sister and my mom. So, it was a lot. That was the first obstacle. Then we had to figure out who was going to do all the work and that ended up being my husband for most of it and I helped. But I couldn’t help as much as I had my father, my kids, there was a lot going on. Luckily, my mom helped me. So basically we started planting vines. We kind of did some research on the type of vines that do well in this land, my husband had to buy all the equipment and learn how to run equipment and stuff like that. I remember we had to actually prove to the town that we’re not getting this 40 acre piece of land just for the sake of not paying residential taxes because this is still farming. They asked us to clean the whole property. So on top of all of that, we also had to clean the property, 40 acres, just me and him. So every afternoon, every weekend we would be here. I remember it was this kind of weather, in December. It was me and him just cutting trees, cleaning the property, and then reusing the logs from the trees. We also removed the barks or whatever you call them and then painted them. So they were durable against rain or snow.

Every week. When you are out in the cold and it’s just you and him, it gets tough. It’s different when you have other people believing in you and to be surrounded with other people that have done the same thing before. This was something completely unknown for us. No one that we knew had done it, especially at our age. I was 25 years old. I was helping my husband plant vines and planting the vines was a week worth of non stop digging holes and planting the vines and covering them up. It was like Tough Mudder in the power of, I don’t know, 100. Our neighbor bought his house about the same time when we started the vineyard, and he used to drink coffee from his balcony and watch us plant the vines. Years later, he tells other people the story of how he watched both of us plant everything from the start.

So the key here is if we were starting a business that we didn’t have any reference on, we didn’t know what the struggles would be, how the success would come. We were going blind into this, but we were committed to doing it. My father backed up our dream while he was at the end of his life and that kind of gave us more fuel to continue and not give up because this was a very physical activity during the first four years. For four years it was all about planting, maintaining the vines, being here every afternoon, every weekend, having no life whatsoever. I would rarely even see my kids, even though I had just given birth to my second son. I would leave him with my mom and come and help my husband do things that I was completely not prepared, trained or comfortable with. I just had to do them. Many times, I would say to my husband that he was crazy and we couldn’t do this and other days he would tell me the same thing. So, we would just kind of support each other when one was feeling low and vice versa. The only thing that kept us going was our determination to not give up. We had to see it through, no matter how hard it was, no matter how many years it took. I remember like within the year that we bought it, my father passed away. Two hours before he passed away, I promised him that we would make it happen. That’s like a force that keeps you going.

Well, the first struggle is that you have to invest a lot the first four or five years without any returns and that’s a lot to ask, especially for young entrepreneurs that have no financial backup. You have to buy the property, which is a big expense. You have to maintain the property, which is another big expense. You have to plant the vines, which is actually the easy part. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could lose the whole thing and you have to reverse or they can kind of outgrow or not grow as much and you get a lot of crop in the end. So yeah, we firstly had to maintain the vines. The more we planted, the more maintenance they needed. We had ten acres. Imagine two people taking care of ten acres of vines while having no money to get any other employees to help us out. It was just me and my husband. We’re still married by the way. So, you have to buy the property, plant and maintain the vines. Then as you grow, you have to maintain even more. Then you have to think about the time for me to prepare because in three years at least, you got to make wine. To make wine you need to have a building, you need to have the infrastructure, you need to build the road. You have to get the electricity and the water. If you have a house and need to do these things you might not think it’s a big deal. Well, it’s a big deal in a 40 acre property that has none of this infrastructure, bringing all of these is extremely expensive and there’s no return. You have to invest and invest and continue to invest. So, we had to find different ways to manage our budget. It was just a continuous struggle between me and my husband. I give him a lot of credit. He built the whole thing and he’s an engineer. He did a lot of the work, an extreme amount of work. We built a prefabricated steel building that is less expensive to put in together. it still kind of looks cool, especially with the way I designed it inside. But it wasn’t our cheapest option. We insulated half of the building where we put the equipment. Now, the equipment is another big expense. At the time we were actually working with some Albanian architects from Boston to put together the design of the winery. We got so excited because they built this amazing, beautiful winery. Then we asked them what it would cost and that dream ended there. We eventually ended up working with them when they did the design of the architecture of the house. So at least it is something we finished.

So eventually, you know, not all the grapes will make the fruit for all the supply that you need. So there’s also kind of an agreement when you are considered an independent-based farm winery. In every state they will wait seven years from the moment you open the business so that you can produce a certain percentage of your wines with the grapes that you’re growing in your vineyard. Then you can always supplement. The East Coast and Northern East coast don’t have all the same exact quality of the grapes were all the different wines. So from everything we serve here, some of them are 100% from grapes from this vineyard, Some of them are a blend of grapes from the vineyard here supplementing with the same grape varietal from like the Finger Lakes or California and then some are 100% with grapes from California, but the wine is made in our wine production facility.

Well, it starts with maintaining the grapes and that is a lot of work. For the grapes with supplements you need to make sure you find the right quality of suppliers that will provide the grapes suitable for the quality of wine that you want to make. Then of course, my husband had to learn about all the winemaking processes. We also have another winemaker now that helps us part time, not the whole time. In September, October and December we harvest the grapes and that depends on the variety of the grapes and also how the temperatures have been year by year. We have some help for harvesting and then we also do a volunteer harvest. So we we get the harvest, the white grapes get immediately crushed and then put into the steel barrel containers, steel tanks, and then the reds, they have to stay with the skins for at least a week or in order for the wine to get the red skin, not just the color, but also the qualities that the red skin produces. Then you leave it to ferment. You have to watch it every day, stir it. My husband does most of that, sharing the duties here. He has to do tasting as well. He has good taste. Everybody that comes to our vineyard is pleasantly surprised even if they’ve been to other vineyards in Connecticut. So, we make pretty good wines.

Well, it depends. For white wines it takes from six to nine months. For red wines, the very minimum is a year, 12 to 18 months or two years sometimes. It depends on what kind of wine you want. We’re still pretty young in that space because we just opened three years ago. So, our wines are really good, but they’re also new young wines.

Wow. That’s a memorable guest experience. So, we had all these struggles to build the winery and make a building and buy some equipment with that crazy limited budget that we had and by the time that we were supposed to open, it was right at the end of the vineyard season, at the beginning of the winter season, so great timing. Then on top of that, we started right in the peak of the COVID pandemic. So when we opened, everybody had to wear masks and our capacity inside was barely 20 or 30 people that we could have indoors, imagine that. It was winter when we opened so it was raining and snowing the whole weekend. Luckily, we had really good support from the local community who were very supportive. The way I did that was when I kind of started sharing our personal story on the Facebook group of our local town and other neighboring towns. So, people were anticipating this new good thing coming out in the middle of the pandemic. So it kind of helped us in a way, because it spurred the interest of a lot of people. However, I was not ready to kind of welcome all that interest in a way because I didn’t know how to as I had never run a hospitality business. We had the vineyard, the winemaking, and the hospitality side of the business which are three different things. I remember, the first weekend it rained and snowed while the second week, it turned like 70 degrees. We barely had staff and also equipment to charge the credit cards. It’s very uncomfortable to be in the situation because, when you don’t anticipate being sought after, you don’t have the resources, you don’t have the equipment to support all the demand right away, especially during the pandemic. We thought no one was going to come in the winter but a lot of people came.

We were exhausted. We were just wondering, ‘How will we get through the next day, and the days after that?’

That’s the main reason why we decided to open it and have our home next to. I love hosting people and it makes me happy when they come and experience a new thing and a quality product and a unique experience and share it with their friends and family and they come over and over and you become part of the community’s lives, basically. It’s a very good feeling to have. The way we kind of grew the business was a lot by community support. We started marketing in local Facebook groups a lot because everybody was online during that time, nobody was listening to radio, etc. Then we partnered with a lot of women owned businesses because during the COVID pandemic, they were the hardest hit. They couldn’t find spaces to run their businesses, they had the kids to take care of and their businesses suffered as well. We had the space and we did all sorts of activities and they spread the word on their sides so they benefited too. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. Since then, in three years, we’ve partnered with over 80 women owned businesses on different events.

You have to be genuine when it comes to how you want to partner with another business owner. You have something of value to give and they have something of value and you have to respect each other and you have to give them your time to understand what they want to do, what kind of event they want to do, how they want to organize it. That takes time, from your side. Some events may be very successful, some not as much but I kind of treat them all the same. I promote them the same way and so do they. That has not changed in the past three years. You also have to kind of innovate and create new activities and new ideas and I rarely say no to new ideas unless, you know, it’s something that you have to abide by like health department regulations, zoning regulations and department regulations. When we wanted to open the vineyard, we had to have hearings with our neighbors and they had to say ‘yes’ and agree to it, because you can’t impose on a community like that, especially with such a big and different kind of a business.

The first thing was that I felt that I had to please everybody. That’s what you do, when you’re in this business, you want to welcome and please everybody and you don’t expect to hear negative comments or things that maybe are a little unrealistic or very unrealistic sometimes. You have trained your staff and you have hired the best, the kindest people to help other people and other guests who come in the winery. The first year was really rough because I had to learn that you can’t please everybody. When you say it like that, it feels like you’re not trying but the thing is, you’re trying very hard to offer a great service and really good quality products. Along the way, you learn that a lot of people or probably like 5% of the guests that come here, may have various comments and various experiences that may not really relate to our services. Maybe they might have had a fight with their partner at home and then they come and they might be very rude to the staff sometimes or they can sometimes over drink. That’s an issue too and the way that you need to talk to a person that is in that state is very different. Luckily, most of our guests are really nice but sometimes with these outliers, you have to be really strong and believe in yourself and in your team and not guilt yourself. In some ways I would feel very guilty. If a certain person was not happy but in those cases you should ask yourself: Did you do your best yesterday? Did your staff do your best yet? Did they follow up with that person and try to either explain or apologize or do something different? Yes? Then that’s it. There’s nothing more you can do.

That’s actually powerful. They can have a negative effect and influence in your business and it’s reality sometimes. When we initially got faced with very few of those scenarios, we relied on our customer base that loved us and supported us to actually leave really good reviews and spread the word. So, you rely on the community to support you. When you start a business and make sure you get your network of people that root for you.

So our business grew very rapidly. In the first year, I still had my corporate job, but in the first year I was working kind of full time at the winery and full time at my other job. Now it is a little different, but in the beginning I was there all the time working with the few employees that we had. Our first employees still work with us till this day. They are like family but they’re also your employees. As you grow and grow, now that there are 40 employees, I’m rarely in there doing the work. Basically, I mostly have to take care of them and I have to understand what they need and what their hours are and what their current situation at home is because if they’re not at their best, my business will not be at their best either. However, it’s a totally different dynamic now. I have to focus on managing the employees and they manage my business.

Well, the first thing you have to do is be compassionate. Sometimes it’s funny because my employees bring friends over and introduce me as their boss. I don’t like it when they use that word because I don’t consider myself their boss, we work together. You have to be really empathetic. A lot of it also is about communication. If you communicate that you want your business practices to be a certain way, you train your employees and agree that certain things should be a certain way. If they have suggestions, you create ways for them to bring up those ideas and suggestions to you or to the people in charge without fearing any repercussions or anything. So that’s why we have a very open type of environment. Everyone works really well together. If there’s any conflict between team members, it’s never good so we always try to resolve it quickly. Everybody works really well together because on busy days, it can be a very high paced environment and if you don’t like the other person, something is going to suffer. However, if you like the other person, you’re going to collaborate and things will go smoothly. But you have to be empathetic because most of the people that we hire are part time employees that have other jobs or go to college and then don’t have the same level of maturity or experiences. So, you just work it out as long as a certain level of service is provided. People have different personalities, so it’s important to understand where they fit best.

Yes, because my parents were entrepreneurs, my grandfathers as well. I come from a family of entrepreneurs and I have it in me. I was always great at starting things, even in my corporate background, they always gave me special projects, to start them from scratch, from ambiguous situations and that’s why I felt very comfortable in starting new things and figuring things out. That’s why the business grew so rapidly because, as my husband said before, it’s one thing to build the infrastructure and build the product, and then it’s another thing to grow the business and grow.

Partnerships. From the beginning, we partnered with the Small Business Development Center and they gave us three advisors that we are still partnering with now to give back and connect them to other small business owners in our area. We partner with so many women business owners, but not exclusively. Then through partnerships, the word spreads, you learn more about new ideas, how to do things better, you see how you know someone else in a different line of business is doing their approach to marketing on how they’re approaching financing and things like that.

So, I have a quote. I do photography of all the vineyards and I have printed photography posters in the vineyard and there’s a quote that says “Create a vision so clear that all your fears become irrelevant.” That was the story of the vineyard. Together with my husband we persevered. When one day I would give up, he would bring me up and if he had doubts another day, I would bring him up. I have that quote on a big photo that I took on the vineyard in the winter, when it was snowing. Everything was in white and you just had to see what it was going to become. There was a lot of fear, a lot of uncertainty, because we had no idea what this business was and we had no idea what we were going to get but our vision was clear, we wanted to have this vineyard, no matter how small or big it was going to become. We also had to do it because I gave my word to my father. Also, all the work that we did as a couple should not have been in vain.

The vineyard now has been the best vineyard in Connecticut for the past two years. It was one of the top 70 small businesses in the country by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The word has spread so much and we’re kind of at capacity. We’re trying to kind of spread or grow our corporate events in the area mostly in the days when we’re not open to the public. We want to host more corporate events from New York City, which is closer. So that’s one area and we’re trying to expand that with a new event venue. Another thing is to expand our carbon control program. From the beginning, when we opened the Vineyard, I really wanted to offset all our carbon emissions. So since I worked in analytics in my other job, I measured and kept the data for every measurement basically because I wanted to show and see how I am going to offset this. Now we have been certified for two years. The next step is trying to understand how we can reduce our carbon footprint even more and then help other small businesses figure that part out.