Autumnal Elegance at Annadel Estate Winery

Lauren Megerdichian
January 24, 2023
Categories: Real Weddings, Romantic, The Blog

Fall in love with this autumnal affair at the Annadel Estate Winery. It’s no secret the Fall season and weddings make a perfect pairing! For this adoring couple’s special day, Quintana Events has given us a Fall wedding at its finest with a color palette that pops – sweet blush and soft cream mixed with rich burgundy and deep yet dusty blue! This distinctive blend of hues translates beautifully to the vibrant bridal bouquet and lush ceremony arch by Aimee Lomeli Designs that exude contemporary elegance with a romantic feel. Take in the crisp style at the full gallery, captured by SMP-favorite, The Ganeys!

From the Bride… Brian and I grew up within 15 minutes of one another in the Seattle area, but it wasn’t until after college when Brian was living in San Francisco that we met in 2015. At the wedding of his good friend from childhood and one of my dearest friends from college, I teased him for not dancing when everyone else was on the dance floor (he’s still not big on dancing). We both felt an instant connection, but at 24 and just starting my career, a 1.5 hour flight to San Francisco felt like an insurmountable distance for a relationship and he was therefore deemed “geographically undesirable.” We met again on a ski trip in Jackson Hole with those same friends in 2017, a trip I was convinced to join having never been on skis in my life. Brian texted my old phone number offering to pick me up from the airport which I just happened to turn on for the first time in a year, and from airport pickup onward we spent the trip getting to know each other over apres ski and movie nights with friends. He even joined in on a country swing dancing lesson despite his aforementioned dislike of dancing. On the last day there, Brian skipped a day on the slopes to go snowshoeing with me; he forgot the snowshoes, but we spent the afternoon laughing and tromping through the snow and decided we would give long distance a go, starting a regular cadence of flights up and down the west coast to see each other.

After long distance adventures and a year and a half creating memories together in San Francisco when the distance became too much, Brian proposed on the Sonoma Coast in early March 2020. It was just the two of us quietly on the beach, which felt like the perfect special moment for us. We spent the rest of the weekend calling friends and family to celebrate, wine tasting, and eating a lot of homemade s’mores at the hotel we stayed at for the weekend. And… then everything shut down. Like everyone, we thought it would be a couple of weeks of enjoying being engaged, and then we would get going with wedding planning; we all know the rest of the story. After a lot of discussion around how to move forward (Do we get married legally and have the wedding we envisioned on our first anniversary? Do we move forward with planning something and amend as we need to depending on the situation at the time?) we decided to enjoy that stage of our relationship and hold off on planning until we could plan the celebration we had envisioned with all the people we care about there to celebrate with us.

Having put planning on hold for so long waiting for everything to return to “normal,” we struggled a little bit with kickstarting our planning process. Did we want to start the rest of our lives together closer to our childhood homes, celebrating the backdrop of our formative years through 18 and making it easier for friends and family in the area to join the celebration? Or did we want to bring everyone to the Bay Area where we have chosen to create our life together and encourage them to enjoy a weekend in some of our favorite places? The answer to that question came incredibly easily after we found Annadel. After an afternoon spent wandering the property with Dan, Bubs the goldendoodle, and a bottle of their bubbly, we fell in love with how we felt there. The mix of the rustic touches of the barn and stone ruins with the natural beauty of the vineyards, oak trees, and giant magnolia over the lawn instantly felt like it fit with us. We called our families and told them we had found the perfect venue for us while we were still sitting in the driveway.

The team that came together to bring all the pieces to life is unparalleled, in my very biased opinion! Brian and I are not particularly artistic people, working in finance and biotech; we definitely know what we like and could point to very specific components we wanted included, but when faced with how to pull all these individual pieces together into a cohesive event we were left a little starry-eyed and overwhelmed by the sheer number of decisions to make. My biggest piece of advice to fellow brides is to trust the people you’ve surrounded yourself with when those feelings set in. Brian never would have chosen the flower that made the centerpiece of his boutonniere on his own, but after our mock up with Aimee he packed it back to Seattle to show his dad because he was so enamored with it; similarly I knew the colors we loved and that I wanted dahlias in my bouquet, but I teared up when seeing the florals because I didn’t know they could come together like that. When Alex suggested a black salad plate on our rental visit I maybe looked at him like he had grown a second head, but the minute it was on the table it tied the settings together perfectly with the mix of soft blushes and moody burgundys that made up our florals. My favorite design element of the day was the decision to have guests walk through our floral arch from the ceremony to cocktail hour and dinner; it enabled us send our guests through a portal into another dimension of the venue they hadn’t seen yet which contrasted with the setting for the ceremony and set a new tone for the cocktail hour and dinner portion of the day.

Reflecting on the day, it feels impossible to pick one element or memory that stands above the rest. We weren’t crazy about sharing personal vows in front of 100 people, but I love how we customized them to speak to a continuation of the commitments we had already made to each other through our relationship, and they rang even truer that day, after a tough personal loss two weeks prior, than they did when we sat down to edit them. As difficult as it was, the decision we made to wait until we could gather all our loved ones together to celebrate was the perfect one for us, and dancing and singing with everyone under the sky that night will be something I remember forever. One moment that maybe became my favorite is one that surprises me, as at one point we were thinking about not doing it. Our first look became a beautiful moment for Brian and I to reflect on everything that got us to this point in our lives together as well as marvel at how lucky we are to be surrounded by such loving people in such a beautiful location. It also reaffirmed for us yet again that we are really each other’s person, as we were both shaking like leaves before, but were perfectly fine in that moment. It’s no coincidence that the photos that capture those moments are some of our favorites.