I visualize time as a sort of goo you are unable to restrain or stop. Yet when I watch our wines get bottled, it’s the closest I will ever get to pausing time, or more accurately, capturing it. Or at the very least, capturing a season.
 
There is a strange relationship to time in the wine business. Farming makes you ever-present and slows time down. Yet the wines we release, in this case the 2017 vintage of the Rudd Oakville Estate Samantha’s Cabernet Sauvignon, is nearly three years old. 
 
There is a fluidity to the wine business that is wonderful and can also make one crazy. Some days, we are laser focused on short-term decisions: do we use our misters, do we do one more thinning pass, do we harvest tomorrow?
 
And yet making these “short-term” decisions, the results of which will not be fully realized for decades, are sometimes irreversible. The challenge it presents for me as a vintner is what I love about the business, and what makes me look at time in a different way than most people. I constantly feel as if I am between years — referring to past vintages, being laser focused on the current growing season, and making long-term decisions that will affect vintages ten years into the future.  It is dizzying. 
 
The culmination of this is why I love the tension of the fall release.  Leading up to the release we are centered on the 2020 harvest, making crucial time-sensitive decisions that will not be appreciated until you taste the wine in 2023, which is so unknown.  Yet when we are right about to pick the fruit of 2020, I need to sit down and reflect upon the 2017 vintage, and remember what the world, and life, was like then. 
 
I fantasize that wine, in a way, is how we are able to travel through time. I invite you to experience this moment in time with me and the 2017 vintage of my namesake wine.

All the best,

Samantha Rudd