At the risk of sounding dramatic, I am painfully passionate about Rudd Estate. But, make no mistake, this is not a passion project. When we first came to the Napa Valley, there were some who didn’t consider us a serious winemaking family, that my Dad’s involvement in so many other businesses lessened his commitment to winemaking in their eyes. Growing up at the winery, in the vineyards, working alongside my dad, I can tell you wholeheartedly that the opposite is true.

I have written to you in the past about my Dad’s fear that I would lack personalized knowledge of the wine business, which came from the discomfort of his own realization that he lacked it in his youth. You have to start somewhere, right? And he started in the warehouse of his family business, Standard Beverage, when he was 13 years old. He knew how to accept inventory from shipping trucks, fix the forklift, send out shipments, and he understood the challenges the other warehouse workers faced. He learned the business from the bottom up. Those 12-hour days in the warehouse were invaluable to his business decisions as he grew Standard Beverage into the largest wine and spirits distributor in Kansas. He felt deep in his core that I could only make the winery a success with my own version of personal experience to pull from when the hard decisions needed to be made.

Since taking over the winery, I realize that there is beauty in the unknown. I think the unknown is the key piece that is often missing. Without the self-awareness to recognize potential blind spots, there is little room to improve and do better the next time. In this industry we can only control so much as Mother Nature is focused on the big picture, not on my small piece of land in Oakville. So, I suppose my own insecurities of needing validation around the credibility of being a winemaking family were really wrong. Things take time — especially in a craft like making wine. I now see that people who questioned our seriousness were possibly short-sighted.

Your ego shouldn't be bigger than your reality. I want to do this right and leave the land better for my children, where they can develop and pursue their own personalized knowledge to build upon what I pass to them. I’m incredibly proud of this wine as it was the first vintage I made decisions at the Estate without my Dad, so it’s a special wine to me in more ways than one. As the old saying goes “the proof is in the pudding,” and in our case, the bottle. You know what you like and love in wine, and I will never be able to convince you otherwise — that’s not what I’m called to do. All I can tell you is that the 2018 Rudd Oakville Estate Samantha’s Cabernet Sauvignon is all the proof I need that we are a winemaking family.

I hope you love this vintage as much as we do. We are very proud of this wine, and I can say I am smiling a lot more these days than when I first took over the winery. I was scared to death at the beginning. Not anymore. I live each day pulling from the experience I had growing up learning this business, while still living the edict that was behind my father’s desk for decades — “Continuous Improvement.”

All the best,

Samantha Rudd