RSVnapa 40th Harvest

Bringing It Home… Love, Loss and Pinot Noir!

by Rob Sinskey

RSVnapa will celebrate the fortieth harvest this year, and though my business card optimistically reads “Daydream Believer,” it has been an unlikely journey. During those forty vintages, wine and life happened. I made the Capa Vineyard home. I stubbed my toe on a few trial relationships before finding the one: a talented young San Francisco chef named Maria. We raised two beautiful children and sent them off to college. We watched our parents grow old and lost one of them.

Like life itself, each vintage has been shaped by the vagaries of a year, a visceral time stamp captured in a bottle. When a cork is popped, we are not only reminded of the physical weather patterns that imprinted the grapes with a unique upbringing: the rare “ideal” vintage, the wettest or driest winter, the hottest or coldest summer, the year of the earthquake or fires; but what happened in our lives: the loves and losses, the birth of a child, a marriage, a first home, a new career, or any first that benchmark our lives. When we open a vintage aligned with a touchstone moment, memories flood back as we share a beverage as complex and baffling as life.

This fortieth crush brings us home to the Capa Vineyard. It has been a serendipitous arc that started with a 15-acre Carneros vineyard, building a Stags Leap District winery, saying goodbye to the winery only to find a Carneros farm, the Wilding Farm, and merging it with the Capa Vineyard for 84 contiguous acres of rolling terrain with different exposures, soils and micro-climates—an inspiring palette of pigments for the next forty years of life.