Craft Matters…
100 years of life and 40 years of wine!
Two numbers: 40 and 100. As I write this, RSVnapa celebrates its 40th season, while my mother, Peggy Webber, marks her 100th year on this planet. Both milestones are achievements worth celebrating, and I assure you, many corks will be popped.
One hundred years is mind-boggling. My mother was born in 1925, into a world with no interstate highways, airlines just beginning to expand beyond mail and short passenger routes, the U.S. was headed toward the Great Depression, operators had to manually connect calls via switchboard, and indoor plumbing was still a rarity in many American homes.
The things she witnessed from 1925 to 2025 are astonishing: the rise of radio, movies, and television; World War II; the atomic age; the Korean War; the Vietnam War; conflicts in the Middle East; the assassinations of a President, activists, and candidates; and the first manned landing on the moon.
My mother was the daughter of a wildcat oilman who lost his fortune during the gas wars. She began working as a dancer in bars at just two years old to earn loose change for food. When she was sixteen, her father died, so she and her mother left Tucson on a train for Hollywood. She immediately landed work in radio, met the great Orson Welles, and went on to a distinguished career in dramatic radio, film, and television. She mastered voices and became known as the “scream queen” for her overdub work for Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (1967) and for starring in many other “B” horror movies. As a teenager, she voiced Ma Friday on Jack Webb’s Dragnet radio show, and she is the last surviving actor to have worked with both Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles.
At 100, she still believes she has unfinished business. She finds it difficult to comprehend how radio transitioned into the internet age—where amateurs can now build successful podcast careers—and that artificial intelligence may soon emulate voices once crafted only by skilled artisans. It’s a brave new world full of opportunity, but we all sense that something is lost when human spontaneity is stripped away from the creative process.
Although wine has existed for thousands of years, the industry has undergone dramatic changes over the past 40 years. When I started in this business, Napa Valley had only about 135 wineries; today, there are more than 550. The dominant grapes are now Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. In the 1980s, many more varieties were still planted throughout the valley, and fermentation often occurred in redwood and concrete vats instead of today’s temperature-controlled stainless steel fermenters. Small oak barrels were less common, and few wineries relied heavily on scientific methods or remedial techniques to refine wines. It was about place, craftsmanship, tradition, and a bit of luck. The land and the human element were the most influential factors in shaping a wine’s style. Often, the absence of strict scientific control and advanced fermentation technology meant that a wine’s character was dictated by its vineyard site rather than intervention. There was beauty in imperfection: most wines carried a distinct sense of place, with the environment leaving its imprint on the wine more than the winemaker did.
Technology has been both a blessing and a curse for the wine world. Today we can “fix” wines to match a desired flavor profile. While this has created more technically competent wines, it has also diluted individuality, as vintners chase ideals and trends instead of letting terroir speak for itself. Soon, artificial intelligence may even influence how we grow and make wine. As with my mother’s reflections on the loss of craft in the creative arts, something vital risks being lost in winemaking when human judgment and imperfection are replaced by machine precision.
As we step into this brave new world, RSVnapa has choices. We won’t completely shun technology—electric tractors, solar power, and some farm robotics are here to stay—but we are determined to preserve the human element in winemaking, crafting pure wines that remain inseparably connected to the land.
Rob Sinskey
