Wine can be as simple as a beverage, or as profound as a portal to a different time and place. Over lunch at Château Lafite Rothschild, we tasted a bottle from 1905, a wine that has been quietly sitting in the cellar through two world wars and a century of change. A wine that made everyone at that table think beyond their lifetime. That is the long view in a single glass. Not as a concept, as a fact.
In May 2026, Scott, Chris and Kelly went to Bordeaux on an R&D trip. Five days, thirteen estates, one cooperage. We went to learn and came back inspired and doubly committed to the craft of winegrowing. Some of what we saw will find its way quietly into the vineyards and the winery. But the deepest lesson of the trip was not technical. It was about time, and what a place is willing to commit to when time is measured in generations.
What has stayed with us, weeks after the trip, are the people who took the time to share their work, their philosophy and their passion. We have been to many of these estates before. Some of the conversations were with people we have known for years. Something was different this time.
“Actually, what's lingering about Bordeaux for me is more than the wines,” Scott reflected on the way home. “It's really the people who left such a lasting impression. The conversations, the philosophies, the outlooks shared by everyone we met were so thoughtful. There was less sameness than I'd anticipated. They are making more intentional choices than ever, with more diversity of ideas and processes.”
He went further. “At a time when the world seems to operate on a short attention span, Bordeaux has become more thoughtful, more meticulous, more intentional. I could really sense the long-term view that most vignerons are taking these days.”
That framed everything else we saw.
The thought had begun revealing itself on the very first visit. At Pontet-Canet, a pioneer in biodynamic farming, they work hard to source the ingredients for the biodynamic preparations from the estate or very close by. They even cultivate the yeast from the estate for fermentation. For the Tesseron family, the estate is more than a vineyard, it is an ecosystem.
By the time we reached Cheval Blanc later in the week, Pierre-Olivier Clouet, the technical director, said it plainly: “the winery is a tool of the vineyard.” We had heard versions of that sentence before — most of us would say we already believe it. But hearing it stated by a place with the means to do anything, choosing instead to do less and to do it in service of the vines, was clarifying. Figeac had built the same conviction into its walls — the fermentation protocol designed first, the building drawn around it. At Lafleur, a small team moves freely between vines and cellar, with no clean boundary between the two kinds of work. The conviction was not a slogan in any of these places. It was the floor plan, the team, the culture.
“Walking through the massal selection block at Cheval Blanc, I started imagining what that would look like for us at Moonracer,” Chris said. “It's the kind of bet you can only make if you trust that someone after you will keep making it.”
What that conviction asks for, more than anything, is patience — the kind that gets harder to find every year. At Cheval Blanc, a new planting block begins ten years in advance: a mother vine identified, propagated, made into wine, and only then put into the ground. At L'Évangile, soil is sampled by plot and by type on a five-year cycle, with the results informing compost and cover crop programs that will not show in the glass for vintages yet to come.
“What I loved most was the focus on research — not just on each estate, but in collaboration between them.” Kelly reflected, “The people we met saw the investment in research as a benefit not just for their own property, but for the region as a whole.”
The other quiet thread running through these visits was restraint. The great houses have, almost without exception, stopped adding SO₂ during fermentation. They have stopped pumping over after the wine reaches a certain point. They have stopped sorting harder than the fruit is asking to be sorted. None of this is fashion. It is what happens after a long enough relationship with the wine — you stop intervening because you have learned what intervention costs. Restraint, in the end, is patience by another name.
We came back to Napa more sure of the path we have been walking, not less. Realm has always taken a long lens — through the years when we made wine without our own winery, through the patient assembly of the three estates we now steward, through the slow and unglamorous choices about which blocks to replant and which ones to wait on. The trip did not introduce us to the long view. It reinforced it, and then it asked us to extend it.
What might that look like in practice? A propagation block at Moonracer, dedicated to Napa heritage selections that will not be planted out for a decade. Trees and plants around the vineyard to promote biodiversity. Soil work measured against the next thirty years rather than the next thirty months. Most of what we are now beginning to think about will not be ours to finish. That, increasingly, is the point.
“Maybe it's always been there,” Scott said on the flight home. “But for some reason I was ready to hear it more on this trip. Or maybe I needed to hear it more.”
We were, and we did.
Onward.
