Our story starts with Fred Carpenter, whose family moved to California from North Dakota around 1907. They settled in the San Joaquin Valley. When he was 17, Fred moved to Oakland where he learned engineering from a correspondence school. Some years later he was one of the inventors of the jet pump. Fred’s company was in Berkeley, CA.  Seeking to escape the Bay Area’s summer fog, in 1941 Fred and his wife Lana bought a 40-acre orchard in St. Helena, which was as far as they could travel on a weekly ration of gasoline. They built a house and spent weekends and summers there until the 1970s. After that they lived there permanently into the early 1980s. A photo of Fred and Lana working in the orchard is on the back label of our wines.

The prune business paid off the loan on the property, but eventually declined.  The more level eastern section of the orchard was sold in 1975. Fred and Lana’s daughter, Lorraine Ruston, moved to the ranch in the mid-1980s and planted Merlot vines on the remaining western slopes of the land.  She managed the vineyard herself and sold these grapes to local wineries.

In the mid-1990s Lorraine’s son, John Ruston, and his wife, Janet Sapadin, were living in New York City and working in the environmental field.  Janet is a New York native and grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan. They had a mutual interest in wine and cooking and began to see the winemaking potential of the vineyard.  In 1996, John, Lorraine and Janet decided to expand the vineyard and enter the wine business together. The 1997 Merlot was the first wine we produced under the Ruston Family Vineyards label.  John and Janet left New York in 1999 and now live in the old farmhouse. Their two daughters were both born in New York and started their lives in Washington Heights. They grew up in the Napa Valley and then took off to attend college (UCLA and UC Riverside) and points beyond, leaving behind cuvées (wine blends) named after them.