A year ago, our wines had earned eight gold medals in international competitions, starting in 2016 when Sametti won the first gold medal ever awarded to a Finnish wine internationally. That total now stands at fourteen. What is going on? Why the sudden surge in awards?

Are we using better equipment? Yes, we are. We built our winery in Hollola and purchased equipment that would better support our way of making wine. But with few exceptions, better equipment doesn’t make better wine. Better equipment mostly just makes the work easier.

Are we getting better at making wine? Of course. We are always learning and discovering how to improve what we do. But there have not been any recent dramatic breakthroughs in our understanding or the processes we are using.

Are the berries we are using better? Yes actually, that is a big part of it. The blueberries picked in 2019 were exceptionally good. The three gold medals Sametti earned this year was for the 2019 vintage – this might be the best wine we have ever made. Also the 2019 vintage of our blueberry wine Silkki is undoubtedly the best we have made for that wine. But that is not the whole story.

The biggest part has to do with focus. Back when we were planning our move to Hollola, one of the things we were really looking forward to was that the quality of our wines would improve. Why? Because David would be in the winery every day and could work on the wines exactly when they needed it, not when we had to schedule the work in advance.

Turns out we were optimistic on that. For the first year and a half we were in Hollola David was still working his day job as an Engineer at Mobidiag, and his primary focus had to stay on that. But during summer 2020 something exceptional happened. Despite the pandemic shutting down many of our biggest customers, people began to discover we were here and started visiting. It got busy enough that the winery could fully support us, and David decided to devote himself fully to his passion.

For over a year now, our full focus has been on making the best wines possible; more than anything else, that focus is responsible for the increased quality and the resulting rain of medals.

Our wines are getting better.