◆ Where did your interest in wine come from?Bill ― I grew up in the Sacramento area where there was an abundance of good raw material to cook with, and my mother was a very creative chef. We always had nicely prepared meals and my parents were into wine every night. It was a kind of vino tavola (table wine), locally made and of a high calibre. On Saturday night my dad would pull out better bottles, and as my sister and I got older we were included with a glass that was half water and half wine.When I got out of college my first job was as a gofer for an urban winery that ended up in Sonoma County (Barefoot Wines / Davis Bynum Wines). The owner, Davis Bynum, was a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle and home winemaker, and I used to buy my wine from him while in college at UC Berkeley. It was reasonably-priced, high-quality wine that a student could afford. So I got the bug and a part-time job working in his tasting room, and helped him transition his winery up to Sonoma. After he closed his tasting room, I opened a retail wine shop in March 1978 in North Berkeley (Solano Cellars) with two partners. The concept was a people’s wine shop with reasonably priced wines, and it quickly evolved into one of the leading wine shops on the U.S. west coast. We sold everything from German Riesling to French Burgundy to Rhone wines. It was basically my graduate school in wine. Concurrently with owning the shop, I started the winery in the mid-1980s, and didn’t get out of the retail trade until 1994, so I had these different revenue streams to support myself and my family in a slow transition.◆ What was the wine market like when you opened your wine shop?―― It was a revolutionary time. We were part of what was called the Berkeley ‘Gourmet Ghetto’, there was a whole scene with Chez Panisse, Cheese Board, Peet’s Coffee, Pig by the Tail, Poulet (Bruce Aidells), and Kermit Lynch. We were selling a lot of bulk half gallon jugs of high-quality wines from some of the last remaining family artisan producers, a lot of them were Italian. They included D’Agostini Reserve Burgundy that my family drank in Sacramento ‒ D’Agostini was actually the last winery to survive prohibition in Amador County. Plus we were selling interesting wines from smaller artisan producers. As our palates evolved we started adding imported wines from small family operations, and we were also the first store to seriously sell Oregon Pinot Noir in California.◆ When did you start selling international wines and traveling, and the Rhone bug bite?― Salespeople were always coming in with wines. There were a lot of small independents who had import catalogues in the Bay Area, and I was a voracious reader of the BIN Book and people like Victor Hazan, and tasting the wines I was reading about. In 1980 nobody was selling a lot of Italian wine in the Bay Area, and I began selling wines Neil Empson had brought into California. My first trip to Europe was in 1983 and I started visiting producers and bringing back unique wines. My interest led me towards production and making wine because I wasenthralled with Rhone varieties. About a dozen of us interested in Rhone varieties were finding these antique vineyards growing them, which weren’t part of the mainstream at the time, and we got stuck with the name Rhone Rangers.I began make wines regularly in 1985, with fruit predominantly sourced in the Sierra Foothills ‒ I was interested in this terroir for Rhone varieties because it most closely mimicked the Rhone Valley, with granitic volcanic soils. I was exploring it in a more methodical and deeper way, and planning and helping develop vineyards in cooler and higher elevation locations. I also got some other growers to start planting vineyards for me exclusively, and working with older vineyards, particularly Zinfandel, that had been around a long time. My first vintage was 50 cases, it quickly went to 250 cases, and then by 1990 it was about 1,300 cases. By the time I left the retail wine business in 1994 it was about 3,500 cases.◆ What was your initial approach/philosophy to winemaking and styles?― Initially I was making blends because I found a lot of the wines from the region had a rusticity that I thought would be ameliorated by blending. What I learnt down the road was a lot of it had to do with the equipment, technique and cooperage they were using. Basically, I learnt to be very gentle and run the winery as a gravity winery so we don’t do a lot of pumping once the wine has been fermented. We do a lot of digging out of tanks by hand, and use gravity to put it in the press. Our equipment is all high-end compared to what other wineries had at the time. German presses and crushers, and exclusively use French Burgundy barrels, and being gentle with our processing techniques. We built our own winery in 1994 and remodelled and expanded it in 1999.We started planting in 1999, mainly Rhone varietals and a little Zinfandel. We manage about 24 acres, but my son just bought a new ranch which adds another 10 acres. We make decent amounts of 7-8 different wines that are more reasonably priced‒ about 5,000 cases all up. Then we make smaller lots of reserve-style wines ‒ in 400 case lots.◆ What are different characteristics between Shenandoah Valley and Fiddletown?―― Shenandoah Valley is largely decomposed granite and Fiddletown has the same soil profile with a volcanic series mixed in, so it is a combination of soils depending on the site. It is all pretty much Terre Rouge, most of the soils have iron which adds the reddish colour. It’s great for both red and white grapes. Fiddletown is higher, but I think the main difference between the appellations is that in Fiddletown the soil warms later. It’s in a canyon at 2,000ft with cool air drainage from about the 4,000ft level that flows down it, and the vines start later in spring and finish later in fall, about 2 weeks later than Shenandoah Valley.◆ What is your approach to sustainability and how has it evolved?― From the beginning our p ractices in vineyards have been s trictly regenerative, organic or what used to be called permaculture in the late 60s and early 70s. We use no herbicides, all the weed work and tilling is done by hand. We grow cover crops, planting a plough-down mix that we mow and mix in the soil. Because of the low humidity in recent years, we haven’t sprayed any fungicides in our vineyards for 4 years. If we do spray fungicides, we use elemental organic sulphur that we mix with water, and might mix in seaweed or kelp at the same time. Otherwise, it is very minimal.◆ You are a firm believer in élevage (raising wine in the bottle)?― We are making wines in a mountainous region where they tend to be more structured, with more acidity and power, and my winemaking is less oxidative and very reductive. Once we ferment the wine it goes into barrel and normally doesn’t get racked the first time for almost a y ear. And that is an aerative racking generally, except for Grenache which we never rack, we just leave it on lees. With Syrah, the wine goes back into the barrel for another year generally for the reserve wines, and then is bottled anaerobically ‒ we don’t give it any oxygen at all between the barrel and bottle. The wines are very slow to evolve, and we hold them in the bottle as part of the winemaking process before we release the wines. We’re not trying to make the wine ready to drink quicker by forcing them, we’re just letting them follow a very slow evolution. It's a major investment, but élevage gives us the opportunity to sell wines to people who appreciate fine wines that are ready to drink. They are going to get even better, but are approachable and not closed in.◆ What is your approach to blending?―― Blending is the winemaker’s thing. If I’m blending a high-quality Grenache, I may add a little bit of Syrah for colour and complexity on the nose, a little Mourvèdre to add more shading, but I’m not going to step on it too hard. Our Grenache is generally 65-75 percent Grenache with the other varieties being 10-15 percent. Blending one varietal like Syrah is a different approach: I look for balance, complexity, longevity, both aromatically, and in mouthfeel, texture and length. There are lot of things going on there to put together something I think is a complete wine.Generally all our Syrah lots are put in varying ages of barrels, coopered from different forests with different toast levels, which gives me a palette to work with. For ease of production, most of our barrels are 225 liters. We do have a few 500 liter barrels which I like a lot, but they are harder for one person to work with because they are heavy. I don’t want our wines to taste of new wood ‒ when you are aging wine like we do in the bottle, the oak tends to integrate with the wines.◆How do you differentiate the brands?Terre Rouge, which is a homage to the red soil we grow it in, is for our Rhone-style wines. The others are Easton wines, named for my dad who loaned me the money for buying the grapes and making our first non-Rhone wine, a Zinfandel.◆What does the future hold?We have some fun projects with my son at his ranch with a couple of new clones, a Venetian clone of Sauvignon Blanc and an Asti clone of Barbera, which we are bottling separately. They also have an old Zinfandel vineyard, Petite Sirah, and some Touriga Nacional and Souzao we made into a dry red wine we’re calling Campo. My main interest is making wines from old vineyards. We are sticking to what we do well, which is more single old-vine vineyards of Zinfandel, and bottling those separately. We have 4 or 5 we do now with specific vineyard names and they all have different personalities, and also single-vineyard Syrahs.【Sierra Foothills AVA】Amador County in the Sierra Foothills AVA was first planted in the 1850s to slake the thirsts of gold prospectors, many of them European. Within a few decades, there were over 100 wineries in the area known as the Mother Lode. The decline of gold mining followed by prohibition in 1920, devastated the frontier wine community. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that it was reborn with a new generation of pioneers. Amador County’s specialty is Zinfandel, California’s signature grape variety, and the County’s old, dry-farmed, low-yielding hillside vines, most head-trained and on their own roots, still provide the source for old vine Zinfandels. Amador has two sub-region AVAs ‒ Shenandoah Valley and Fiddletown, and Terre Rouge and Easton are active in both.Reference: https://amadorwine.com/vines-wines/history/