Domaine de la Terre Rouge and Easton Wines, Amador County. Answered in writing, October 2026, more than fifty years into a life in wine.
A kitchen tumbler, a few cubes of ice, a splash of the plain red his parents kept on the dinner table in Sacramento every night, and enough water poured over the top to thin it down. That was Saturday night for Bill Easton and his sister when he was nine or ten years old. He remembers that glass as the beginning, and the way he tells it, the water went down a little every year and the wine went up, until by the time the two of them were teenagers they were simply drinking wine with dinner along with everyone else at the table.
Plenty of families have some version of that glass, a first sip from a father's beer or a thimble of sherry at the holidays, and most of those memories stay right there at the table. On weekends the family drove up into the Sierra Foothills to buy half-gallon jugs of red from the Italian families who made wine there, and Zinfandel, he once told Wine & Spirits, was what his parents drank and what he drank when he was young.
He carried that taste down to Berkeley, where he studied political science and English, and after college he went to work for Davis Bynum, a San Francisco Chronicle newspaperman who was making wine in a converted warehouse in Albany. In 1978 he opened a shop of his own, Solano Cellars, and in among the bottles from Ridge and Ravenswood and the ones he brought home from his yearly trips to Europe, he kept a spot at the counter for jugs of Amador red, the same kind his parents used to drive up the hill for. His wife, Jane O'Riordan, cooked in the little fourteen-seat bistro they opened inside the store and changed the menu every week to go with whatever Bill was pouring.
In 1985 the two of them went up the hill themselves. The soil in that part of Amador County runs red, and they named the place for it, Domaine de la Terre Rouge, and Bill set out to make Syrah and the other Rhône grapes in country that had been growing Zinfandel since the 1800s. He was one of the original Rhône Rangers, and they gave him their Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. The year he dates his life by, though, is 1994, when he sold the shop, fermented that harvest at someone else's winery, and waited on a federal bond that didn't arrive until October, with the wine already pressed into barrels, before loading it on a flatbed and hauling it to a cellar that was finally his own.
More than thirty years on, that cellar still has no named tanks, because names, Bill says, belong to things with a soul, though he makes an exception for a 1969 International dump truck called Big Green that carries the stems and skins back out to the vineyard. The tasting room belongs to Gris Gris, a cat who showed up years ago, laid eight dead mice outside the winery's back door by way of a résumé, and worked her way from a box under the crush pad to the cellar and finally to the tasting room, where the staff treat her like a queen. In 2016 his Ascent Syrah became the first wine grown and made in the Sierra Foothills to earn 100 points from Wine Enthusiast, and he couldn't fully explain that one to the magazine either.
I have not been to Terre Rouge yet. Scott Harvey, the first winemaker in this series, makes wine a few miles down the road, and between the two of them and the cat, the trip has moved well up my list. Bill answered the twenty questions in writing, with a note at the top saying his biography hadn't been updated since 2019. Some of his answers run most of a page and one of them is a single word, and I have left them the way he wrote them.
These are his answers to the twenty questions every winemaker in this series is asked.
1.Who taught you?
My parents were my first instructors on wine and its place at the table. They had a simple red wine on the table with dinner every night. We could sip it, but mainly we were introduced to it over ice in a tumbler and diluted further with water from the time I was 9 or 10 years old. This was more of a Saturday night special treat for my sister and I. As we got older the tumbler contained less water and more wine. By the time we were teenagers we were just drinking wine if we wanted it during special dinners.
After that I would say I was self-taught by buying different wines in my late teens and trying them, many times with friends when I was in college during an evening meal, but sometimes on a picnic or date.
As far as winemaking, my first mentor was Davis Bynum, who had a winery in Albany near Berkeley. I went to work for him after I got out of college. I also started reading every book I could get my hands on that talked about wine and wine's place in California's cultural geography.
2.Who have you taught, and where are they now?
Like most small wineries we have had a string of people during harvest doing stages, and as well we have had many, many people rotate through our winery on their way to their own managerial or ownership situation. Some of these people are at their own wineries, family wineries, or are consultants in France, Italy, South Africa, Oregon, and California.
3.Is there a vintage you date your life by?
Maybe the 1994 vintage, which turned out to be a great year! It was also the year that I sold my retail store in Berkeley, California, and transitioned to full-time winemaker at my own facility. Up to that stage I had been making wine at two other wineries and still working in the Bay Area. 1994 was the year I fermented elsewhere and pressed out into barrels and moved the wine on a flatbed to my own cellar. My federal winery bond didn't arrive until October 1994, and harvest was already in motion.
4.What's changed in the trade since you started that someone new would walk right past?
The wine trade in the 1960s and 1970s was largely either long-time farm families, counterculture types (like myself), or people that had dropped out of the professional rat race to have a more engaging and grounded lifestyle and avocation. Most people were in the wine business because they loved wine and loved farming vineyards. Nobody acted like they were in the trade to make a quick buck.
Then the bankers, corporations, hedge funds, lawyers, and other capitalist money-chasing schemers showed up. The wine industry has kind of followed the economic development arc of the auto industry: it started consolidating. Capital chases capital. Financialization kicked in. There is a lot of expensive real estate associated with the wine industry, so economic value unrelated to wine production.
5.Walk me through a typical harvest day at the peak.
Harvest is walking vineyards and talking with your growers and keeping an eye on your own vineyard properties and the weather. You are in contact with your labor contractor, as we hand-harvest all of our vineyards. We still start picking at sunrise, when you can easily see any damaged and diseased fruit and not harvest it. The first sort is in the vineyard. In a very bad year where there might be excessive disease, the day before harvesting we would send a crew through to drop the diseased fruit on the ground. I and my assistant are either driving tractors with the picking crew or operating the forklift, unloading picking bins and stacking them for later loading on a flatbed trailer to haul to the winery for processing. We usually stop picking at noon if the weather is quite warm. We want the fruit to come to the winery cool. In cooler years we can harvest until a section we have chosen to harvest is done. At the winery we hand sort the fruit on a vibrating table that then feeds into the stemmer-crusher. We can adjust this tool for whole cluster, whole berry de-stemmed, or crushed and de-stemmed. Often whole clusters are simply layered and shoveled into an open-top fermentor with crushed fruit. Tanks are gassed with CO2 and sealed after filling to soak for a couple of days.
Harvest days can be long. Depending on available winemaking labor, occasionally we will let the grapes "rest" in a cold room overnight before processing. This is an old Roman practice.
6.What decision do you make that you can't fully explain to someone else?
Winemaking is a highly evolved craft, and perhaps up to one hundred analog Y/N decisions are made about each single lot through the complete process of making a finished wine. Many of these decisions are made by general historical winemaking knowledge, previous experience, a particular lot's wine chemistry, by organoleptic (tasting) grapes, the must, the pressed wine, etc. Good winemaking is intuitive, and a winemaker generally has a sense of what direction they want the wine to move towards.
7.Tell me about a harvest that went wrong.
Harvests go wrong all the time. There are equipment issues, labor issues, weather issues, grape disease issues. Let's face it, you are working with a component of your winemaking that you cannot control: Mother Nature. A good winemaker can surmount these difficulties and make good wine under difficult conditions. Generally if you don't push your vineyards too hard they will reward you with excellent fruit.
8.Who's the legend around the winery?
Gris Gris, the winery cat that is 17 or 18 years old. She showed up and ingratiated herself by lining up 8 mice (dead) outside the back door of the winery. This earned her food and an outdoor bed in a box under our crush pad roof for two years. Then she worked her way into the cellar. Several years later she elevated herself to the tasting room that is about fifty yards away from the winery building. For the last decade or so she has been our feline ambassador, with a great following of cat-friendly visitors, and is doted on by our hospitality staff like a queen.
9.Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year?
Crush is just the beginning of the life of a new wine. So once the vats are pressed and the wine has been barreled down, it needs to be closely monitored for unintended deviations on its path towards wine that will be finished and bottled. The monitoring is mostly done by us in-house in our lab. If we need enzymatic analysis we send it out to a lab.
Harvest is just part of an annual cycle. We continue to pay attention to the vineyards by light tilling and the planting of cover crops for vine health and nutrition, as well as soil stability for the coming winter rains and snow.
After harvest there is usually a celebration with, of course, food and lots of wine (which is food!).
10.What do people outside the trade always get wrong?
The idea that all wine and winemaking is the same. That it is all created with the same intent (other than to be drunk). I asked a winemaker friend once about what amazed him the most about the wine business, and he answered, "How much bad wine there is in the market, and how easily it sells!" I am in the fine wine business. We are crafting an artisan product that has complexity and will improve in the bottle with proper cellaring. It is highly detailed work.
11.What's the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?
Being born, if you are religious; original sin, ha! I am just kidding. Who would remember the first thing that they got wrong, as that is water under the bridge. If you are smart your mistakes are integrated into your subconscious and you avoid them in the future. Mistakes become part of the learning cycle.
12.Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though a faster way exists?
In making a finely crafted item, faster is not always better. Haste makes waste, right? I am sure we have fine-tuned certain cellar operations to be more effective and efficient. As we became more successful as a winery it allowed us to purchase better tools for making wine. More refrigeration, heat-generating devices for cleaning, ozone machines, better pumps, the world's best cooperage, etc. Humans craft things in slower time frames. Machines make things faster, with more efficiency, and mediocrity.
Machines make things faster, with more efficiency, and mediocrity.
13.What were you taught that you've since stopped doing?
That is a question of degree. We all incorporate everything that we have ever learned into current practices. Craft is encyclopedic.
14.Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?
No. Names are for objects that have soul. Perhaps the "Big Green" dump truck, which is a 1969 International 5-ton truck for taking pomace and stems back to the vineyard as compost.
15.When someone who knows nothing about wine walks in, what do they already know that you can build on?
Probably. Maybe. You can tell them a narrative that connects them to the place we make wine and the region. If they are physically present at the winery, their senses and cognitive functions are probably attuned to the present moment, unless they have too many preconceived notions or some sort of mental dissonance.
16.When someone pours your wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn't in the tasting notes?
Nothing perhaps, or something about the place, terroir, or geography of the region. Also maybe something about the winemaker's motivations. But they could just enjoy the wine on a hedonistic level and see if it rings their bell.
17.What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?
Nothing.
18.What's your favorite wine that you don't make?
I have many wines that I enjoy. It depends on what I am eating and what my mood is at that time. Some of my best memories of great wine experiences are the synergy of wine and the other foods that I am enjoying with it, the place I am drinking the wine, and the company and the conversation with which I am sharing the moment.
19.When you make a great one, do you know right away?
Sometimes. Sometimes not. Often great wine is an act of blending at a later date in the cycle from early winemaking post-harvest.
20.One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?
I hope you enjoy this.
One more: What does this work take away from you that people don't see?
That I have a passion (overly used word) for my avocation. Wine is in my blood.
Bill Easton answered in writing in October 2026 and supplied his winery biography, which dates from about 2017. Later and supporting background is drawn from Wine Enthusiast (the 2016 Ascent review), the San Francisco Chronicle, Wine & Spirits (Summer 2022), Wines & Vines, Farm to Fork, and Vinography, and on Davis Bynum's Albany winery from Prince of Pinot.
Patrick R. Dunn trained in narrative at the University of Maine under Stephen King and folklorist Edward "Sandy" Ives, and spent thirty years leading global crisis management and operational resilience teams across four continents, through 9/11, Katrina, and Sandy. He spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger and is WSET Level 3 certified. Through his practice, Vianarra, he works with winery owners, boutique hotels, and restaurants on how they tell their story. He writes about wine and hospitality every week at newsletter.vianarra.com.