2018 Andis Wines Semillon Bill Dillian Vineyard Sierra Foothills California 750 ml

Legendary 100-point consultant Philippe Melka, and his Director of Winemaking Maayan Koschitzky, a veteran of Screaming Eagle and Dalle Valle, are household names in the Napa wine business. Melka’s list of heavyweight clients includes Quintessa, Vineyard 29, Dana Estates, and Seavy. 

So when a new opportunity arose for them to make their mark in the fast-rising Amador County, tucked away in the Sierra Foothills, working with some of the oldest vines in California, it was the opportunity they had been waiting for.

They zeroed in on a patchwork of sites around the Gold Rush era towns of Plymouth and Fiddletown, in the east-to-west flowing Shenandoah Valley appellation. Eventually, they struck vinous gold in meeting Andrew Friedlander, a Marine Corp Veteran, and Janis Akuna, both co-founders of Andis Wines (the name ‘Andis’ is formed by joining the first three letters of Andrew with the last two of Janis). 

Friedlander and Akuna had planted 23 acres of vines and had also set about sourcing fruit from the locally-known “Grands Crus” of the Sierra Foothills. One of those sites, the Bill Dillian Vineyard, is planted to indescribably beautiful 40-year-old head-trained Semillon vines. It’s the sole source for the 2018 Andis Semillon, which under the vision of Melka and Koschitzky, delivers beautiful tension with a bit of richness, countered by extremely bright acidity and a mouthwatering finish. It’s the kind of bright and giving white that has the power to relegate similarly styled wines—like those laser-focused Chablis or crisp, taut Napa Sauvignon Blancs—to the back of the cellar racks. 

When Melka and Koschitzky agreed to work with Andis Wines, they engineered the winery equivalent of a Marine Corp about-face. Seeking to increase freshness and complexity in the finished wines, they brought in brand new equipment, improved protocols, and made farming adjustments that drove up acidity and pushed back on sugars and ripeness. They let Bill Dilliann’s four-decades-old free-standing bush vines do the heavy lifting—then hand-harvested the grapes a bit sooner than in the past, robbing them of longer hang-times that would have resulted in a  sweet-juiced, flabby wine. 

The fine-tuning of farming in a place like Amador County, where vineyards in places begin at 1,000 ft. in elevation, is what attracts big talent—it’s a trend that started a couple of decades ago but is only now gaining traction among the media and critics. Higher elevation sites are closer to the sun, typically are planted on well-draining soils, and produce wines with more finesse, tension, and energy. Given the price of grapes per ton in Napa and Sonoma, it’s no wonder that the Sierra Foothills is a hotbed of magical grapes to be had at superb prices. 

Estates like Favia (run by superstars Andy Erickson and Annie Favia) and Keplinger source some of their favorite Rhône grapes here. In Wine Spectator’s “Editors Pick” issue, editor Tim Fish declared that an Amador County wine had spurred his “aha” moment of the year—revealing the peak of authenticity and regionality. We think this Semillon offers the peak expression of a New World-take on an Old World Left Bank-favorite. Leave it to French-born Philippe Melka to pull that off.