Radoux-Ferrière Wine: a friendship, some oak, and a Double Gold

Where AMÉDÉE comes from. A personal story, told without smoothing the edges.

Some stories shape you more than you realize at the time. Radoux-Ferrière Wine is one of those. It is not just a bottle or a medal, it is a friendship, a leap into the unknown, and the moment I understood that what my family had passed down to me about wood could live inside a glass.

The meeting

It was in California, in a classroom. A guy sat down next to me. Andrew D. Ferrière. He was taking that class as an outside student, and from our very first conversation between two exercises, something clicked between us. He was not the classic finance profile.

Andrew was a vineyard management consultant and a vineyard developer. A man of conviction: deeply human, mindful of ecology, grounded in the reality and the constraints of running a business, and above all able to listen. He had that rare quality of hearing what people needed before they knew how to put it into words. Me, I came from wood. My family, the Radoux family, had been shaping wood for generations. My great-grandfather Amédée and my grandfather Robert had passed on a trade to me, but also a way of looking at the world through the grain of oak. So when we started dreaming out loud about what we could do together, the answer came on its own. Wine.

From consulting to grapes

We did not jump in blind. We started out consulting for vineyards, on the use of oak, the choice of barrels, winemaking techniques. We learned the California wine landscape from the inside, crisscrossed the Sierra Foothills, tasted with growers, got our hands in the dirt. And at some point, consulting was no longer enough for us.

We sourced the grapes in the Sierra Foothills. Syrah for its wild, peppery side, Cabernet Sauvignon for structure, Merlot for roundness, Cabernet Franc for that aromatic lift that makes you close your eyes. A Meritage, a blend that tells the story of its terroir. The oak was my part: I chose the forests, the grain, the toasting profiles, drawing on what my grandfather had taught me and on years spent watching wood transform under heat.

Maturation, and a first trial

For maturation, we used a mix of Radoux barrels and what were then only the very first stirrings of our low temperature extraction technique. The goal we had set ourselves was ambitious: to find again the molecules a barrel gives to wine, with more control. We were far from it back then, and we found that out soon enough. But it was out of those imperfect trials that the heart of AMÉDÉE's work emerged, years later.

That wine aged right alongside us. Today, in 2026, it is still there. The wood followed the evolution of the fruit without covering it. More than twenty years later, it still says something in the glass. That is my opinion as a taster, not a lab measurement.

The Double Gold

When we entered our 2002 vintage in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, I had a knot in my stomach. Panels that taste blind and cut you no slack. We won the Double Gold, which means every judge on the panel awarded gold independently of the others.

I remember the call, and standing there not believing it. That moment was not just pride. It was the confirmation that the oak know-how my family had carried for generations was not only about making good barrels: it was about understanding what happens when wood meets wine.

What I took from it

People sometimes ask me why I created AMÉDÉE, and they expect a strategy answer. The truth is simpler. Radoux-Ferrière showed me that I could put what I knew about oak directly at the service of the winemaker, not as a supplier but as a partner. Oak is not a commodity, it is a living material, and there is still a lot to understand about the way it works in a wine. The questions you ask us most often are gathered in our questions and answers, and the ones we cannot answer are in there too.

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