Benziger Family Winery

The Free Bacchus Story

Mike Benziger bought the Sonoma Mountain place in 1980 and hired the best advice money could buy. The advice was to clear the vineyard of everything that was not a vine — the weeds, the insects, the birds, anything that might compete — and the family followed it for twelve years. Then they walked outside one morning and there was nothing. No birds, no insects, soil so dead it was washing off the hill. Benziger has described the moment since as the point at which they understood the grapes were living on piped-in chemistry rather than on the ground they were planted in.

The repair took a decade. They brought in the biodynamic consultant Alan York, began converting the home ranch in 1995, and in 2000 the eighty-five-acre Sonoma Mountain estate was certified Biodynamic by Demeter. The first wine off it, released in 2001, was called Tribute, and it was the first Demeter-certified wine made in Sonoma County.

Two certificates run here and they cover different ground, so it is worth separating them. The USDA organic register lists Benziger under CCOF, certified from 7 July 2008 across roughly 151 acres at Glen Ellen, for crops and for winemaking, and the certified wines on it are the Chardonnays — West Rows, Pear Block, Apple Hill, Los Carneros — with a Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir, a Winemaker's Claret, a Stone Dragon Syrah and a Blanc de Blanc.

Tribute is not on that list. Its credential is the other one: it is estate-grown on the Demeter-certified Sonoma Mountain vineyard, and Demeter USA's own Vineyards and Wineries register carried Benziger Family Winery LLC as recently as November 2025. So the flagship here is a certified biodynamic wine rather than a certified organic one. Both certificates are real, neither covers the other, and a page that said simply "certified organic" would be describing the Chardonnays and quietly implying the Cabernet.

One more thing to know. The family sold the winery to The Wine Group in June 2015, and the name on the label is now a brand rather than an owner. We record ownership wherever it changes, because a certificate follows an operation and not a surname — and in this case the Demeter certificate on the hill is exactly what survived the sale.