Cathiard Vineyard

The Free Bacchus Story

Florence and Daniel Cathiard were ski champions before they were winemakers, and their first trip to America, in 1969, was to the Woodstock festival. In 1990 they bought Château Smith Haut Lafitte in Bordeaux. They kept thinking about Napa Valley, and just after the 2019 harvest the chance came. In January 2020 they bought a historic estate in the foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains.

Two Scottish brothers, James and William Rennie, bought the land in 1885. They planted sixty acres of vines across what are now the Rutherford and St. Helena appellations, built a stone winery that moved the wine by gravity, and, the estate says, were the first in California to crush grapes with a gasoline engine. Then a fire burned their press and barrels, phylloxera spread through the valley, and Prohibition closed the winery in 1920. Louis Martini bought the property in 1933.

Napa Valley is Cabernet Sauvignon country, and Rutherford sits in the middle of the valley. The Cathiards make a Cabernet Sauvignon from their hillside vines, where each plant is pruned so carefully that the estate compares it to a bonsai. They rebuilt the winery with small new tanks, refurbished the old horseshoe-shaped cellar dug into the mountain, and are developing a cooperage on site to make their own barrels. OEX, a single-vineyard Rutherford Cabernet, comes in 700 numbered bottles.

CCOF certifies the estate’s crops, on 13 acres, and has since August 2020. It is a crops certificate only, so the grapes are certified organic and the wines are not certified organic wine.