Frey Vineyards

The Free Bacchus Story

Katrina Frey learned biodynamic farming in the 1970s from Alan Chadwick, the English horticulturist, and in 1980 she started Frey Vineyards with her husband, Jonathan, and his brother Matthew. The family had lived in Redwood Valley, in Mendocino County, since the 1960s. More than forty years later the winery says it has never added sulfites to a single wine.

Sulfites are the preservative almost every winemaker adds, including many who farm organically. American rules do not allow any to be added to a wine sold as organic, which is why a wine can be made from organic grapes and still not be organic wine. Frey chose the harder label. On the US organic register all 240 of its wines are listed at the full organic level, and the winery says its bottles usually hold between 0 and 5 parts per million of sulfites that occur naturally.

In 1996, by its own account, Frey became the first biodynamic winery in the US to add no sulfites. Cows, goats, sheep and chickens are part of how the farm is run. Demeter lists Frey as both a biodynamic farm and a winery, and the Biodynamic wines are sold as their own range, separate from the organic ones.

On the night of 9 October 2017 the Redwood Complex fire reached the winery in about half an hour. Katrina Frey wrote afterwards that the 65 family members and friends asleep there, aged one to ninety-three, escaped up a dirt mountain road across seven stream beds. The offices, bottling line, tasting room and barns burned, along with six acres of vines and the family’s goats. The bottled wine survived in a metal warehouse. Frey kept paying all its staff, many of whom had lost their homes, and rebuilt on a new site on West Road.