Fromm Winery

The Free Bacchus Story

Georg Fromm came from a Swiss winemaking family in Malans. He and the winemaker Hätsch Kalberer met in the late 1980s and decided to make wine in Marlborough. They made their first harvest in 1992. What they planted was the unusual part. The Fromm Vineyard went in with eight red varieties, Pinot Noir, Syrah and Malbec among them, in a region that was making its name with Sauvignon Blanc.

Sauvignon Blanc is still made here only in excellent vintages. The Fromms went back to Switzerland in 2008, and the winery is now owned by an old family friend, Pol Lenzinger, and the Walliser family, while Georg has returned to the family estate in Malans. The estate claims the oldest single-vineyard Malbec in New Zealand, and co-ferments its Syrah with Viognier.

Going organic was easy, the general manager of the day, William Hoare, said in 2015, because the vines had never been sprayed with pesticides in the first place, and Marlborough is dry and windy with soils that are not too vigorous. Fromm has been 100 per cent certified organic since 2011. It also leaves most of its vines to find their own water. The older vines have not been irrigated since 2004, more than 60 per cent of the vineyard gets none, and the estate estimates that saves 9.5 million litres a year.

The wine critics reach for first does not come from Fromm’s own vineyard. Clayvin is a hillside of north-facing clay in the Brancott Valley, as Michael Cooper describes it, that Fromm once part-owned and still buys from; it now belongs to Giesen. The Fromm Pinot Noir Clayvin Vineyard is on Fromm’s organic certificate by name, vintage by vintage, and James Suckling gave the 2022 97 points.