Hamel Family Wines

The Free Bacchus Story

The first wine was 290 cases of Cabernet in 2006, off a single acre behind a house in Kenwood. George and Pam Hamel had settled in the Bay Area a decade earlier and bought the place with no intention of building a winery around it.

The estate they have now was assembled rather than inherited. The turn came in 2013 with Nuns Canyon in the Moon Mountain District — 110 acres running up the western slopes of the Mayacamas between 1,200 and 1,600 feet, on red iron-rich soil over gravel and fractured basalt left by old volcanic flows. Since 2018 it has been dry-farmed in full and certified biodynamic.

Dropping irrigation is the decision that costs something. Nearly every vineyard in Sonoma Valley irrigates, and dry farming means smaller crops every year and real exposure in a dry one. John Hamel has run viticulture since 2017 and drove the change.

Both certifications are held: Demeter for biodynamic and CCOF for organic. The Demeter listing was confirmed against the USA register in November 2025 rather than taken from the estate's own description.

Money buys a hillside in the Moon Mountain District. It does not make dry farming safe, and a family that had owned the site for four years when it committed to going without irrigation was choosing the harder version of the thing it had just bought.