Hedges Family Estate

The Free Bacchus Story

Tom Hedges, from Richland in eastern Washington, married Anne-Marie Liégeois in her home village in Champagne in 1976. They spent years in the produce trade, started shipping Californian and Washington wine to Taiwan in 1986, and in 1987 founded Hedges Cellars with a first shipment of Columbia Valley Cabernet-Merlot to Vin & Spirit Centralen in Stockholm.

In 1989 they bought fifty acres on Red Mountain, in Washington’s Yakima Valley, and planted forty of them to Bordeaux varieties. Ground was broken for the family château in February 1995. When Red Mountain became an official American Viticultural Area in 2001, about 4,040 acres of which some 600 were planted, the petition behind it had come from Lorne Jacobson of Hedges Cellars.

The move to biodynamics came slowly. The family started talking about it in 2007, converted the home vineyard in 2008 and passed Demeter’s certification in 2011, after what it calls “a long three years”. By 2019 all five vineyards were farmed biodynamically, and the whole estate was certified in 2021. The family is candid that it has not been easy: it writes of “large struggles”, and 2020 brought the smallest crop in a long time.

Asked why it bothers with certification, the family answers “accountability and transparency”: outside auditors keep a producer honest. Their daughter Sarah Hedges Goedhart became head winemaker in 2015, when her uncle retired, and their son Christophe runs global sales. The vineyards and winery are certified by Demeter USA and, separately, organic by CCOF, whose certificate names the Hedges wines one by one.