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Free Bacchus for the trade
Free Bacchus verifies which wine and spirits producers are genuinely certified. We work alongside hospitality groups, restaurants and retailers — finding what already qualifies on a list, and helping the growers who earned it reach the people ordering.
Producers never pay.
Not to be assessed, not to be listed, not to be ranked. The buyer is the client and the producer is the subject, and keeping those two apart is what makes the rating worth anything to you.
The problem
None of these is regulated in wine or spirits. No body certifies them, no auditor checks them, and a producer spraying synthetic herbicides across every hectare may lawfully use any of them.
Behind the adjectives sit organic and biodynamic schemes with audits, defined scopes and public registers — Demeter, USDA Organic, Ecocert and a dozen more. They were never designed to line up against one another. Each has its own scope, its own renewal cycle and its own way of publishing, and a certificate from one says nothing about the standard of another.
What the labels meanWhich leaves a beverage director with a practical problem rather than a philosophical one. There is no straightforward way to see what, on a list you already own, actually qualifies. That is where we start — with the list as it stands, before anything about it changes.
What we do
One
We assess your existing wine and spirits list against the Free Bacchus Verification Standard. You receive what is verifiably certified and at what tier, what fails and the specific reason it fails, what cannot be verified at all, and certified substitutions matched on style, region and price band.
An independent assessment your own team cannot produce about itself.
Two
Item-level recognition. Qualifying wines and spirits on your list carry the Free Bacchus mark, so a guest can identify them at the point of choosing rather than afterwards.
A venue joins once at least one listing qualifies and works toward more over time. Display of the mark on the printed or digital list is a condition of the programme.
Monitoring runs alongside it: if a producer’s certification lapses or its tier changes, we tell you before a guest finds out.
Three
Where a verified producer you want has no US distribution, we can build a route to market for them through our import and distribution partners. You get the bottle; a grower doing the work properly gets a market.
This takes typically several months and depends on volume. We would rather say that plainly than quote you a date we cannot hold.
Assessment happens first, and never the other way round.
How it works
SKUs, in any format you already keep them in.
Each SKU is traced to the producer behind it and checked against the named certifying body’s own register. Producers not already in our database are researched directly.
Findings, the reason behind each one, and certified substitutions where something does not qualify.
Optional monitoring, so a change in status reaches you first.
This is not an automated lookup. Every finding is signed off by a person.
Certification scope, ownership changes and partial certifications require judgment. A register lookup cannot tell you that a producer’s organic certificate covers two expressions and not the core range. A reader can, and does.
Independence
Producers never pay to be assessed, listed or ranked. There is no paid placement of any kind, at any tier.
We are not a retailer, and we are not the seller of record in any transaction.
Assessment is independent of commercial availability. Substitution shortlists are generated by tier, style and price band, never filtered by what we happen to be able to supply.
You may source any recommendation through your own importer, and we will say so in the report.
Who this is for
Size is not the qualifier. A group with sixty rooms and a neighbourhood restaurant with one are working from the same problem, and both get the same standard and the same report. A short list is quicker to screen, not less worth screening — and on a list of forty, twenty SKUs at no charge is half of it.
Hotels and resorts, one or fifty
Restaurants and bars
Retail, grocery and wine shops
Airlines and cruise
Importers and distributors auditing their own portfolios
Enquire
Tell us what you are working with. We will screen up to 20 SKUs at no charge, so you can see the shape of the output before anyone signs anything — a sample, not a full assessment.