Anniversary Podcast
Our next episode of “Frey Vines” is an anniversary podcast to celebrate 45 years in Organic Wine! On March 24th, 1980, we became the first Organic Winery in the USA! Tune in on your favorite podcasting platform or check out our YouTube channel to see the episode. See below for a full audio transcript. Enjoy!
Molly Frey: Welcome to the fourth episode of Frey Vines, the podcast devoted to telling you the story of organic wine. Frey Vineyards was bonded in 1980 as the first organic winery in the USA, making this year, 2025, our 45th organic anniversary. We're celebrating this milestone by reflecting on the journey to bring organic wine to the market. We're not just looking back at where we've come from, though. This year, we're opening up our new winery facilities and making more plans for our green future.
Katrina Frey: Well, it was a grand experiment, I would say. Jonathan and I had come back to the Frey Vineyards Ranch where he grew up and the majority of his family still lived. After a year and a half of being apprentices with Alan Chadwick at the Covelo Garden Project, so we were hardcore devotees to organic agriculture when we arrived. And we thought at first we would grow vegetables, and we tried that, but it was 1977, there was barely a farmer's market in Ukiah, there really wasn't the awareness of organics. And there was this vineyard that was organic by neglect that we used to joke about because it was pruned, and that was about it.
So anyway, we decided after one day of going to the farmer's market, waking up at 5:30, putting my little baby Caroline in my backpack and going out and harvesting cabbages and loading up the truck and sitting in the stand and coming back with $28. I said, we have to figure out something else to do. So, Jonathan decided to start the winery, and it's not that he hadn't ever been thinking about it. He had just by luck. His circle of friends at UC Santa Cruz, where he was, were all wine people, very well educated. We also were very close family, friends and colleagues with the Fetzer Winery. So, and we're in premium wine country in Mendocino County. So all of those factors. Drew's made it somewhat obvious that that's the path we should take. Jonathan sat down and read everything he could find for about six months on how to make wine.
And we started in. And, in retrospect, I would say we started in very naively. Not naive about how to grow grapes. But just what it really entailed to become a winery. At that point, we were winery number 12 in Mendocino County. There are well over a hundred, mostly very small wineries now in Mendocino County.
Our first bottle of wine: 1980 Cabernet Sauvignon
So what was it like when we finally had wine in a bottle? Our first vintage was 1980, and we had a Chardonnay and a Cabernet. And I started by trying to sell it in the market. Mendocino County, Jonathan's father, my father-in-law, Paul Fry, and I and little baby Caroline used to drive over to the coast because we knew that was a touristy area and Cafe Beaujolais bought some and you know some of the nice little wine shops. Then we went to Fort Bragg, California to the Safeway there, and they ordered a whole pallet. and we were both ecstatic and thought “oh it's going to be easy to sell organic wine.” Well, of course, it wasn't.
Molly: You have to remember that there weren't any organic wines in the marketplace in the early 1980s. Frey bonded as the first organic winery and that came with the onus of having to educate and market organics in a way that had never been done before. When we say that we are pioneers in organics, we're not just paying lip service to our premier status. We're actually situating ourselves as the fundamental players that brought organics into the wine industry.
Katrina: Soon, we spread out to the Bay Area. And my brother in law, Matthew Frey, and I would take turns going down there to sell wine. I had my funky old Volvo and I made a point of parking at least a block away from the wine shop that I was going to go into because it made me look like such a country hick. And I'd walk in to the wine shop and I would look around and I would decide whether to even mention the “O word,” organic, because it really wasn't seen as a good selling point at that point.
There was a lot of assumptions that organic wine was going to be funky, and that was still back in the day when the main joke about an organic apple was, “What's worse than finding a worm in your organic apple? Finding half a worm.” So we struggled a lot those first five years to sell the wine, but the quality was good, and we got good feedback about that. And at the same time, we spent that first decade trying to learn how to really properly make good wine.
Molly: One of the biggest practices that distinguishes Frey from other wineries is that we don't add any sulfites during our wine making. Because we come from a family devoted to organics and natural practices, nobody wanted to add any synthetic chemicals to the wine. However, a lot of different imbalances in wine are often corrected by the addition of chemicals to manipulate the desired outcomes. And nobody was educating anybody about the incredibly long list of synthetic chemicals and preservatives that are allowed in conventional winemaking. We had to really dive into what is required to make a wine with just organic grapes and yeast.
Meanwhile, the world of organic products was changing. The idea of organic agriculture was starting to catch, and people were starting to lean into the category of organics in a way that had never happened before.
Katrina: At the same time that all of the certification was going on, the country was becoming more and more interested in organics, and there was growing and growing consumer demand. And when I started really feeling the difference, when I would go out to sell was at the end of the 80s, and that was when Whole Foods first raised their roof in Austin, Texas. Across the country, there was suddenly an actual movement towards organic food. So, a lot of our growth went up in lockstep with the creation of other organic food companies and the growing demand for organics across, across the U.S. And it was really booming in the 90s, I would say, and that's when the winery did a big expansion. We started buying more and more certified organic fruit from our neighbor farmers here in Mendocino County and Lake County. And that allowed us to produce a lot more wine because we, our vineyards, weren't enough to meet the demand at that point.
Organic Grapevine at Frey Vineyards
Molly: The magic of Frey Vineyards is that really a bunch of organic farmers and a family got together to make an organic offering because we believe in organics. Not because organics was popular or an easy market to get into. The Freys are really a family living together on land in Mendocino County who want to make a contribution to the world as organic farmers.
Derek Dahlen: Frey Vineyards is really, you know, top down, family owned and operated business. Frey Vineyards was started by Jonathan and Katrina Frey and Jonathan's brothers and sisters. He's the oldest of 12 children, so there's a large labor pool to work with. And now, 40 plus years later, there are many additions to the operation from the younger generation.
It's really getting back to the point: Frey Vineyards, what's great about working here is that on a daily basis, you're spending time with family members. It's not a corporate structure like a lot of businesses this size would be because of the family dynamics that go on. And it's great to work more or less out of my back door. A lot of days our winery is adjacent to my home, and there's vineyards more or less all around us. It's nice and easy to come home for lunch.
Eliza Frey: And the winery has also been a really interesting kind of social landing ground for all the different friends and family that have, you know, passed through the Frey Ranch over the years. It's kind of a unique situation where we've had lots and lots of foreign visitors, lots and lots of interns, lots and lots of friends of family members, youth, college students. It's all kinds of people come to the winery and being included and feel connected to the family and the land and the product has been a really special thing. It's really been one of the gifts of running the business.
Beba Frey, matriarch of the Frey community
Molly: We're thrilled that we've been able to foster the growth of organics in the United States. As we've grown and evolved over the last 45 years. We've seen our family business grow into a thriving world of connections from organic growers to organic winemakers, to you, the organic consumer.
For questions or comments about the content shared here, Frey Vineyards or Frey wines, you can email info@freywine.com or call. 1 800 760 3739. Thank you for joining us for this anniversary podcast episode of the Frey Vines podcast, telling the story of organic grapes. Cheers for celebrating 45 years with us by listening to this anniversary podcast and reflecting on our journey. We hope you'll tune in for our next episodes when we'll pluck more storied fruits off the Frey Vines.