The Frey Vines Podcast “Organic Origins”
We’re happy to introduce the pilot episode “Organic Origins” of the “Frey Vines” Podcast! This podcast explores the history and present adventures at Frey Vineyards where we created and sustain the first Organic Winery in the USA. Here’s a full transcript of the first episode featuring music by The Freys, and interviews with Eliza and Jonathan Frey. “Organic Origins” is Episode 1, from Season 1 of the Frey Vines Podcast. Each month we’ll be releasing a new episode of the storied fruits plucked from the Frey Vines!
MOLLY FREY: Welcome to the pilot episode of Frey Vines, the podcast devoted to telling the story of Organic Wine. I’m Molly Frey, and I spent the last couple of decades raising goats at the Frey Ranch on my family’s land. In the past year, I’ve switched from a long career of walking the goats through the vineyards here in Redwood Valley to being more of a keyboard warrior, implementing social media strategies to get the word out to a larger audience that my family started and runs the first certified Organic and the first certified Biodynamic winery in the USA.
As pioneers in Organic & Biodynamic wine, I wanted to share my family’s process of creating something special here in Mendocino County, the greenest American Viticultural Area (or AVA for short) in California. Wine Enthusiast declared Mendocino the AVA of the year for 2024 largely because of the wonderful, sustainably produced, and award-winning wines coming out of this beautiful region of Northern California. With a 1/3 of California’s total organic grape production growing in this AVA, we believe that this distinction is in no small part due to the organic pioneering efforts of the Frey family. My aunt and uncle, Katrina and Jonathan Frey established the first organic winery when we were bonded in 1980. Why, before organics were popular, would my relatives have started an organic wine movement? And, why are there currently four generations of farmers still living on the Frey property? To explore the farming history of the Freys in more depth, here is my cousin Eliza Frey.
Organic Origins: the History
ELIZA FREY: My name is Eliza Frey. I have been working on and off at Frey Vineyard since I was quite young. I grew up in the midst of the business being created and growing. Yeah, I'm really passionate about farming and gardening and I think a lot of that came from my family history. My parents met each other working on an organic farm project. It was kind of like a commune with the British horticulturist named Alan Chadwick, and that was up in Covelo, California, which is a rural community in Mendocino County.
And so, you know, when I was a kid, they hadn't gotten into the grapes and wine as much. I grew up really in the garden with them. My mom, from her side of the family also, her grandfather had a perennial nursery in Brattleboro, Vermont. And so she grew up, within a family of horticulturalists. And so farming and gardening was always a big part of her upbringing and her personal interests. On the Frey side, one of the reasons that Beba and Paul, you know, bought the ranch in Redwood Valley was because they wanted to live a more agrarian and rural life. They had both been born in Brooklyn, New York.
MOLLY: The matriarch of our community, Beba Frey turned 100 years old this past summer. And we are so grateful to be a part of this amazing women’s family. Beba, for her own part, was a pioneer as well. When she graduated as a doctor, she was one of very few women who had been able to get accepted into medical school and complete her course of study. She then teamed up with another doctor, Paul Frey, and went on to have twelve bright, creative, and wonderful Frey children. All of the Freys share a love of organic agriculture and maintain their own personal gardens.
ELIZA: Beba ended up bonding with a farm woman in upstate New York. Her family would go up to the Catskills. Someone in their parish had a house that they would let her family [stay at]; her father was the minister of their local Lutheran church. So they would go and spend the summer up in the Catskills and Beba was the eldest of six kids and she would every day go down the lane to Flossie Arnold's farm to get milk and whatever else Flossie had at her farm and they struck up a friendship.
And one summer at the end of their stay, Flossie asked Beba if she would stay and work with her and that became a really important lifelong friendship for Beba. She and her mother didn't have a close relationship and so Flossie was like her adopted mother and she would spend every summer with her and make hay. Flossie was a widow so there would be hired hands on the farm and [Beba] really loved that lifestyle and the fresh air. So, you know, she had the the desire also to live a more rural and agrarian life, especially with her large amount of children.
MOLLY: To share more about his own deep dive into organics and how he met Katrina, here’s Eliza’s dad and Beba’s eldest son, Jonathan Frey.
JONATHAN FREY: We went to horticultural school up in Covelo. I had left home in 1970 to do a course of study at UC Santa Cruz. And then later went back, (this was for a summer session when I was a high school junior) to UC Santa Cruz and, ran into a garden project that they had there that was run by an Englishman, Alan Chadwick, who had put together a pretty interesting course of study on horticulture, mostly under classical English lines. So it was, you know, a very interesting scene there. And his garden project on the UC campus was featured in the press, it was in “Life” magazine. So it gathered quite a bit of attention.
I was all broke, I was camped out in the woods while going to the summer session in 1970, so I'd stop by the garden project. And there was a bunch of kids working there, and then Chadwick kept working on his study courses. I got to meet some of the people there. I had heard that Alan Chadwick had moved his garden project up to Covelo, of all places, in northeast Mendocino County. It was run in a very, rigorous course style. Chadwick had kept on working on his curriculum quite a bit. So it was very valuable, learning experience. You would sign up for a year, typically the same as a school year, roughly starting in the middle of September, around the time of the you know, Equinox, and then it would go for a year.
It was all free, which was great, but you would trade labor for the course of study. And so I was there during its heyday. There was probably about 80 students there, and they had a whole staff. Chadwick, of course, was the maestro who ran the whole thing, kind of along the lines of, I would say, the English armed forces, maybe. Very top down management style, but he, as I said earlier, put a lot of effort into his course. So every week there'd be lectures on Monday dealing with the subject matter for the week, which is typically a certain plant or a plant family. And then Tuesday would be, Practical Demonstrations. That's the spectrum of gardening in the classic English style. You know, including growing under glass, cold frames, composting, seed saving, plant breeding, and a heavy emphasis on flowers. So it was a very, you know, in-depth kind of you know, education.
“She had gardening in her blood.”
That's where I met Katrina. She came from a family that her mom had a green thumb. So she had gardening in her blood. And so that's where we first met. After we left Covelo, we then kicked around the country looking for different types of horticultural opportunities in North Carolina, and then up at her grandfather's nursery, and then later in Michigan, where her parents lived. None of those really panned out. So then I worked out a deal with my dad to do a kind of a truck garden on the home ranch here. So he gave me about three acres to work with.
MOLLY: A “truck garden,” for those of you who are wondering, is a garden devoted to getting your organic produce into a truck to take it to a farmer’s market somewhere. But the truck garden wasn’t the only agricultural endeavor on the Frey family land. When Paul and Beba Frey moved to Mendocino County to raise their children, they kept animals and raised crops to help feed the many mouths. As they were raising their family in the 60s, there were rumors circulating that the land where they were living was going to be bought by the government through Eminent Domain for a dam project. They took action to increase the value of the land, although the project never came to fruition.
Organic Grapes
JON: There were some grapes that were planted on the ranch here on Tomki Road in 1966. Starting then, the Army Corps of Engineers was going to build a dam on Tomki Road. It would have flooded part of my parent's property. So then they talked to some people in the area. And so they said, “why don't you go ahead and plant grapes to improve the value of your property?” And so we went down to the MLO nursery in Napa and got some cuttings. And then I heeled them into some sand, we buried them in sand, they came in bundles. And then we started planting them. I had a deal to sell the grapes with my dad.
MOLLY: For many years, the grapes were being sold to other wineries to make into wine, but in 1979, the wineries they had been selling the grapes to said that their tanks were at capacity. Jonathan Frey had friends in the winemaking business and set to educating himself about making wine. This family of organic farmers with an unlikely crop of organic grapes was put in the position of having to try their hands at making organic wine for the first time.
JON: By 1980 we had gotten the winery bonded and established a, you know, entity to do business under so we could get our business license. So we just started making wine, very small scale. It was really no capital whatsoever. The business was capitalized at $10,000 based on the value of a few tanks and pipes and pumps that we had gotten from the dairy at the old Mendocino State Hospital. But we had to assign some type of capital value. So we kind of got kick started into the wine business that way.
MOLLY: From unexpected humble beginnings the Freys created the first Organic winery in the country. We continue to produce 100% organic wines for both wholesale and retail markets over four decades later. Musical Credit for the intro music to this episode goes to “The Freys” band: Daniel, Samuel, and Adam Frey with their song “Come and Play”
Season 1, Episode 1: Organic Origins
Frey Vineyards Info
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Thank you for joining us for the Pilot episode, “Organic Origins” of the Frey Vines podcast. We hope you’ll turn in for our next episodes, in which we’ll share more of the story of Organic Wine.