Pioneers in Organic Winemaking

Frey Vineyards started as a commitment to organic agriculture and winemaking when there was none. In 1980, young sweethearts Katrina and Jonathan Frey made their first barrel of wine. They both had become organic farmers under Alan Chadwick’s tutelage. Although they had respectively grown up in gardening families, after they studied under the charismatic Shakespearean teacher, together they embarked on their enterprise: founding America’s first organic winery. With the support of Jonathan’s brother Matthew, they built the first winery, became certified organic, and started fermenting Frey wine. There weren’t any other organic wineries at the time, and organics hadn’t caught the favor that it currently enjoys.Surrounded by a hilly nature reserve in Northern California’s Mendocino County, the Frey Ranch started much earlier when doctors Paul and Beba Frey settled and raised their twelve children. Each of the Frey siblings took an interest in farming after their mother, Beba, passed on her desire from her youth spent in upstate New York growing food each summer. Since they were living on the Frey Ranch, there was a personal interest in supporting organics for the health of their community and their children (and now their grandchildren). Four generations of Freys now live in the areas surrounding the old winery site and vineyards.Over the years, several of the Freys joined the Frey Vineyards team. Paul (Junior) has become internationally renowned as a no-sulfites-added winemaker. Luke Frey has been awarded similarly for his advancement in biodynamic agriculture. Tamara Frey has a successful career creating delicious meals with local, organic, and sustainable ingredients. Together, they made a winery that focused on more than just grapes. Nathaniel Frey’s incredible photography skill lent itself well to winery promotion. Other siblings with business acumen joined the board, and others still used their engineering skills to build the winery infrastructure further.

In the four decades since Frey Vineyards started, the family has been pushing the envelope on ecological practices to further their family enterprise. In the past, the family created a sustainable food system on the ranch, providing dairy products (with milk coming from an in-house herd of goats and cows), sourdough bread (from biodynamic grains grown between the vineyard rows and milled on site), grapeseed oil (pressed from organic grape seeds leftover from winemaking), locally grown olives (from an orchard planted by the family in between the Cabernet and Zinfandel rows on the home ranch), and locally produced meat (from animals grazed in the vineyards) for the winery employees. However, in 2017, a wildfire destroyed the family homes and most of the infrastructure on the Frey Ranch.

February 28, 2024 – Before organic agriculture was popular, there was a family of farmers who wanted to change the world. They started America’s first organic winery and they’ve set the standard in organic wine production since 1980! These old photos, in order of appearance, are: Beba Frey as a young woman working on a farm in upstate New York, a trio of young Freys (Caroline, Eliza, and Daniel) on the ranch, Katrina and Johnathan Frey in their garden, Beba Frey working on the farm, old grape harvesting boxes in the vineyards, a Frey family harvest, and a car parked in front of the original winery building.

Since then, the rebuilding efforts have been focused on making the new winery as green as possible. Frey Vineyards has rolled out every environmental stop for a state-of-the-art winemaking facility. As America’s first organic winery, Frey Vineyards has been pursuing the most ecologically sound business practices since its inception. With the rebuild, Frey has been afforded an opportunity to start over, crafting things anew with the latest and greatest ecological technologies available. Organic winemaking, although a minority market, has been steadily increasing since Frey started; there are now lots of competitors in the market looking to capitalize on this organic niche. The youngest consumers of wine (in the 20-30-year-old age group) have the highest interest in choosing an organic product for reasons of personal and environmental health. 

Frey Vineyards is not just about organic wine; it’s an environmental establishment committed to producing a “pure” product. The new site wastewater treatment employs a small army of earthworms who do an amazing job of composting the wine wastewater so that it can be used as fertilizer for the grapes once more. This “BioFiltro” system, a testament to our commitment to innovation, was successfully installed at the new winery site to be able to transform the wastewater efficiently in a couple of hours. As of early 2024, BioFiltro claims that over 49,000,000,000 gallons of wastewater have been regenerated for use in agriculture by their systems worldwide. BioFiltro is a carbon-neutral company with a patented filtration system that uses the humble but effective earthworm.

Recently, Frey brought on two Monarch electric tractors to add to the vineyard vehicle fleet. These 100 percent electric tractors can run on solar. Over the holidays last year, the Frey family used one of the monarch tractors to light a completely solar-powered Christmas tree in a living redwood tree on the Frey Ranch. Our winemaker Paul got about a mile of lights strung up at the edge of a redwood tree grove. With the help of a surveyor friend, they triangulated the tree’s height and found that it was 192 feet tall! Then, with a drone, they took row after row of lights to the top. Miraculously, the LED lights display only used around 80 watts of power, and the entire setup ran on solar energy from one of our solar-powered Monarch tractors. We believe Paul has set a record for the world’s tallest living and decorated Christmas tree! A large solar array atop the winery warehouse is also in the works to replace the solar array that was destroyed during the fire.

Frey Vineyards focuses on maintaining both hedgerows and gardens for the surrounding ecosystem. The Biodynamic wine certification requires that 10 percent of a farm be reserved for native plant habitat. In addition to more than meeting that requirement with our surrounding nature reserve (spanning 100s of acres), our garden team has been adding a native plant sanctuary to the new winery development. The focus on California natives directly supports pollinators in the ecosystem, including an array of milkweeds planted to foster a thriving community of monarch butterflies on their migration routes. These biodiversity measures also bolster better yields for the grape harvest, provide more nutrient value to the wine grapes grown, and increase our market value. That’s good, green business!

Article by Molly Frey is the Social Media Coordinator at Frey Vineyards. She loves telling the story of Frey Vineyards, our love of land stewardship, and organic winemaking. For the last 16 years, she tended to a herd of goats on the Frey Ranch. Her debut novel, “Wildfire Weeds,” explores the themes of wildfire ecology, sustainability, and climate change within the setting of a pot farm in Northern California. In response to the global pandemic and the need for more good news about how humans can thrive, she has created a podcast called “The Positive Fantastic.”

 Molly is a mom to a wonderful teenage son in a small town in Mendocino County, where she enjoys gardening, writing, and storytelling through social media.