The Wine
Our newest podcast episode shares all about the wine we make at Frey Vineyards. With several organic options available in our wine shop, this podcast explores our different varietals, our different labels, and different certifications. Please enjoy the full transcript below or listen to the podcast on your favorite streaming platform.
MOLLY FREY: Welcome to the sixth episode of Frey Vines, the podcast devoted to telling the story of organic wine! Today, we’re focusing on all the many fantastic wine offerings from Frey Vineyards.
ELIZA FREY: At the beginning of Frey Vineyards, we only produced a couple of varietals of wine, and those were the grapes that were historically grown on our home ranch that were planted in the seventies. Over the years, as the business got established, people wanted more availability and selection in the organic and non-sulfited realm.
MOLLY: When Frey opened our winery doors 45 years ago, we had no idea what a world of organic wine we would be creating. Being the first organic winery meant that we spent a lot of time in the early years educating and advocating for Organic wine’s place at the table. As the popularity for organics grew, we helped create the organic wine category in the industry, and we significantly expanded our wine offerings. We have held fast to our uncompromising commitment to creating the highest quality wines available for you to enjoy.
An award-winning line up of Frey Wines
ELIZA: And so as we expanded our production and planted more vineyards and started working with more growers. We've ended up with a really wide selection of varietals and blends for people to have access to. Within our own vineyards we were very much based on heritage varieties from Mendocino County and things that were really known to do really well in our region.
So we started with Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, which has been grown since the 1800s in Mendocino County. We did Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. Over the past decade or so, we've had a lot of fun expanding some of our new plantings into more exciting and lesser-produced varietals. So that's when we've brought in Malbec and Tempranillo and Dolcetto and Barbera, and that has been really fun to grow small lots of more specialty wines to produce those smaller lots and bottle them for our customers.
That's one of the things that makes America really interesting versus Europe in terms of wine regions. Europe's wine traditions are so strongly ingrained and their appellations are so tightly controlled that there, there are a lot of limitations on the kinds of varietals that you can grow in a given appellation or region. And one of the great things about being in the US is that we have total choice over what we grow where. So there are certain varieties while historically weren't grown in a climate like ours, we have experimented and started growing them here. And while the wines might have a little bit different characteristics of kind of the typical regional expression of a given varietal, we've made some wonderful wines with them.
The grape I'm thinking of most is Pinot Noir, which has traditionally been a cool-weather grape, but we've found that Pinot Noir does really nicely in Redwood Valley. You end up with a little bit more robust and fruit-forward wine, but the vines do well, the grapes are nice, and so we've had success with kind of pushing the limits of a given climate or region where a particular varietal can grow, and that has been a fun experimentation and learning process for us.
MOLLY: In addition to our classic Organic wine line, we have added several other wonderful wines to our wine offerings. Starting in the 1990s, we became the first certified Biodynamic winery in the USA, and we’ve been making a line of Biodynamic wines ever since. Because the Biodynamic and Organic certifications are not the same, we have chosen to certify every bottle of Frey wine as Organic, and the Biodynamic line is also certified by the Demeter Association. All of our wines can be found in our wine shop at www.freywine.com
In the more recent past, Frey Vineyards expanded to offer our Pacific Redwood line of wines. These wines are offered exclusively in retail stores across the country. They are the same great organic selections that you have come to love from Frey.
Additionally, we helped our colleague and friend Nicky Coachman-Robinson to produce the Kwaya Cellars organic trio of Chardonnay, Sangiovese, and Merlot wines. These three are available both in our wine shop and at retail locations throughout the United States.
ELIZA: Another way that we've expanded what varietals we grow is by our vineyard acquisitions. So certain vineyards we bought were already planted, so we sort of inherited whatever was at the ranch. So that's when we first got into Pinot Grigio, for instance, we bought a vineyard that was planted in Pinot Grigio, and that's become, you know, one of my personal favorite white wines that we make.
But among the grapes that we grow the oldest vines we have are Cabernet Sauvignon Vines that were planted in the sixties. We also have some, some plantings from the sixties of Carignan and Zinfandel over at Road D. When we first started the winery, we were focused purely on varietals, and pretty soon we realized and started to learn, I think, as our family grew as winemakers and gained more experience. Really some of the beauty of blends, and this is something that Europe has known for a very long time, that blended wines can be, um, really balanced in their expression because what one particular varietal might lack. Another varietal can fill in.
So if something is really juicy and jammy and the other has the acidity, you put them together and you get the best of both worlds. So in the early nineties, we came out with our first blended table wine, which was “Organic Red,” and we had organic red for a few years. And there's an interesting story about the label regulation of organic red when we first decided to make a medium bodied red table wine, we decided to call it organic red and things were going along well. And then, because of label regulation at the federal level before 2002, there was no federal definition of organic, the word organic —that got codified by the federal government in 2002 when the National Organic Program was adopted under the USDA.
MOLLY: All of the wines we make at Frey Vineyards are certified organic, vegan, gluten-free, and have no sulfites added! Every varietal, every bottle, every sip meets the highest standards available. We started making organic wine before there was a federal organic standard, but we’ve always had the strictest commitment to bringing the best quality wines to you.
ELIZA: And so before that happened, we were barred from using the word organic on our label because there wasn't a federal definition. And at that point we had to scramble to figure out what we could call this wine that we had historically been calling “Organic Red,” and we settled on “Natural Red.” And so for about 20 years, our red blend was called Natural Red.
We started running into problems with it as we started to become suspicious of some of the natural claims. Natural is not a regulated term and it doesn't have a federal definition, and so anyone can kind of slap the word natural on any product or food that they're making, and it doesn't really give the consumer a whole lot of information.
Around the year 2020, we reverted back to “Organic Red,” and this was because now we had the federal definition to back up the claim. We are indeed certified organic, and so we could use the words organic red. It also got us back to the roots of that blend. Because there was no federal definition of organic, we were limited to only calling our red blend natural red, and it was kind of business as usual with selling that wine as natural red. But we were very excited a few years ago when we went back to the original verbiage of the LA of the label being organic red, and we also have organic whites.
The idea behind the blends, the “Organic Red,” “Organic White,” and “Organic Rosé,” is to have medium-bodied, food-friendly wines that are available at a reasonable price point for kind of everyday consumption of people who want that in their diet. And as wine makers having the blends, it gives us options of which wines we can use in a given year. If we are heavy on one varietal versus another, the blends will kind of shift to reflect what we have in stock and what the seasons are. But we do have our flavor profiles that we're aiming for in the blending process. Blending wine is really an art. There are so many directions you can go with it. And it's really amazing what altering 3 - 5% of a given blend can do to the character of the finished wine.
And so that's something that we spend a lot of time on with our blends, is really tasting through the wines from each grower or each vineyard, getting a handle, getting familiar with them, and figuring out what their strengths and weaknesses are. And then from the whole selection that we have, really dialing in what tastes the best and what makes sense logistically in terms of the seller processes and pumping one tank into another. And so there's a lot of nuance and factors, and at the end of the day, it really is, it's kind of an art where you work with, what you have, you experiments, you share it with others, and as a group, we kind of come to a decision of what our final blends will be.
MOLLY: In terms of our blended offerings, Frey Vineyards currently offers the Organic table wines Eliza was mentioning, the Agriculturalist blends, and also a Biodynamic Field blend.
ELIZA: The Biodynamic field blend gets its name from an old style of blended wine that growers would do where they would, in a given vineyard block, they would plant many different kinds of grapes and then all of those would get harvested together and fermented together. That's not always how we produce the field blend. What we often do is actually have designated vineyards in tanks, and then we do the blending process after. The Biodynamic Field Blend is a red blend from our estate grown grapes. That means grapes that are grown in our home vineyards by our own staff and family.
The biodynamic field blend as opposed to our organic red is a more full-bodied and robust blend, and so we usually, we rely pretty heavily on Syrah, Merlot, and Cabernet for those blends. There's often Petite Sirah in it as well. And again, it changes season to season and kind of that intuition and art of which wine is needed to round out the flavor profile, the mouth feel, the color, the aromas, and so that's a very playful time in the wine making year.
Basically what we do is we have tank samples. We get samples from the tanks of all the different wines that are available for the blend. We do a little calculation to figure out the volume of the finished blend, how much we think we'll be needing for our customers for the year, and then we sit down and find the strongest blend as the foundation. Blends are composed of kind of middle, low, and high notes. The middle is sort of the backbone, the foundational line. The high notes are the aroma and acidity, and the low notes are alcohol, tannin, and the kind of darker, bitter skin flavors of reds.
MOLLY: We hope that this podcast has helped you understand all the wine offerings that we have at Frey Vineyards. Whether you’re at your favorite store picking up a bottle for dinner or you’re a regular Wine Club member who receives curated shipments several times a year, Frey Vineyards is here to bring you award-winning Organic and Biodynamic wines that you can trust are made to the highest standards possible. If you have a favorite varietal that you would like delivered to your door regularly, we have a subscription service in the Frey wine shop. And finally, if you want to spread the love of Frey wine, we offer gift certificates for you to give to your wine loving friends to use in our wine shop.
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. Our retail staff is happy to help you Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm Pacific Standard Time. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Frey Vines Podcast, telling the story of organic grapes. We hope you'll tune in for our next episodes when we'll pluck more storied fruits off the Frey Vines.