New Freestone Winery up & running for

2007 harvest!

By Theresa Heredia
Associate Winemaker, Freestone

The newly-completed Freestone winery in the calm before the "storm" of harvest.

After several years of planning and anticipation, construction of the new Freestone winery in west Sonoma County was finally completed in late spring giving way to the excitement of equipment installation and harvest preparations. In July, the winemaking team consisting of myself and Justin Ennis headed to Freestone to direct the new project. In August we were joined by Office Manager Jessica Malone, who handled many of the important startup details for the new facility.

Jessica Malone and local Occidental resident intern Scott Doughty perform pigage (punching down or stomping the grapes) on a whole cluster tank.   Then came the interns… The winery, once bare and empty, overflowed with a full staff from around the world. This amazing group of passionate and intelligent winemaking individuals came to us from Australia, Spain, New Zealand and California. They arrived just in time to help with barrel arrangement, equipment sanitation, ordering supplies, grape sampling and much, much more. The energy, excitement and honor that each person felt as a member of the inaugural vintage made this team incomparable. Two months of intense preparation passed quickly and then finally, the moment we had all been awaiting; Freestone Vineyard’s inaugural harvest.

Winery construction team and Freestone crew observe grape sorting on the new equipment (Theresa in pink and Brian Gustine of Hensel Phelps Construction to her left). On September 5th the first six tons of Pinot Noir grapes from the Quarter Moon vineyard were presented to the winery. Greg Cannon, Joel Robledo and the vineyard team provided the winery with such pristine fruit that many of the grapes were delivered directly to tank as whole clusters. This would continue for the remainder of the harvest allowing us to consider many different winemaking options. Even the interns had a chance to apply their talent to the winemaking process. Each team received a tank and submitted a proposal for approval before the onset of fermentation: one group coined the name “The Perfume Project” and the other “Insane in the Stem-brain”; both experimental wines are great and are likely destined for the 2007 Freestone Sonoma Coast blend!

After these initial few days of harvesting, the weather cooled enough to halt Pinot Noir picking for almost another two weeks. Chardonnay, however, benefited during this cool period, ripening evenly while preserving natural acidity. We used this to our advantage and began harvesting some of our Chardonnay blocks, focusing exclusively on our white winemaking regime while the Pinot Noir ripened further. The second wave of Pinto Noir harvesting began on September 25th and provided slightly different grape chemistry from the first group. The nature of our fermentations was altered and the resulting wine composition differed in tannin ripeness, fruit concentration and acid balance. These two mini Pinot Noir harvests yielded a variety of different, complex and exciting blending components.

The next interesting phase will be the evaluation of each lot of wine following completion of the malolactic fermentation. The actual blending process, anticipated sometime later this year, will focus on producing the best wines yet. After all, this is the inaugural vintage for the new winery!