FREESTONE VINEYARDS

by Michelle J. Baker
In the wine world, the name Joseph Phelps has been synonymous with great innovation and high quality since 1972, when construction entrepreneur Phelps founded a Napa Valley winery bearing his name. Phelps wasn’t afraid to take the big risks, including making the first Bordeaux-style blend in California, Insignia, which now has more than 30 years at the head of its class.
Now the Phelps family has set out to make a name among Burgundy varietals along the Sonoma Coast. In the late 1990s Bill Phelps, Joseph Phelps’s son and Chairman of the Board of Joseph Phelps Vineyards, spent months with the management team in search of the perfect piece of land on which to plant Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. They found it in the rugged foothills near Freestone, an historic village in west Sonoma County just over six miles from the coast and 15 miles east of Santa Rosa.
The Phelps’s then planted nearly 100 acres of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay on...

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