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f a l l 2 0 1 8 | 2 9 F etzer Vineyards celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and while the winery's founding is officially on the books as occurring in 1968, Fetzer's story truly began more than a decade earlier. In 1957, Bernard "Barney" Fetzer moved his family down from Medford, Oregon, to an 800-acre ranch in Mendocino County's Redwood Valley. The family's first property didn't have a fixer-upper more so than a "tear-it-downer": By then, Barney and his wife, Kathleen, were raising eight of their eventual 11 children, and the patriarch and his older sons built a new home together using lots of scavenged material. The family followed the same self-reliant approach years later while scrapping to- gether their boutique-style winery. The original Mendocino property also came with a vineyard, a handy caretaker who could fix tractors, and the help of a family who assisted in pruning and picking the 27,000 grapevines. (In the beginning, the Fetzers sold off their fruit to a big producer.) In Kathleen Fetzer's book Kathleen's Vineyard, her son Jim recalls that they "farmed organically in the beginning, and there was an abundance of insects, song- birds and other life in the fields." "As we moved to the chemical world of farming, the insects, singing birds, and other life quickly vanished, as did the quality of the fruit," Jim continues. "In the mid-1980s, we changed our farming systems back to organic ways of building life in the soil and encouraging diversity in the field . . . The soils have come to life again, and the fruit has shown to produce a much higher- quality wine. We haven't looked back since." PHOTOS COURTESY OF FETZER VINEYARDS A piece of history: Kathleen Fetzer (center) surrounded by the 11 Fetzer children in Mendocino County, CA, in the 1980s. Ben Byczynski serves as the Director of Grower Relations at Fetzer Vineyards.

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