STORIES OF FIRE AND WINE FRED PETERSON:
The modest, talented Californian tells Margaret Rand about his path from the US Navy, to being a part-time fireman and Dry Creek Valley fine winemaker
people are full of amour-propre; Fred doesn’t seem to be. “That’s not terribly unfair,” he replied. “I have great admiration for Ridge, and I had the privilege of working for Paul Draper for many years.” Fred has in fact worked for quite a few people in California, always managing vineyards or making wine; he didn’t set up his own winery until 1995. And even then, you get the impression that it was a bit accidental. “I just wanted to make wine,” he says of his career. “I was never concerned about having my name on the door.” He’s stubborn, too. He describes himself as “transparent; what you see is what you get. I’m a terrible liar. My best friend is my brother Mike; I never knew what I wanted to do, but he wanted to be a cop. He can lie with the right face; it’s a gift I never had, but I don’t regret it.” It’s all been a bit accidental, actually, Fred’s life. He seems never to have had a driving vision, though he says he is driven— “in a weird way. What the fuck is success? But fear of failure is a big thing.” He now makes Zinfandel from Dry Creek Valley that is deep and complex, savory and subtle, and reminiscent of Ridge. And rather like Ridge, it has an admixture of other grapes: Petite Sirah, Carignan, Grenache. “We always blend a bit of Carignan in Zinfandel.” Those last three, plus Syrah, go into Mendo Blendo from Redwood Valley, and from the same Tollini Vineyard comes Zero Manipulation, which is Carignan, Grenache, and Syrah. There are other wines, too, from Bradford Mountain Vineyard, including a White Blend of Vermentino, Vernaccia, and Verdelho. Oh, and in his spare time he used to be a fireman. His father also worked for the San Francisco Fire Department, and Fred grew up in South San Francisco, an area that Fred describes as “meatpacking, steel; very industrial. Now it’s high-tech. But it was a great place to grow up, and you could hike to the ocean.
W “When I was younger, I never considered being a firefighter.
But at UC Davis they formed a firefighting crew and I needed to make money one summer, so I became a part of that crew.” That was in the summers of 1976 and 1977, both drought years, and he really enjoyed it. So, in early 1987 he joined the Geyserville Fire Protection District as a volunteer, partly to do something for the community and partly to get himself out of his comfort zone of grapes and wine. He’d enjoyed the camaraderie of the
Opposite: Fred Peterson with his son Jamie, who joined his father as assistant winemaker in 2002 and is now in charge of the family winery.
ould it be terribly rude, Fred, to describe you as the poor man’s Ridge? The thing about Fred Peterson is that even if you’ve only met him briefly before, you can ask him things like this. Some
navy, too; but of course, firefighting wasn’t all fun. There were suicides to deal with, car crashes, things that he couldn’t forget. But he loved the teamwork, the physicality.
Join the navy, see the vineyard But already we’re going too far ahead. The US Navy? UC Davis? Okay, the navy. This was the era of the Vietnam War, which
Fred was against; he protested and said he was a conscientious objector, “which drove my father crazy. He said I was a coward, and it stung.” To prove he wasn’t, he enlisted in the navy as a hospital foreman, which meant going with the military to Vietnam but not carrying a weapon. “I didn’t want to get shot at in a war I didn’t believe in.” But “I scored high in tests, and I was going to be sent to Intelligence, until Intelligence interviewed me and learned of my politics.” So, he went to radio school instead and was posted to a communications station in Guam, then to an ammunitions ship that was being decommissioned, and then to a supply ship. “It was quite cool.” The ship was USS Regulus, and it ran aground in Hong Kong in a typhoon (nothing to do with Fred, I should add), which meant three extra weeks in Hong Kong. “I’m not that bright, but I’m really lucky.” Back in the US, Fred spent his final six months on a large
tugboat in Pearl Harbor, towing targets for target practice three days a week, with the rest of the week off, then a stint in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Then he planned to go UC Santa Cruz, with a major in pre-med. In devout Sicilian Catholic families like that of his mother, he says, you can become a priest or a doctor, and he was not going to be a priest. Not that he wanted to be a doctor either. Actually, the attraction of UC Santa Cruz was girls, rugby, and scuba diving, he says. Eventually, he decided he wanted to do something in agriculture. “A buddy had a motorcycle, and I went with him to Iowa, to the farm of a friend. It was the first time I’d driven a tractor or hoed beet. So, I wanted to do agriculture. An adviser at UC said, ‘Take time off and consider what you want to do, and then come back.’” But what to do? A friend said he could work on his family vineyard, and there was an agricultural program at Mendocino Junior College.
And he reconnected with wine. “Reconnected” because
Fred’s mother’s Sicilian roots meant there had always been wine on the dinner table, but quality wasn’t really a consideration. “So, in a peculiar way I have to thank the navy for connecting me to good wine.”
Back in Santa Cruz, he worked at Bargetto Winery, and
because he didn’t have a car, he used to hitchhike. One Saturday, a Lambretta stopped for him; “I didn’t know it was a woman; she was six foot tall and wearing a helmet.” She was called Martha, and they later married.
THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 87 | 2025 | 93
Photography courtesy of Peterson
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