Our Freeport Series of Wines
Introducing Our New Freeport Label Series Featuring Freeport Annie: Queen of the Lake Erie Rum Runners
 We are thrilled to introduce our New Freeport Annie story labels for our Freeport Series of wines. Our Freeport wines are our line of delicious everyday wines for every occasion - bright, versatile, easy drinking semi-dry wines that appeal to wine lovers across the taste preference spectrum. We love these wines and wanted to give them the bottle spruce-up they deserved so we decided to enlist the talents of Catalina Pieri, a great young artist whose work we discovered during a visit to Savannah, GA, to help us create memorable new label images for our Freeport wines
Our Freeport Series - a red, a white, a rosé, and a sparkling rosé - honors Freeport which was one of the earliest settlements in our area of Pennsylvania. Freeport was established in the late 1700’s as America was being born. It was created and named as a free port in the new, loosely governed country in honor of the recently earned freedom from oppressive British rule and taxation. It was a small port where local fishermen, lumbermen, and merchants could bring their goods ashore for transport to market via the new road built in the 1790’s. There is little or no history available on Freeport or its founding except that the first permanent settlers came to the area in the 1790’s. So, we get to make up our own stories. Our story of choice, as told in our new Freeport label series, revolves around rumrunning during Prohibition and that story has a basis in historical reality. Rum running on Lake Erie was a real thing and the Erie area, because it was a quieter port centrally located between Cleveland and Buffalo and an easy shot to Pittsburgh, was one of the centers  of rum running activity on the Great Lakes during Prohibition. From Erie it is also only a short 30 mile run across the lake to Canada. To navigate the choppy waters of Lake Erie, to have enough concealed storage to fit a profitable amount of liquor, and to make quick trips across the Lake with enough speed and horsepower to outrun the Coast Guard when necessary, the rum runners’ boats of choice were the beautiful, high powered wood boats made by the Dart Boat Company in Toledo Ohio.
 Fast forward from 1790 to 1918 where we meet Anne McCord a beautiful, fierce young widow who has been dealt double tragedy, the loss of her husband on the battlefields of Europe in the last days of World War I and the loss of her parents to the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918. Her family operated an inn and tavern near the original Freeport site which she was now left to run on her own and support her two children. She was clever and resourceful and hard-working and was able to make a go of it but was soon again gravely challenged with the beginning of Prohibition in  1919 that closed down her tavern business and threatened the livelihood and well-being of her family. Not one to be defeated and furious at the US Government for its sanctimonious, heavy-handed institution of Prohibition and for mismanaging the pandemic that decimated her family, she saw a business opportunity and thought that the quiet, unassuming harbor of Freeport well away from the main Coast Guard stations would be the perfect place to bring in liquor from Canada under cover of night. She made agreements with her Canadian contacts to purchase liquor and set up a speakeasy in the basement of her inn that became a local legend and her rum running business thrived. Her sharp intelligence, her unflappable determination, her sense of honor, and her ferocity when needed helped her to build a really successful business with loyal customers and to fight off competitors and evade the authorities. During Prohibition she became known as Freeport Annie, Queen of the Lake Erie Rum Runners, and Freeport thrived and returned to its roots as a free port operating outside the authority of an overreaching government.
 After Prohibition, Annie and her children, accustomed to the excitement and adventure of their lives during the Prohibition years, felt the need to move on to a life in a less sleepy part of the world. She sold her inn and moved her family to Pittsburgh where we lose her trail. We suspect that with her cleverness and her hoard of Prohibition cash and the proceeds from selling the inn that she navigated through The Great Depression in good shape and lived out her days in style and elegance. Sadly, the inn did not survive the Great Depression and today, nearly 100 years later, all trace of it has vanished. The 20’s heyday and spirit of Freeport and Freeport Annie live on, though, in our Freeport wine series and our new labels inspired by her story and the visual and artistic styles of the period.
Freeport Annie is visually inspired by Gertrude Lythgoe, the real-life Queen of  the Caribbean Rum Runners, and our new labels take advantage of the rich graphic visual opportunity presented by references to lake waves, art deco wallpaper patterns from the 20’s, sleek and polished wood Dart Boat images, elegant 1920’s women and those incomparable hats and dresses, moonlight, barrels and glasses of wine and liquor, and speakeasies.
Enjoy!
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