Kosta Browne's Wild Ride

<p>Last March at World of Pinot Noir in Pismo Beach, the annual gathering of pinot noir aficionados and the newly released pinots they love, one tasting booth was swarmed like no other: Kosta Browne.</p><p>The draw? The first taste of the winery’s 2006 wines. Known for their velvety representation of the Russian River Valley, Kosta Browne’s “New World”-style pinot, as it’s been characterized, is big and lush.</p><p>The Sebastopol-based partnership of Dan Kosta and Michael Browne started by making one barrel of pinot in 1997. A decade later, the rock star attention is still relatively new.</p><p>“World of Pinot’s been an interesting barometer on the buzz about our brand,” Browne noted. “With the 2002 vintage there were a few people checking it out. With the ’03, a little more buzz and then for the ’04 vintage it was two-, three-people deep. The ’05, five deep and last year it was just a zoo.”</p><p>The goal of making great Sonoma County pinot noir, from the best vineyard sources in the Russian River especially, dates back to the duo’s days as waiters and sommeliers at John Ash & Co. restaurant in Santa Rosa, where they both got jobs in the early 1990s.</p><p>“We went through hard-knock university and really learned as we went,” said Browne. “... People think we appeared out of nowhere. We don’t want to be a quick rise and flash in the pan. We want to sustain this thing and make it better every year, which is the challenge.”</p><p>Kosta grew up in Sonoma County, where his dad owned a wine shop for a few years in the early 1980s, Cellarmaster Wines in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square. It was there Kosta was given his first chance to taste and learn about wine.</p><p>“Burgundy was about it at that time,” Kosta remembers of the pinot noirs in his dad’s store. “My exposure to Russian River pinot came through the restaurant business in the late ’80s. We were exposed to Williams Selyem, Rochioli, Joe Swan, Dehlinger. There were some other labels making mediocre pinot noir but the ones that were good were really good.”</p><p>Browne, a transplant from Washington originally interested in architecture, also got the pinot noir bug working the floor at John Ash.</p><p>“Our higher-end clients that knew the most about wine, were the most passionate, were into pinot,” he remembers. “Making the wine, I always wanted to have a challenge and people always said (pinot) was the hardest one.”</p><p>The two started pooling their tip money, putting aside $10 into an envelope each night they worked. Jeffrey Madura, until recently the executive chef at John Ash, threw in a third’s worth and together they bought a half ton of grapes and made a full barrel of pinot. The year was 1997.</p><p>“Michael just fell in love with wine,” said Madura, who still has three bottles of the 1997. “And Dan has always had a great palate, he was born with that. It’s a great thing to see two guys having this vision and it getting to this level.”</p><p>One local winemaker who helped them learn as they went was the late John Farrington, who had worked at Williams Selyem.</p><p>“At first he was reluctant to share information, but he gave me tidbits here and there and I just learned how to do it by doing it,” Browne says. “Whatever worked, I did more of; whatever didn’t, I stopped doing.”</p><p>One of Kosta Browne’s first important Russian River grape sources was Cohn Vineyard, which Farrington knew from his Williams Selyem days. The 2000 Cohn Vineyard would mark the pair’s first commercial release. Then Browne met grower Dennis Koplen through his son, Chris, who was bartending at John Ash. Kosta Browne started buying grapes from Koplen Vineyard in 2002, releasing a vineyard designate soon after.</p><p>By the 2002 vintage, the critics and pinot-lovers started to take notice. Before long, a cult wine was born.</p><p>“Kosta Browne has a big following locally in our store and also with customers on our e-newsletter list that reside out of California,” said Michael Traverso, the wine buyer at Traverso’s in Santa Rosa, one of the first retailers to carry their wines.</p><p>“Kosta Browne hit the big points at the right time when the pinot-‘Sideways’ phenomenon came to the marketplace,” he added. “(It) couldn’t have been better timing.”</p><p>When the 2003 vintage was released, it “really hit it,” Browne said. “Then the underground started getting into it, the wine boards and blogs, and then the thing just started taking off, it was on fire. We were going, oh my god what do we have on our hands? A tiger by the tail.”</p><p>Now their challenge is keeping up with demand. From 2004 to 2005 to 2006, Kosta Browne went from making 4,000 to 7,000 to 11,000 cases. This year they suspect it’ll be between 11,000 and 12,000 with a couple of new vineyard sources coming on near Annapolis and a new vineyard designate, Pisoni from the Santa Lucia Highlands.</p><p>With the goal of getting better every year, it’s been perhaps incompatible to also get bigger. And so Kosta Browne remains one of those painfully hard-to-find wines. The mailing list has a waiting list, retail is practically non-existent, and local restaurants like Syrah, Zazu, John Ash and Mirepoix struggle to keep the wines in stock.</p><p>The two live in the appellation they love, Kosta on Olivet Road with wife Alli and two young daughters; Browne in Windsor where his family includes three small kids. Along the way they’ve graduated from making their wines wherever they could to building out their own 18,000-square-foot facility in the old VacuDry plant off Highway 116, which they moved into prior to the 2007 crush.</p><p>Year to year since 2002 the buzz on Kosta Browne seems only to intensify. It’s been a surreal experience for Browne, a self-taught winemaker who describes his “biggest psychological trip” happening just after the 2003 vintage wines each earned scores between 90 and 96 from Wine Spectator.</p><p>“Now we’re all busy enough to not get too caught up in it,” Browne muses. “We’re busier than ever.” </p><p>Virginie Boone is a freelance wine writer based in Sonoma County. She can be reached at virginieboone@yahoo.com or visitwineabout.pressdemocrat.com.</p>