Wine Spectator's Wine of the Year is Quite the Story

The Wine Spectator's team of Editors and staff selected the 2009 Kosta Browne Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir as their Wine of the Year. This wine has a release price of $52 USD. Now, this is not a wine we would readily run out and purchase, but the story of how the two partners came to attain this aware is super interesting.

Dan Kosta and Michael Browne worked together as waiters at the John Ash Co. Restaurant in Sonoma (which we have ironically eaten at). They fancied the idea of owning and running a winery and began to save $10 each from their tips to go towards the first step in their dream. When they got to $1300, they had enough to buy a half ton of Pinot Noir grapes, a used De-stemmer/Crusher, and a Wine Barrel. From there they taught themselves how to become winemakers, with many mistakes along the way. Each year, they got a little better and got better at selecting the grapes to use. As self-taught winemakers they worked with one of the most difficult grapes to make good wine from and eventually knocked it out of the park.
 
One of the amazing things about the pair is that they do not own a vineyard or winery. They rent space in order to make their wine. They have never grown a grape. They leverage the grapes grown by tried and true suppliers who grow Pinot Noir from several vineyards around Sonoma. It was a dream they had and they made it happen. It is fascinating. While this summary obviously over-simplifies the journey from waiters to Wine of the Year, it does show that a dream and perseverance count.  So much so, that they sold a majority portion of their wine company to Vincraft in 2009 for a reported $36 million.  That is a great return on investment from that tip money.

Lesson? 

Follow your dreams!

Oh and keep on drinking!

Chris & Shannon