Wine, Brothers and Song

It’s an old story. Country boy makes good in the city, buys a farm so his family can enjoy the country life and then finds out he’s growing major-league Cabernet Sauvignon. Only this time, he’s managing a hit rock band at the same time.

It started in 1969, when Bruce Cohn and his brother, Marty, hooked up with a rock band named Pud. He changed its name to the Doobie Brothers, got it a record deal and began a long odyssey of dealing with the myriad personalities of an ever-changing band (14 musicians have played in the Doobies over the years). He negotiated contracts, handled hundreds of music-related activities, acted as a surrogate parent and spent a lot of his time on the road.

But he’d been reared on a farm in Forestville, Sonoma County, where milking goats had been a household chore, and realized he missed the country life. He bought Olive Hill vineyard in 1974 as a home for his wife and kids.

There were still amazing bargains to be had in those days. One of the properties Cohn turned down faced a dramatic towering hill, but the package included a deal-breaker: The property owner wanted to keep a piece of land among the grapevines for himself to build a home on one day. “I didn’t want to look out my window and see his house,” says Cohn. Today that property is Chateau St. Jean.

What Cohn ended up buying was 56 sloping acres of rich soil in the Valley of the Moon. On the southern tip of the property, there was a natural spring that had been a watering hole on the Santa Rosa-Sonoma stagecoach route a century before. A grove of olive trees shaded the long and winding driveway. The 1920s-vintage home, with large rooms and numerous windows looking out onto a hillside, was set well back from the road, so there was no road noise.

As for the grapes from the property’s vines, mostly Cabernet and Chardonnay, they were just a bonus. Cohn sold them to the Sebastiani and Kenwood wineries.

But in 1974, Julio Gallo himself, of E&J; Gallo Winery, showed up at Olive Hill in a helicopter and offered Cohn a better price for his Cabernet grapes than he had been getting. This woke Cohn up to the possibility that he might be able to do more with them than sell them to Sebastiani, who was mixing them with grapes from Lodi in the Central Valley to make generic Cabernet.

He didn’t know exactly how good his grapes were, so he asked Charles Wagner, winemaker at Caymus Vineyards over in Napa Valley, to make a test batch of Olive Hill Cabernet. “When he tasted the wine,” Cohn said, “Charlie told me, ‘Bruce, you’re missing the boat. You’ve got the best Cabernet I’ve ever tasted from Sonoma. Get August [Sebastiani] to do a vineyard designation for you.’

“So I called August, and he said he didn’t do vineyard designations but Jim Bundschu did.”

Cohn then started selling grapes to Gundlach-Bundschu Vineyards, and Gundlach-Bundschu put out Cabernet Sauvignons under its own label with the Olive Hill vineyard designation in 1979 and 1980. Ravenswood also made an Olive Hill Cabernet in 1979. Soon those wines began to win gold medals at major wine competitions.

By 1982, Cohn believed that the vineyard’s name had been established and wanted to start his own winery. “But that was 1982,” he points out, “the year the Doobies broke up.” That ended his income stream for the time being, so the winery had to be put on the back burner. In 1984, Cohn debuted a new rock group, Night Ranger, and the cash it generated went to start the B.R. Cohn Winery. (And the Doobies started touring again in 1987.)

His first winemaker, from 1984 through 1987, was Helen Turley, who has gone on to become a cult winemaker, making wines under her own label, Marcassin, and for a handful of highly sought-after boutique wineries. Two other winemakers followed over the next eight years, and Cohn’s winery kept winning medals--but not with the consistency it was capable of, in the opinion of Cohn (and brother Marty, who left the rock world in 1993 to become the general manager of the winery).

“I have always had great grapes,” Cohn said, “but the wine was never as great as I knew it could be.” Whenever he sold his grapes, other people had made wines that won gold medals, but sometimes the wines from his own winery were getting only silver.

In 1995, Cohn hired Merry Edwards, a longtime winemaker (Mount Eden, Matanzas Creek) and consultant with a wide reputation for repairing run-down wineries. Edwards’ commitment to other projects prevented her from becoming the Cohn brothers’ head winemaker, but she recommended Fresno State enology graduate Mikael Gulyash, who had previously worked at Jordan and at King Estate in Oregon. (Edwards continues to consult for the winery.)

When Gulyash arrived in 1995 to apply for the position of head winemaker, he was surprised at the condition of the winery. “A lot of things were in disarray,” Gulyash recalled. A number of barrels, for instance, were overdue to be cleaned or replaced.

“I knew there was work to be done,” Gulyash said. “My biggest attraction was the fruit and the fact that I could work with Merry Edwards. Merry brings a lot to the table, and she is everything I was hoping she would be.”

A few weeks ago, the B.R. Cohn Winery released the best wines it has ever made, and Cohn attributes the success of the winery today to Edwards, Gulyash and other recent personnel changes. Cohn had also added a new marketing director, Larry Klein, who had a proven track record at Clos du Bois and Geyser Peak. And Marty Cohn had taken over the faltering tasting room at the winery and made it hugely successful.

“This is a wonderful [microclimate] for Cabernet,” Edwards said. “Most of the other ranches around here are a lot cooler.”

“This is like a little banana belt in here,” said Cohn, pointing to the rear of the property that runs up a bench in the Sonoma Mountain foothills. The little warm pocket Olive Hill enjoys allows grapes to ripen more evenly.

Edwards said her first vintage here, 1995, was really a learning experience. “That was a fairly warm season, and we had no experience with the fruit, obviously, but we were anticipating it being very intense because of the small berry size. We found that getting the grapes dead ripe is very important here to flesh them out, so we pushed the ripeness envelope.”

She also noted that there is a limited amount of water available, so the vines here can become a bit stressed toward the end of the harvest, but she was thrilled with the first wines. “When fermentation was finished and we were getting the wines into barrel, I was just ecstatic,” said the usually reserved Edwards.

“And the wines have gotten better from there. I thought the vineyard had a lot of potential. There seemed to be a core of really wonderful fruit. But as we get to know the vineyard, it’s better and better each year. It’s a wonderful vineyard.”

Cohn’s Cabernets have always been full-bodied, dense, fairly concentrated wines that exhibit black cherry and cassis flavors. But they have typically been quite tannic and astringent. His 1995s are proving that a thick, concentrated red wine need not be so tannic.

“This is a vineyard that wants to create rather tannic wines,” Edwards said, “because the soils are rocky. So what we’re trying to do is retain the texture and depth and body of the wine but to tame down the tannins.”

The first wines from the Gulyash-Edwards tenure were released only months ago, and already the word is out: stunning wines worth their far-from-modest prices.

In my opinion, the best of the lot are the 1995 Cabernet Sauvignon Special Selection ($80) and the 1995 Cabernet Sauvignon “Olive Hill Estate” ($35). The “Special Selection” shows amazingly intense cassis fruit with hints of cedar, plum and wild berries; it’s thick, relatively dense with an almost almond/chocolate finish. Still closed and immature, but there is clear potential to age beautifully for at least 10 years, probably longer. About 700 cases were produced.

The “Olive Hill Estate” has deep, rich cassis and black raspberry notes with a hint of anise or mint and a long, deep, complex finish that is just barely showing itself. (It’s not as tannic as the more powerful 1994 version of the same wine.) About 3,000 cases were produced.

Cohn also makes a stylish Chardonnay ($14) and a Chardonnay with the Joseph Herman Carneros designation ($24); a small amount of a wonderful Merlot ($24); 250 cases of a strikingly concentrated Pinot Noir ($24); and about 8,000 cases of a Silver Label Cabernet Sauvignon that is crafted from 25% of his own fruit and 75% of fruit from Paso Robles, a startlingly fine value at $14.

By the the way, this place is called Olive Hill, right? While he was getting his wine act together, Cohn also saw potential in the olive trees that had originally been planted just for shade. Five years ago, he began harvesting the olives, a slow, arduous task because he had to use ladders.

The result: Cohn joined with olive oil expert Greg Reisinger to form Olive Hill Oil Co. Using the facilities of the Olive Press in Glen Ellen, in which Reisinger is a partner, Reisinger custom-presses Cohn’s olives. Cohn’s estate-bottled extra-virgin olive oil, in a dramatic, tall imported Italian bottle, is prized by those who use it for dipping bread. There is also a blended olive oil under the B.R. Cohn label that has a three-olive blend made from olives from the Central Valley.

And finally, to marry with the oil, Cohn decided to make wine vinegar, and these handsomely packaged specialty vinegars, in similar bottles to the oil’s, are soon to be joined by a home-made balsamic-style vinegar.

So it’s an old story. Country boy makes good, buys farm, starts producing award-winning Cabernet and finally turns out the makings for super-premium salad dressing. And meanwhile, the Doobie Brothers are still rocking on.

* Berger os a syndicated wine columnist living in Topanga and Sonoma County.