Join us for a private tasting on Saturday, May 11th featuring exquisite wines from Jeff Cohn Cellars.
~ Tickets are limited (40-person capacity for the event)
~ Ticket price: $40 per person (includes wine tasting and charcuterie)
~ Please purchase tickets at the bottom of the event page
Wines included in the tasting:
~ 2018 Smoke & Mirrors Red Blend (Sonoma County)
Plums, blueberries, peppery herbs, and cedary spice notes all emerge from the 2018 Smoke & Mirrors, another charming, medium to full-bodied, pure, balanced wine in the lineup. It’s already impossible to resist and there’s no need to delay gratification, although I see no reason it won’t evolve for at least 4-6 years.
~ 2018 Sweetwater Springs Vineyard Zinfandel (Russian River Valley)
Opening in spicy white pepper and lavender, this wine flies an impressive flag for the variety in this appellation—an increasing rarity in fact. Rich as blackberry cobbler, it offers enduring baking spice and a velvety smooth texture that’s hard to resist in its overt exuberance of full-throttled flavor.
~ 2019 Domaine des Chirats Syrah (Rockpile)
The 2019 Syrah Domaine des Chirats comes from the Rockpile Vineyard and has very soft floral aromas of lavender, baked earth, and sweet smoke. The palate is ripe and inviting, with boysenberry and turned earth, and the wine displays a building structure on the finish that would welcome another year or two in bottle before drinking.
~ 2022 Les Inseparables White Blend
Its medium gold hue is followed by a medium-bodied, elegant, yet richer wine from Cohn that has a gorgeous nose of ripe lemons, honeysuckle, toast, and white flowers. It brings some classic Cohn richness, but this stays pretty and elegant, with a terrific sense of freshness. It’s going to shine on the dinner table.
~ 2018 Rossi Ranch Vineyard Red Blend (Sonoma Valley)
It has a medium ruby color and gregarious red berry fruits, with notes of blood orange, cracked pepper and charred meats. Medium-bodied, it’s grainy and fresh with understated, pepper-laced fruits and an uplifted, juicy finish.
ABOUT JEFF COHN CELLARS
Jeff Cohn, the winemaker and president of Jeff Cohn Cellars got his start in the industry just over 30 years ago. As an intern at Boordy Vineyards in Maryland, he drove an hour and half each way to prune vines in frigid weather, pick grapes in stifling heat, and scrub everything from barrels to floors.
Long before he began his winemaking career, he received an associate degree in culinary arts from Johnson & Wales University, and a bachelor’s degree in hospitality management from Florida International University.
Jeff had always loved the hospitality industry, and as he worked through several high-profile positions after college, he found his passion for wine steadily growing. The more he learned, the more he wanted to learn, until he realized that becoming a winemaker was his ultimate goal. The job at Boordy was a deciding factor in the trajectory of his career -- in spite of all the scrubbing.
With the encouragement and support of his family, Jeff moved to California in 1993 to follow his dream. He earned his master’s degree in agriculture chemistry, with an emphasis on enology, from California State University, Fresno in 1996. It was here that Jeff discovered French winemaking techniques and the concept of terroir. "The flavor profile was so different than anything else I had ever tried," he says of the first Chateauneuf-du-Pape he tried in school. "It was a shocker. To go from tasting only single varietals to a blend really opened my eyes."
Upon graduation, Jeff joined Rosenblum Cellars in 1996 as the enologist. He rapidly moved beyond lab work and soon found himself in charge of the entire white wine program. In 2000, Jeff was officially promoted to winemaker, and in 2004 was named vice president of winemaking and production at Rosenblum. He was instrumental in creating innovative barrel and yeast programs at the winery. It was through experimentation at Rosenblum that Jeff perfected the technique of using diverse types of yeast to create even more subtle, specific characteristics in the wine he was crafting.
He began his own label, JC Cellars, in 1996. JC Cellars' first vintage was the 1996 Rhodes Vineyard Zinfandel. 75 cases were made. Over time, case production at JC Cellars slowly increased from that small, intimate introduction to just over 5,000 cases annually. In January 2006 Jeff finally parted ways with Rosenblum to focus exclusively on his own winery, but not before crafting the 2003 Rockpile Road Zinfandel, which placed 3rd on Wine Spectator’s Top 100 list that year. This was a coup for not only Jeff but all of California’s winemaking industry, as no Zinfandel had ever appeared so high on the list before. In fact, at that time, no Zinfandel from California had ever even cracked the top ten.
Jeff goes to great lengths to marry California fruit to the aspects of terroir and minerality you'd find in France's oldest winemaking regions. He does so by travelling all over California, from Amador County to Alexander Valley, in search of the finest fruit and the best vineyards. Among some of Jeff's most important discoveries include the Rockpile region in Sonoma, where 22 years ago he began sourcing the Syrah grapes that are now the main component of his most elegant and complex wines; the Buffalo Hill Syrah, Rockpile Haley Syrah, Domaine des Chirats Syrah, and the stunning So Serine Syrah to name a few. The craggy soil of the aptly named Rockpile produces some of the most complex and distinctive minerality in all of California.
Throughout the years Jeff Cohn Cellars (rebranded from JC to Jeff Cohn with the 2012 vintage wines) has taken on a life of its own. After 20 years in the East Bay, the wines are now made in Windsor, much closer to all the vineyards.
Harvest is the most hectic time of year, when you can really experience all that goes into the craft of winemaking. "It’s my absolute favorite time of year," says Jeff, “and it’s also nerve-wracking because there is just so much to do. We easily put in 10-to-12-hour days for weeks on end. But fermentation...I love the aroma. I love the process, just seeing grapes become beautiful wines, well, it’s just pure magic.”
The future of Jeff Cohn Cellars involves exacting even more attention on the quality of the fruit. "The Rhône stuff is the passion," Jeff says, "but now we have some great Zinfandel vineyards including Sweetwater Springs, Iron Hill, and the remarkable St. Peter’s Church. The goal is to become a bit more focused and work with some really small vineyards and growers that we know are the best of the best."
Jeff Cohn Cellars -- a winery where you'll find remarkably crafted wine, a winemaker with decades of experience, and staff with an unparalleled passion for food, drink, and hospitality.
