Winemaker Notes:

Once harvested, we crush into glycol-jacketed stainless steel tanks to begin fermentation. We heat up to an ideal temperature and perform pumpovers at least twice a day during primary fermentation. Once completed, we barrel the wine down to French oak to complete malolactic fermentation.

The wine is racked three times to “clean up” and allow homogeneous blending then put back down to French oak. The blend of the wine is based on a barrel-to-barrel selection of only the best for this special bottling of Merlot—our first in the Silver Label tier.

History of B.R. Cohn
Winery founder Bruce Cohn was introduced to the music industry at an early age. Prior to moving west from Chicago, Illinois, his father sang Italian Arias and his mother was known to have sung with Frank Sinatra in the Chicago nightclub scene. In 1956, the family relocated to the Bay Area and settled in Sonoma County. While at college, studying broadcasting and communications, Bruce became intimately involved with the San Francisco music scene, running a music rehearsal studio by day and serving as a television engineer at night. It was around this time, in 1970, that Bruce met and became the manager of the Doobie Brothers, which he managed for 45 years as they climbed the charts into Rock-n-Roll stardom.

AGRICULTURAL RETREAT
In 1974, to keep some sanity and preserve his family’s quality of life, Bruce purchased an old dairy in Glen Ellen. With a drive to cultivate the existing vineyard, Bruce soon became intensely involved with all aspects of growing grapes, mentored by Charlie Wagner of Caymus. A decade after taking ownership of the land and having great success selling grapes to other wineries, Bruce founded B.R. Cohn Winery in 1984.