Cobb Wines is the work of two generations of the Cobb family on the far Sonoma Coast. David Cobb, a marine ecologist, and his wife Diane spent the mid-1980s searching from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Oregon border for a property where Pinot Noir could thrive close to redwoods and the Pacific. They settled on a ridge above Occidental and hand-planted Coastlands Vineyard in 1989, five acres of Pinot Noir on marine sedimentary soils at 1,150 feet elevation, three miles from the ocean. Williams Selyem bought the fruit beginning in 1992 and produced a single-vineyard bottling in 1994. Son Ross (who studied agroecology at UC Santa Cruz and went on to winemaking roles at Ferrari-Carano, Williams Selyem, Flowers, and Hirsch) founded Cobb Wines with his parents in 2001, harvesting 130 cases that first vintage.
Coastlands Vineyard Pinot Noir, Sonoma Coast: the estate flagship, from vines planted 1989 to 1998 in marine soils at 1,150 feet.
Diane Cobb: Coastlands Pinot Noir, Sonoma Coast: the top cuvée from the original 1989 nursery block, named in memory of Diane Cobb.
Rice-Spivak Vineyard Pinot Noir, Sonoma Coast: a consistently aromatic, structured bottling over a vein of volcanic ash.
Sonoma Coast Chardonnay: a native-fermented, minimal-intervention white drawn from five coastal vineyards.
Riesling, Sonoma Coast: a small-lot dry Riesling from this far-coast Pinot specialist.
Today Ross lives on the Coastlands property with his wife Cindy and daughter Kennedy, farming the estate himself. The portfolio centers on three estate vineyards (Coastlands, Doc's Ranch, and Abigail's), joined by grower sites such as Rice-Spivak (Sebastopol Hills) and Emmaline Ann on the Sonoma Coast and Wendling in Anderson Valley. Winemaking is low-intervention: native yeasts, whole-cluster fermentation, unfined and unfiltered. Wines are allocated through a mailing list with limited retail availability, and the Healdsburg tasting room pours them by appointment every day except Tuesday, in a Grower Series or an Estate Series flight booked on Tock.
