David Coffaro Vineyard & Winery

Estate Cuvée — The signature Dry Creek red blend.

Terre Melange — One of Coffaro’s many estate field blends.

Old-Vine Zinfandel, Carignane & Petite Sirah — From blocks planted in the late 1800s.

Aglianico — An Italian variety and one of Dave’s personal experiments.

Everything is grown on the twenty-acre estate, divided into seven blocks; roughly sixty percent of each vintage sells through the Crazy Coffaro Futures Program before release.

David Coffaro farms a twenty-acre vineyard in the warm northern end of Dry Creek Valley, where more than half the vines were planted in the 1800s. He and his wife Pat bought the property in 1979, gave up city life in Marin, and spent fifteen years selling fruit to Gallo while Dave made wine at home for himself. He went commercial in 1994, at fifty-one, and has run the place his own way ever since — estate-grown, screw-capped, fermented fast and pressed early, and sold mostly before it is bottled. The wines are estate, the prices are deliberately low, and the frills are nonexistent.

The signature here is the Crazy Coffaro Futures Program: customers buy wine while it is still in the barrel, sometimes still on the vine, at roughly half the eventual retail price, and about sixty percent of each vintage sells that way before release. The tasting room is a remodeled barrel room hung with Dave’s sports and music memorabilia, opening onto a deck above the vineyard, and barrel samples of single varietals and his many blends are part of the visit. Dave plants what interests him — Aglianico, Lagrein, Souzao, Portuguese reds most of his neighbors have never grown. He has said he will be in charge until he is a hundred.

David Coffaro bought his twenty-acre Dry Creek vineyard with his wife Pat in 1979 and spent about fifteen years selling fruit to Gallo while making wine at home. He went commercial in 1994, at fifty-one, with no formal training — learning instead from neighbors at Lambert Bridge, Nalle, and Ferrari-Carano. He has run the winery on his own terms since: estate-grown, fermented fast and pressed early, screw-capped, and priced deliberately low.

Pat Coffaro has been David’s partner in the winery since the couple left city life in Marin for Dry Creek Valley in 1979. Together they built a small, no-frills operation of about five thousand cases a year, much of it sold direct to a loyal following through the winery’s futures program rather than through retail.