The Hobo Wine Company
Healdsburg, California

About the Winery | Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon | Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel

About the Winery
The Hobo Wine Company is the brainchild, side job, menace to the wine industry, hedged bet, cash strain, mental anguish, late night musing, bruised hands, dirty t-shirts, and constant companion of Kenny Likitprakong. Despite knowing better, he started his own label in 2002 with the simple idea to have some good fun.

Kenny on Hobo in 2004:

The question always comes up, “Why Hobo?” A friend in the wine industry once told me that he figured the hobo name came from the fact that I was about the dirtiest winemaker he knew. The part about me being the dirtiest winemaker might be true, but it is not where the name came from. It’s partly a trip I’m on about a dead American era and partly about the fact that I don’t own a winery or any vineyards. If you are looking for estate bottled wines, you have come to the wrong place.

Hobo is my tribute and homage to a freedom and an era that I grew up romanticizing. I think I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties chasing the rambling ways of the American Hobo. When I was seventeen I started traveling around, listening to Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen and the likes, seeing the different parts of the country and other countries, writing in journals and taking photos and didn’t really stop until I was twenty-three or twenty-four. As the experiences racked up, I found out that the hoboes had disappeared. The hobo had become a relic in the story of our expanding country. Like all good heroes, I figured they deserved their place in history and on wine bottles.

Northeast Wine Brokers is proud to be the exclusive agent for the following Hobo wines in Connecticut:

2007 Cabernet Sauvignon, Alexander Valley
Our Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is intended to be approachable, consumed relatively young, and a versatile food companion. We are always after a more subtle, more restrained, almost lighter style of Cabernet Sauvignon , but also something that is bright and characteristic of the variety. We often say that our winemaking style and our wines lie somewhere between California and France and this wine definitely epitomizes that statement. Lean like a lot of French wine, but fruit forward like the best of California.

The grapes for this wine came from our own block in Mitch Patin’s Lloyd Vineyard on West Soda Rock Road towards the southern end of Alexander Valley on the banks of the Russian River. The site was planted in 1998 to clone 7 on 3309 and clone 337 on 504.

Typical of Hobo, this wine’s life resembled a Pinot Noir more than a Cabernet Sauvignon. Fermented in open-tops, punched down by hand, and gravity racked to barrels before being aged in 2nd fill oak barrels for 15 months.

406 cases produced.

2007 Zinfandel, Dry Creek Valley
As always, the Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel is an “Appellation Wine“ and we attempt to make a wine that represents what we think the appellation is; rich, but not overripe, fruit-forward, but not a a bomb, structured, but not tannic. This year’s cuvee is a blend of the Beasley, Treborce, Larrick, Wellstone, Voigt, and Branham Vineyards. We have covered all the geographical components from the far North Rockpile part of the Dry Creek Valley to Geyserville to Lytton Springs to the Upper Bench of the East Valley to the lower slopes of the West Valley to the Southern most border of the appellation. It is our belief that the multiple sites and climates and soil types give us a representation of the appellation and a variety of different expressions and flavors. The pieces were fermented individually and blended at the first racking in December of 2008 including about 10% Petite Sirah. The final blend was aged in a combination of French and American oak with 30% new oak (half French and half American).

440 cases produced.