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. Its partly a trip Im
on about a dead American era and partly about the fact that I dont
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 didnt 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 Patins
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 wines 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 years 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.
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