The Pinot Noir Maestro Who Turned His Side Hustle Into Incredible Wine

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Michael Browne and Dan Kosta grew Kosta Browne into one of the country’s most popular and respected Pinot Noir brands, garnering numerous accolades along the way. And yet, Browne couldn’t help but have a side hustle. In the late 2000s, he started making small-batch, single-vineyard Pinot Noir called Cirq, named for the six years he spent as a circus performer when he was a teenager. Since he and his cofounder sold off their Pinot powerhouse, Browne’s side hustle has become his main gig, with his energy focused fully on Browne Family Wines. “Kosta Browne is no longer the style that I created,” Browne says. “We are making better wines now. Just at a much smaller scale.”

Browne crafted his first vintage of Cirq in 2009, while he was still working as head winemaker at the brand he and Kosta established in 1997. For the first few years, Cirq offered two single-vineyard expressions from the Treehouse and Bootlegger’s Hill vineyards in Russian River Valley; since 2017, the brand has been a multi-vineyard cuvée from the same AVA. “When we sold Kosta Browne, they kept those vineyards,” Browne says. “It was hard to extract Cirq, and that was one of the concessions.” So he reformatted Cirq as a single-SKU bottling of Russian River Valley Pinot Noir from some of the best sites in the appellation, including some he has worked with since the beginning. While the loss of these two vineyards was especially difficult because he had personally named them, Browne enjoys the flexibility of not being tied to a single vineyard for this wine.

Like any good winemaker, Browne can geek out about the variety of Pinot Noir clones cultivated in the vineyards he sourced the 2022 from, but he finds that site selection and farming practices are a more important indicator of flavor, tannic profile, and overall quality. He explains that Koplen Vineyard, which he has worked with since 2001, is the “backbone of the blend” and offers deep, brooding fruit with great tannic structure. “A Koplen Vineyard wine from Kosta Browne was poured at a White House state dinner during Obama’s administration,” Browne proudly points out. Graham Vineyard, in the Green Valley sub-AVA, contributes plush, round fruit, while the cold-climate Guidici Vineyard in the hills near the town of Occidental lends itself to intense, crunchy red-fruit flavors such as cranberry, rhubarb, and pomegranate, which he calls “the electricity of the blend.” He says the Black Oak Vineyard in the center of the appellation supplies plush, round fruit that is mid-palate driven, and Castaldi Vineyard just down the road from both Black Oak and Koplen enriches the wine with luscious deep-red-fruit flavors that reveal themselves on the midpalate. Browne seems to have a soft spot for the 900-foot-high Chenoweth Home Ranch Vineyard; the grapes from here provide a combination of red- and dark-fruit flavors to which Browne attributes a constant sense of movement on the palate.

As founder and CEO of Browne Family Wines, Browne oversees the entire business at Cirq and sister brand Chev, which produces a range of appellation-designate Pinot Noir from Russian River Valley, Oregon, Sta Rita Hills, and Santa Lucia Highlands, as well as a Russian River Valley Chardonnay. Cirq’s sourcing changes year to year depending on vintage conditions and what Browne and winemaker Cabell Coursey (who also worked at Kosta Browne) think will bring out the best expression. He only makes around 30,000 bottles of Cirq each year, most of which is sold directly to the consumer or to top-tier restaurants. “Think of a very exclusive Napa Cab brand that has small production at the high end,” Browne says. “That is us, only in the Russian River Valley.”

Cirq 2022 Russian River Valley Pinot Noir has aromas of ripe summer strawberry, fresh raspberry, and holiday baking spices with a hint of hillside herbs. Gorgeous black cherry, pomegranate, and red-plum flavors mingle with soft notes of Oolong tea, bittersweet chocolate, and dried thyme that are suspended in a web of opulent tannins. A vein of dazzling acidity plies the side palate and lingers into a brilliant finish marked with notes of white chocolate and orange zest.

From the ages of 12 to 18, Browne was a performer with the Wenatchee Youth Circus in his home state of Washington, where he walked the high wire, flew on the trapeze, and ate fire, becoming the main performer by the end of his tenure there. “It taught me about hard work, dedication, failure, risk taking, and showmanship, among many other things,” Browne says. With a name and a label that recall those days, recent vintages of Cirq have received between 97 and 100 points from important scoring publications. While we are among the first to taste the 2022, we can tell you that Browne has not only shot this one out of the cannon, but he has nailed the landing as well.

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