Dos’ Bar, a Sonoma tasting room for natural wine and cider, has closed after its founders struggled to make the collective model sustainable.
Jess Lander/The Chronicle
Dos’ Bar, the Sonoma tasting room serving natural wine and cider that tried to turn into a neighborhood gathering place, has closed after roughly two years in business.
The collective brought together small producers in a casual downtown space that felt more like a living room, music venue and pop-up dinner spot than a traditional Wine Country tasting room.
Dos co-founder Aaron Brown, who also co-founded Bardos Cider, said the closure was not prompted by anything specific, but by a business model that never fully caught up with the idea.
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“Nothing bad happened,” Brown said. “It just never matured into a different chapter — and some fun things don’t.”
Dos’ Bar opened in 2024 at 521 Broadway, one block off Sonoma Plaza, as part of a modern wave of collective tasting rooms in the Bay Area. Instead of one winery building out its own hospitality operation, several small producers shared a space, splitting exposure and, in theory, costs. Participating producers included Caleb Leisure, which ferments wines in Georgian qvevri, and hybrid grape winery North American Press.
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The idea had local appeal: Small natural wine and cider brands could pour in the town where many of their ingredients and relationships were rooted, without each financing a solo tasting room. Dos’ Bar hosted tastings, music, food pop-ups and community events, drawing crowds when the programming clicked.
But Brown said the daily economics were much harder.
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“We weren’t profitable,” he said. “None of the founders had paid ourselves. We were working for free. The staff was paid, but the founders were not.”
The venue’s core tension was that it wanted to function as a community hub but was structured financially as a tasting room.
Wine and cider sales flowed back to producers, Brown said. Events had to be tied to a participating brand. The work of booking, staffing, promoting and coordinating the space fell to people who already had their own labels, jobs and harvest schedules.
“It ended up having a living-room feel, like ‘Cheers,’” Brown said. “But there was no core committed person, and you need that.”
Brown a Sonoma native, said Dos’ Bar was partly inspired by Sonoma’s earlier wine culture — a time he imagined through stories and photographs of now-famous local wine families eating breakfast together before heading out to farm.
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To him, the natural wine scene had echoes of that older, less polished era: people making things because they loved them, not because they had a corporate hospitality plan.
“We didn’t really have a plan,” Brown said. “It was a collective, and for me it was an exploration of identity — what Sonoma is inwardly versus what it is externally.”
That question became part of the bar’s identity. Sonoma is a global wine destination, but it can be a difficult place to build a local hangout. Brown said Dos’ Bar could be lively during events but slow on ordinary days, especially in winter. Even getting people to turn off the Plaza and down Broadway could be hard.
Still, he said the room was gaining momentum. Visitors discovered producers they had not heard of. Locals came for music, pop-ups and the sense that the place belonged to people who lived and worked nearby.
The closure comes as California wine businesses are rethinking tasting rooms and direct-to-consumer sales. Industry reports have shown softer tasting room traffic, pressure on small wineries and a broader decline in U.S. wine sales.
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The founders considered ways to keep it going, Brown said. One possibility was to make the tasting room a fuller cooperative run directly by the participating wineries, removing the need for a separate management layer. Another was to narrow the focus to producers based in Sonoma. Neither version fully came together.
“We thought about it a lot,” Brown said. “There were so many times when someone thought, ‘I’ve got it. I figured it out.’ But then there was always another problem.”
He said the group also recognized, in hindsight, that it had not done enough traditional hospitality outreach — the steady relationship-building with hotels, concierges, restaurants and neighboring businesses that can help drive tasting room traffic in Wine Country.
Dos’ Bar originated as a popup, and Brown did not shut down the possibility that it could return to those roots: less fixed overhead, more flexibility and a focus on the gatherings that worked best.
“I still have the sandwich board,” Brown said.
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For now, Brown described Dos’ Bar as an experiment that reached its natural end before it could become a more conventional business.
“It was an impulsive, spirited vision,” he said.
Dining and Cooking