Walk two blocks in downtown Jacksonville this month and you will pass one storefront that went quiet and one that got louder than it has been in years. The tasting room at 255 E. California Street, which poured Somar Family Vineyards' Douro-rooted reds and ports for locals who treated it like a regular stop, closed its doors effective immediately earlier this year. A few streets over on North 5th, Cowhorn Kitchen reopened in January under a chef with four consecutive James Beard semifinalist nods to his name. Neither move made national news. Both are the kind of quiet reshuffling that only someone who actually lives here would notice, and together they say something specific about where this town's food and wine identity is heading: fewer doors, but each one asking more of you when you walk through it.
The Room That Went Quiet
Somar's closure came without much fanfare. The notice on the winery's site thanked the Jacksonville community for its support and explained that wine club members would keep their benefits, just at a different address: the Padigan Tasting Room, 2335 N Phoenix Rd in Medford. If you were a member who used to walk over on a Saturday afternoon, that convenience is gone. Pickups and pours now require a drive out to Medford instead of a stroll down California Street.
Somar's story in Jacksonville was never long. The Ramos family, whose winemaking roots trace back over a century to a stone house in Portugal's Douro Valley, had only recently opened the downtown room, one of a handful of newer tasting rooms that had moved into the historic core in the last several years. Fourteen estate-grown varietals, all hand-cultivated on vineyards along Griffin Creek Road and West Main Street. Now that inventory pours somewhere else.
The Room That Got Loud
Cowhorn Kitchen didn't open from scratch this year. It has occupied 130 North 5th Street since 2024, built as an extension of Cowhorn Vineyard & Garden's biodynamic farming philosophy under founding chef Tim Payne. What changed in January was the kitchen leadership, and that change is the more interesting half of this story.
Josh Dorcak, who owns MÄS in Ashland and has been named a James Beard Foundation semifinalist for Best Chef: Northwest and Pacific four years running, advancing to finalist in each of the last three, partnered with Cowhorn to reimagine the restaurant. He brought in Evan Bolling, his former Chef de Cuisine at MÄS, to actually run the kitchen day to day. The result is a 22-seat dining room built around hyper-seasonal, prix fixe and à la carte menus that change with what is coming out of the ground nearby, paired exclusively with biodynamic wines from Cowhorn and its sister property Johan Vineyards.
Dorcak has described the project as distinct from his other ventures. His Ashland restaurants, MÄS, NAMA, and Kandō, are food-led experiments. Cowhorn Kitchen is something else.
"Our work at Cowhorn Kitchen is about telling the story of this region and its vineyards."
That framing matters for anyone trying to understand what Jacksonville's food scene is actually becoming. Cowhorn Kitchen and its sister lodge, Tu Tu' Tun in Gold Beach, share an ownership group led by investor Katherine "Mini" Byers, who acquired the vineyard in 2021 and the lodge in 2023. This isn't a solo chef testing a pop-up. It's a small hospitality group making a deliberate, well-funded bet that a 22-seat room in a town of roughly 2,800 people can be a destination on its own terms.
The Math Behind the Trade
Here is the part that a quick scroll through a review site won't tell you. Somar's tasting room was, by design, a low-friction stop. Walk in, sit at the bar, taste a flight, buy a bottle, leave whenever. Cowhorn Kitchen, at 22 seats with a chef pairing that changes nightly and reservations recommended well in advance, is the opposite kind of experience. You plan for it. You book it. You treat it as an occasion rather than a stop on a stroll.
That's not a coincidence, and it's not really about wine at all. It's about what kind of hospitality experience a town of this size can support twice over. Jacksonville has never had the population to sustain unlimited tasting rooms competing for the same walk-in foot traffic. What seems to be happening instead is a sorting: the easy, casual pours are consolidating into fewer spots (South Stage Cellars, open since 2006 in a brick building dating to 1864, keeps doing exactly what it has always done, seven days a week from May through November), while the harder-to-book, higher-intensity experiences like Cowhorn Kitchen are becoming the town's calling card for people willing to plan ahead. Remotion, the small tasting room at 105 W. Main St. owned by locals Lori and Ben Grable, still fits the casual-visit model. The Jacksonville Inn, meanwhile, just finished renovating its own footprint into an intimate 8-room boutique hotel with a reimagined wine bar, which is its own small bet on the same idea: fewer offerings, more polish on each one.
If you live here, the practical takeaway is simple. The town isn't losing its wine culture. It's trading breadth for depth in specific, visible ways, and the calendar for the next few months makes that trade even more concrete.
What's Actually on the Calendar This Fall
- September 11 to 13: Cowhorn Kitchen's Fall Release Weekend, featuring a six-course tasting menu built around the vineyard's newest releases.
- September 12 and 13, midday: A patio celebration of the same release, open for anyone who wants the shorter, three-course version instead of the full evening tasting menu.
- November 21: The Applegate Valley Vintners Association's Fall Uncorked event, the annual gathering for the fifteen wineries that make up the Applegate Valley AVA just south and west of town.
Craig Camp, a local winery manager active in that association, put the region's pitch plainly:
"In the Applegate Valley, we make wines that have something to say."
That line doubles as a decent summary of what's happening in downtown Jacksonville proper right now too. The tasting rooms and restaurants that are surviving and expanding aren't competing on volume. They're competing on whether they have something specific to say, and whether they're willing to make you work a little to hear it.
The Practical Version
If you're a Somar wine club member, your next pickup is in Medford, not downtown. If you want a table at Cowhorn Kitchen, especially during Fall Release Weekend, book ahead rather than walking up. If you want the low-key, no-reservation version of a Jacksonville wine afternoon, South Stage Cellars and Remotion still deliver that experience the way they always have. And if you're weighing a trip out to the Applegate Valley proper, November 21 is the date to circle.
None of this is a dramatic story. Nobody's town is being remade overnight. But the swap on California and 5th streets this year, one closure, one high-profile reopening, is a useful reminder that even a town this small and this settled keeps rewriting its own daily rhythms. The people who notice tend to be the ones who already call it home.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property in Jacksonville, whether you're watching the historic district for a listing or thinking about what a changing downtown does to foot traffic and long-term value, the Lamanna Blackwell Group team knows this town from the ground up. Schedule a consultation and let's talk through what you're actually looking at.
