Old World Spirits

Old World Spirits is the California craft distillery founded in 2005 by Davorin Kuchan — and one of the most editorially distinct American craft-spirits operations because of Kuchan's genuinely uncommon background as a Croatian-born, third-generation family winemaker who combined his European wine heritage with a Berkeley Haas MBA and a high-tech career before launching Old World Spirits as his American craft-distilling project. The operation originally opened in Belmont (the Bay Area peninsula town between San Francisco and San Jose), then expanded with a new estate winery-and-distillery development in Morgan Hill around 2017, with the dual-location structure reflecting Kuchan's broader integrated wine-and-spirits production model.

The Kuchan family wine heritage anchors the editorial frame. Davorin came to the United States in the mid-1980s from Croatia, where his family had operated as third-generation winemakers in the broader Eastern European wine tradition. After earning a master's degree from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and pursuing a successful Silicon Valley high-tech career, Kuchan launched Old World Spirits in 2005 as a deliberate return to the family wine-and-spirits production heritage. The operational model — combining Kuchan Cellars (the wine side) with Old World Spirits (the spirits side) — produces a genuinely integrated wine-and-spirits brand that's unusual in modern American craft distilling.

The product range is remarkably broad for a small-craft operation. Old World Spirits produces Blade Gin (the flagship — a juniper-forward modern gin, the brand's most-distributed product), Rusty Blade Original Barrel Aged Gin (a barrel-aged Blade variant), St. Blaise Vodka, 100% Goldrun Rye Whiskey (a 100% rye mash bill, distinctive in the broader American rye field), La Sorciere Absinthe (one of the early legal American absinthes after the 2007 federal legalization, with the Mediterranean-tradition production approach reflecting Kuchan's European distilling pedagogy), Kuchan Nocino (a black walnut liqueur made from walnuts grown in Kuchan's own Morgan Hill orchard), Kuchan XO Brandy, and Kuchan Eaux-De-Vie expressions in Indian Blood Peach and Williams Pear variants. The cross-category breadth — from juniper-forward modern gin through traditional European-style brandy and eau-de-vie — reflects Kuchan's deliberate European-distilling-tradition foundation.

The Bay Area visitor experience runs through both the Belmont production legacy and the newer Morgan Hill estate winery-and-distillery development. Old World Spirits has accumulated over a dozen gold medals and industry awards across the broader American craft spirits competition circuit, with the editorial reputation anchored by Kuchan's genuine European distilling heritage rather than the more standard Kentucky-template orientation that defines most American craft distilling.