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-cra…