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Thursday 4pm - 8pm Friday 1pm - 8pm Saturday 1pm - 6pm Sunday 1pm - 6pm

Birichino

Tasting Room: 204 Church St, Santa Cruz now open Wed-Sun. Making fine wines from old vines (and from the Late Disco era) since 2008.

Tastings inside and out on our new Patio Parklet. Pet friendly to friendly pets! Alex Krause and John Locke founded Birichino in Santa Cruz in 2008. Drawing on a combined four decades making wine in California, France, Italy, and beyond, they are focused on attaining the perfect balance of perfume, poise, and puckishness. Sourcing from a number of carefully farmed, family-owned, own-rooted 19th an

d early 20th century vineyards (and a few from the late disco era) planted by and large in more moderate, marine-influenced climates, their preoccupation is to safeguard the quality and vibrance of their raw materials. Their preference is for minimal intervention, most often favoring native fermentations, employing stainless or neutral barrels, minimal racking and fining, and avoiding filtration altogether when possible. But most critically, their aim is to make delicious wines that give pleasure, revitalize, and revive.

05/09/2026

Oh so pretty bonbons in the house! Wildflower honey, passionfruit and 74% single origin Mexico await you with a glass of your favorite Birichino wine this weekend (or until we sell out/eat them all). Come on down !

04/24/2026

Have you found yourself in the grip of fire-breathing, treasure-stealing dragons lately?

Well, then, we have just the thing for you: this year, Saint George’s Day is celebrated on Thursday, April 23rd and to encourage the traditional feasting, Morris dancing, the watching of Punch and Judy shows, the collection of dewdrops on fields, and free exchange of books and roses, we’ve decided to extend a 15% discount until midnight, April 24th on all three of our Saint Georges wines: to wit
2024 Saint Georges Chardonnay – Our newest Saint Georges wine, principally from Wente Clone vines planted in 1969 at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains, plus a little Mount Eden (Peter Martin Ray) and Gabilans (Coastview) magic, currently paired on the Chef’s menu at Le Bernardin in New York City and by the glass at Wine Director Aldo Sohm’s Sohm Bar in New York City. 2024 Saint Georges Pinot Noir – Our New York Times-recommended Pinot Noir mainly produced from vines planted in 1969 at Besson, and from Chalone and Lime kiln Valley that “speaks of California, yet the wine is focused, fresh and complex” and lauded by the Wine Advocate as “one of the best Pinot Noir value propositions in the Central Coast.” 2024 Saint Georges Zinfandel Old Vines –Vivid, zesty Zinfandel principally from vines planted in 1922 at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains at Besson, and 2 other sites planted on their own roots in the Cienega Valley in 1908, and Lime Kiln Valley dating to 1895.   Use code SLAY at checkout! LINK in BIO to our shop!  Note If you order a total of 12 bottles of any of our wines, an additional 10% discount applieson the entire order.  Offer expires at Midnight, April 24th
As always, our Club members get additional discounts, complimentary tastings at our downtown Santa Cruz tasting room, first dibs on new releases, and more!

We can now ship to: AZ, CA, CO, FL, ID, IL, MA, MD, MI, MO, MN, NC, NH, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, TX, VA, VT, WA & D.C.

All the best to you and yours,

Alex & John

02/14/2026

Come join us at Birichino this Valentine’s Day weekend for:
✨ a new small lot carbonic Carignane Pet Nat pour only available at our tasting room (Nepenthes) paired with
🍫 handcrafted 72% Jamaican chocolate bonbon from our talented confectioner friends . We also have a few of their good food award-winning Bejofo estate Madagascar bars on hand if we dont eat them all first… All this served up in
❤️ a cozy romantic atmosphere to share with friends, and loved one(s), and furry friends;)

Cheers to friends, chocolate, wine and love ! 🥂

01/30/2026

As many of you know, a general strike will be taking place nationwide Friday, January 30th.

Though we would love nothing more to welcome our guests in and provide a bit of an oasis in these times of strife, we will close in solidarity with the most vulnerable members of our and other communities – in protest of their treatment at the hands of our federal government.

It’s the least we can do to highlight the enormous contribution and importance of immigrants who enrich our community and industry. We need to stand up for their fundamental human rights, and for ALL those who are threatened by the policies of the federal government, including LGBTQ+ community who also find themselves the scapegoats of Federally–imposed persecution and denial of rights. We will not stand for that!

We are an agricultural business at heart, and without the immigrants that first came to California like Paul Masson in Saratoga, Charles Tamm up at Chalone, Etienne Thée and Charles LeFranc at Almaden in the Cienega Valley, and Agoston Haraszthy in Sonoma, we would not be here. And without the huge contribution immigrants still make to viticulture and winemaking, and indeed all sectors of our economy, we would have nothing.

Please make your voices heard with your elected officials, and get involved in supporting those in your community that most need the help. Please support this strike action if you can by not working, not going to school and not shopping tomorrow, January 30th. If you must make purchases, and obviously many of us must still attend to essential matters, please support a local small business over Big Box stores – billionaires don’t need any more of your money.

If you come to our Tasting Room or place orders online today Thursday January 29th, Saturday Jan 31st or Sunday Feb 1st, we would be most grateful. We’ll again be sharing 20% of our profits this weekend with Second Harvest Food Bank, a great local organization who are helping provide sustenance to the immigrant community, and all Santa Cruz County’s food insecure in this challenging economy.

Stay safe and thank you!

12/20/2025

Big bottles in the house! Magnums now available at the tasting room and online for pickup this weekend- and if you’re Left Coastal, we might mange to get orders of them out FedEx ground in time on Monday for all your Holi days! Festivus will be tough, though. We make at most 6 or 7 cases each vintage, all filled, corked waxed and labeled by hand. Pick up a few to have now, and some to put away for a few years. The current offering includes our first vintages of Peter Martin Ray Cabernet and Enz Mourvèdre from the excellent 2017 vintage, as well as verticals of our Grenache and a few of our vineyard designate Pinots. Carpe Magnum Vinum!

11/30/2025

For the first time since 2020 we’re bringing back a special offer for our online customers - we’ll cover ground shipping* with the purchase of any 12+ bottles ordered. Head over to our online store link in bio!

If you’ve been meaning to buy a few nice bottles to restock your cellar after Thanksgiving, now is the time! A simple way to make up a full case: pick out a few specially-priced Gift Packs to make holiday shopping that much easier. Grab some of the last bottles of this 2022 Mourvèdre from own-rooted dry farmed vines planted in 1895!

You know our ways: you’ll get a 10% case discount, plus free ground shipping* on any 12+ bottles ordered.

As an early celebration of Giving Tuesday, we’ll donate 10% of our profits from your orders to our amazing local Second Harvest Food Bank who’ve been doing good work for decades, and feed more than 75,000 people a month here in Santa Cruz County.

Take advantage of this special deal, and pick up a case or 3 by Midnight Pacific on Monday, Dec 1st!

But wait, there’s more: as an added bonus, the Cybermen won’t convert you to an emotionless, space-going cyborg!

Be sure to enter the code CYBERMENSCH at checkout to qualify.

Club members get additional discounts.

All the best to you and yours,

Alex & John

*Ground Shipping Included in the Continental US where we’re permitted to ship

11/28/2025

Put on some plaid and come downtown! Quite a few downtown Santa Cruz businesses are participating in today to encourage y’all to shop local, support small business and keep your hard-earned dollars in our community instead of enriching billionaires. We heartily support that notion and as an enticement, we will offer 20% of any single bottle today for Plaid-clad Plaid Friday participants. It’s the perfect opportunity to pick up, for example, a bottle of our Peter Martin Ray Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay to go with leftover Turkey, or a MAGNUM of one of our single vineyard Pinot Noirs to go with leftover extended families at an incredible price.

11/24/2025

This past Wednesday, we pressed off the last lot of our 2025 harvest - the lot we informally call the “Skonkworks” in honor of the L’il Abner comic strip about a “Skonk oil” factory that inspired the name for the secret labs where the P-38 fighters and U2 and SR-71 spy planes were built by Lockheed Martin. Our secret is far less well-kept, but since 2013, we’ve been personally hand-selecting and picking ourselves (sometimes with friends who never volunteer twice to help) about a ton and a half of the loosest, perfectly ripe Grenache clusters at Besson to then lay a single layer deep in FYBs (F-ing Yellow Boxes) in the shade of George’s barn in the dark, with fans circulating. The idea is not so much a dehydration and concentration of the fruit, but an alchemical transformation of the qualities of the stems which go from quite green at harvest, to completely lignified and brown after a fortnight. Through some magic a non-French major might might be better placed to explain (Maillard reactions, anyone?) the fruit does transform, and loses about 10% of its weight, but the net effect is to enhance the almost amaro-like aromatics that we adore in Besson Grenache, and also allow us to create another gear in our main bottling of Grenache. We subsequently entirely destem and then add back all the stems for an extended monthlong native ferment and maceration of this special lot, and towards the end of that maceration, the tannins soften. -continued in comments-!

11/18/2025

As we wrap up the 2025 vintage, we are thrilled to get a mention in this week’s New York Times for our 2024 St Georges Pinot Noir. We are so grateful as well to the Besson family who’ve farmed the majority of these grapes for decades, and for our amazing distributor who have gotten our wines into the hands of so many great wine shops in NY who are equally passionate about what they do, and spread the word about our wines. It’s exactly that advocacy and championing of small wineries like ours that makes all the difference - we don’t have an advertising budget, we don’t have a dedicated sales team or marketing department. It’s just us, our growers, a great cellar and tasting room crew. Support your local wine merchants- we need them! Happy Thanksgiving!

11/05/2025

That’s a wrap on the 2025 vintage! We are so grateful for the above-and-beyond help of our friend today, who stayed all day long, feeding us snacks, and picking box after box with us so we could finish strong with California’s oldest Orange Muscat vines, planted 139 years ago, way back in 1886 at Enz in the Lime Kiln Valley. We are so very lucky and thankful for his support and yours!

Address

204 Church Street
Santa Cruz, CA
95060

Opening Hours

Thursday	4pm - 8pm
Friday	1pm - 8pm
Saturday	1pm - 6pm
Sunday	1pm - 6pm

Telephone

(831) 425-4811

Website

http://www.birichino.com/

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