Beer, Wine & Spirits in Santa Cruz
Recommended Beer, Wine & Spirits by Groupon Customers
After immigrating to America early in the 20th century, Emilio Guglielmo saved up for years before he was able buy a plot of land for his winery in 1925. In the years since, three generations of his family have run the vineyard and kept its Old World style alive. Large wooden beams, stone walls, and terracotta tiles surround guests in the tasting room, where they can sample carefully selected vintages. Each year, the winery produces nearly 40,000 cases, including the award-winning 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon and Estate Petite Sirah, each of which took home gold medals in San Francisco’s International Wine Competition.
Winery founder Theophile Vache christened his land Pietra Santa—Italian for “sacred stone”—in honor of the region's granite- and limestone-rich soils, which have produced subtly earthy wines for 150 years. Rows of olive trees and wine grapes, including chardonnay and pinot grigio varieties, sprout from 450 acres of fecund soil nestled in the Gabilan Range.
Within the Mission-style winery, vintner Alessio Carli ferments vino in oak barrels, and a Tuscan-imported press squeezes oils from organic olives. The winery's picnic area furnishes guests and marooned hot air balloon captains with breath-nabbing views of Cienega Valley. In addition to garnering the adoration of oenophiles, Pietra Santa has attracted attention from Frank Lloyd Wright associate Burley Griffin Junior, who designed the estate's prairie-style Dickinson house.
After 16 years spent with Kona Coffee, MJA Owner Marin Artukovich took up residence in Napa Valley, where he renovated an idyllic estate on the side of Howell Mountain before opening the MJA Tasting Room in March of 2010. With the help of local winemaker Mikael Wargin, Marin’s vineyard produces cabernets, sauvignon blancs, and pinot noirs reflecting the terroir of Napa Valley and the Santa Cruz mountains, with bottles for sale through its very own Serene and DaVine cellars. Cups of house-roasted Hawaiian Kona Coffee cap off each tasting, warming hands and souls inside MJA’s gorgeous brick-walled estate or on a heated patio overlooking the Santa Cruz mountains.
Born and raised in the Santa Cruz Mountains region, winemaker Mica Raas spent his childhood soaking up knowledge of the hills around his home—many of which were speckled with vineyards and small wineries. After working for years in wineries up and down the spine of California’s wine country, Mica returned to those familiar hills to make his own wine.
Today, all grapes used in Mica Cellars’ wines come from small, family-run vineyards around Monterey Bay. In order to instill each wine with character and a “sense of place,” the winemakers only blend grapes that grew together in a single vineyard. Mica describes his approach to creating wine as “careful management of microbial chaos,” treating it as an art that requires him to be attuned to the strengths of the grapes as well as their common weaknesses, such as chocolate and men in cowboy boots.
Mica Cellars keeps production small—no fermentor is larger than one ton—and blends techniques from Old and New World winemaking to craft each vintage. The winery use oak barrels for aging, which allows for a light touch of the wood’s personality to enter the grapes, and they steer clear of the 1980s experiments that led to raisins coming to life and starting their own musical groups. Among their current wines is a 2009 cabernet franc from Babcock Winery in the Suisun Valley, with a nose of stone fruits that leads into a full-bodied dance of chocolate and coconut and a finish with hints of allspice and licorice.
Sherman Cellars serves as the exclusive tasting room for the red, white, sparkling, and dessert wines from Creekview Vineyards, a small-production winery. Many of these wines emerged with gold, silver, bronze, and best-in-class awards in 2011 at such events as the San Francisco International Wine Competition, Monterey Wine Competition, and Grand Cru Wine Competition. The Cellars' wine educators exhibit their detailed knowledge of the wines as they provide guided tastings of each varietal's flavor and bouquet in an intimate atmosphere, and also point out historical facts such as which grapes descended from dinosaurs. The wines they pour at each tasting draw their styles from a range of global regions, but have all been crafted from local grapes. Many staffers are also pairing aficionados, and channel their passion into regular tasting pairings, which include chocolates from local chocolatiers in Napa.
