Oakland natural wine bar the Punchdown is opening in Sebastopol

Looney and Costa moved to Sebastopol from Oakland in early 2022 following possessing a baby. “It was inevitable that we ended up likely to get started a place someplace up in this article,” Looney mentioned. When they acquired about an opening at the Barlow, in what was formerly a Tibetan furniture retail store, they jumped. The Barlow is home to a amount of other wine organizations, like Kosta Browne Winery, Pax Wines and Location, a tasting space representing several wine producers.

The wine selection will be identical to what buyers can discover at the Punchdown in Oakland, which was a semifinalist for a James Beard Award in 2022. The bar has a various choice of low-intervention wines from all over the planet, primarily Europe, and is recognized for having approachable support that welcomes all-natural-wine novices. (Several of the bottles the Punchdown shares are “zero-zero,” the most intense variety of all-natural winemaking in which almost nothing at all is additional or removed, but its variety is not exclusively zero-zero.) The Sebastopol place, having said that, will have extra cabinets for retail wine profits. The pair hope to sell bottles from all of Sonoma County’s pure winemakers, but they imagine there’s also a demand from customers for imported wines that aren’t as easily offered in Wine Place.

This is not Looney and Costa’s very first time living in Sonoma County. In 2007, they met when operating harvest work in Healdsburg. The two previously experienced an curiosity in organic wine, but “we thoroughly felt that at the time there was not truly our variety of wine listed here — the stuff that we desired to consume,” Looney claimed.

But they sensed that “it was only a issue of time,” he stated, right before another person would fill that hole by opening a all-natural wine bar in Sonoma County. They figured it may as properly be them.

As in Oakland, there will be a modest food items menu with things like cheese, charcuterie and conservas. The Barlow place will not have a complete kitchen, so some of the housemade products — like dips and pate — may possibly be prepped in the first Punchdown kitchen.  

Right now, they are setting up out the space, converting reclaimed redwood slabs into tables and waiting around on kitchen equipment to arrive. Meanwhile, Looney is nevertheless splitting his time concerning Sebastopol and the bar in Oakland.

“There’s a fantastic community in Sebastopol,” Looney claimed. He and Costa have lengthy admired how a lot of of the Barlow’s other corporations, like Acre Pizza, are child-pleasant, and they will welcome households with tiny small children at the new wine bar.