Today we’d like to introduce you to Gretchen Skedsvold.
Hi Gretchen, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I was raised in Western North Dakota on a family farm. My mom was into organic gardening, canning, preserving, and cooking and my dad raised grain crops and cattle, then transitioned to bison ranching when I was a teenager. I grew up eating food my parents had grown and made themselves. I learned to cook at a young age and seriously considered going to culinary school instead of getting a 4-year college degree. But I ended up getting a 4-year degree, working in private equity, then getting an MBA and a job on Wall Street, although I always daydreamed of saving up enough money to quit my corporate job, go to culinary school and open a restaurant. I did end up spending the summer after my graduation from business school studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and getting a certificate in basic cuisine and after I moved to Minneapolis from New York City in 2012 I worked in the prep kitchen at Tilia in Minneapolis one day a week for a couple of years, but it was for fun and personal fulfillment, not a career switch. When my husband and I relocated to Minneapolis in 2012 I was disappointed with the lack of natural wines for sale at the local shops. In New York, we’d lived across the street from a pair of sister farm-to-table restaurants called Diner and Marlow & Sons where we’d gotten hooked on the rustic, earthy, sometimes downright wacky natural wines they served. We’d learned to love orange wines, and Pet Nats and stinky Chinon. And the wine shops in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where we’d lived mostly carried those kinds of wines. But I couldn’t find many of them in Minneapolis. I would go around town grabbing a couple of bottles here and there from Kowalski’s, France 44, Zipp’s, Solo Vino, Surdyk’s and other places that carried wines from small independent winemakers and importers like Louis Dressner, Kermit Lynch and Neal Rosenthal. But there wasn’t one place I could go where they had all the wines I wanted and when I would occasionally ask shops about bringing in wines from importers like Jenny & Francois, Selection Massale and Vom Boden or asking if I could special order natural wines they would decline and tell me there wasn’t a market for those wines in Minnesota. So I continued to order a lot of wines from wine shops I used to frequent in New York in spite of the cost and quality control issues (one particularly cold winter a whole case of wine froze en route).
After we bought a house in Bryn Mawr at the end of 2012 I started to daydream about opening a really small neighborhood wine shop that sold mostly natural wines from small independent winemakers. After my son was born in 2014 and I was on maternity leave a retail space my husband and I had been eyeing for the wine shop idea became available for rent and we called the building owners and they were excited about the prospect of a wine shop in their building and agreed to rent us the space. However, upon further research with the city, I learned the space was not properly zoned for a liquor store and zoning couldn’t be modified. In the process, I also learned it’s actually very difficult to find the right space to open a liquor store with the proper zoning, spacing from other liquor stores, churches, schools, etc. So I found a zoning map and looked at all the places close to our house that looked like they had the proper zoning and spacing from other liquor stores, schools and churches. And Glenwood Avenue between Downtown Minneapolis and Theo Wirth Park just a 10-minute walk from my house in Bryn Mawr looked like it might work. So I drove up and down Glenwood Avenue looking for an available space to rent. I found a space in a building across the street from the International Market Square. The space was kind of hidden in the back of the building, not facing the busier more visible side along Glenwood Avenue, it was very big and expensive but it had a cool industrial vibe with high ceilings, lots of glass and concrete and felt like it was in Brooklyn. So I pitched our idea to the building’s landlord, complete with my business plan in PowerPoint slides. And we signed a lease, incorporated our business in late 2014 and opened our doors in late 2015.
We struggled at first, as new transplants to Minneapolis who didn’t have a very big social network here, didn’t have a name in the local food & wine scene but the people we did know were excited about our idea and a handful of people in our neighborhood were staunch supporters from the very beginning, the small wine distributors we worked with were extremely supportive of us, wine-loving staff at local restaurants like The Bachelor Farmer, Terzo, Tilia and Alma shopped with us and sent customers our way, we got positive press from local food & wine writers, started a wine club and slowly built a following. In 2018 we moved a few blocks down Glenwood Ave to a new location a little closer to our house and facing the busy street. Our business has continued to grow there.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It hasn’t been a smooth road. I discussed a lot of challenges in the previous question but we’ve had to be very scrappy and creative running our business and we’re lucky to have corporate jobs so we don’t have to make a living running the wine shop. Having income independent of our business has given us more time for our business to get on its feet and has allowed us to make decisions that aren’t based on a pure profit motive.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We sell mostly wines (but also beers and spirits) made by small independent winemakers (and brewers and distillers). We like to think of ourselves as the indie record shop of liquor stores. We’re a mom and pop shop supporting mom and pop producers of alcoholic (and non-alcoholic) beverages. A lot of our wines fall in the “natural” category, a loosely defined category that typically includes wines that are made with grapes grown without the use of industrial pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers (sometimes certified organic or biodynamic but indie farmers don’t always go through the red tape of getting certified), wines that are spontaneously fermented (without the addition of commercially obtained yeasts) and wines that do not include chemical additives, enzymes, flavor enhancers, colorants, etc. We’re proud of our kind, helpful, knowledgable staff who are all dedicated to the same principles we are, our carefully selected inventory (we drink everything we sell–if we wouldn’t drink it ourselves it’s not on the shelves), the non-intimidating vibe of our shop and our dedication to people and principle over profit.
Who else deserves credit in your story?
My husband who is co-owner of the business, my parents for teaching me to appreciate good food and sustainable agriculture and instilling me with strong values and a non-conforming mindset, my (maternal) grandparents who traveled the world and were the first wine connoisseurs I ever met, the scrappy small business restaurants and wine shops in New York City and Paris where I was learned about the joy of natural wine, the small independent distributors in Minneapolis like New France Wine Company and Libation Project and Tradition and Rootstock and Bourget who were as excited about natural wines as I was and who brought in so many of the wines that I wanted to sell when I asked for them (and didn’t tell me that people in Minnesota would never buy the wines that I liked), the restaurants like Tilia and Bachelor Farmer and Alma and Terzo and many others who had a lot of the same wines we sell on their wine lists and told customers to come shop with us, the staff that worked at those restaurants who shopped with us and told their patrons to shop with us, the staff at wine shops like Solo Vino and Surdyk’s and France 44 who sent their own customers to us when they asked about natural wine and our store manager Linda and all of our past and present staff who believe in what we do as much as we do. And our customers of course…they justify our existence!
Contact Info:
- Website: shophenryandson.com
- Instagram: @shophenryandson
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shophenryandson
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/shophenryandson
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKz44IhSNq8Z5fxY8tNfePg/videos
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/shophenryandson/_created/
Image Credits:
Dodd Demas
