Francesca Galarus did not grow up in wine country. She spent years managing high-volume restaurants, including a New York City nightspot open until the early morning, before her partner Nicholas returned from winemaking internships in Napa Valley and New Zealand with a vision.
An early dream to open a winery became Mural City Cellars, Philadelphia’s neighborhood winery and wine bar. Francesca shared the full story on the Spilled Salt podcast, hosted by Maureen Ballatori.
Starting Small: 500 Cases of Wine in a Suburban Garage
In fall 2019, the couple made their first vintage in Francesca’s mother’s garage in the Philadelphia suburbs. She punched down fermentation bins by hand and balanced the work with day jobs.
When the pandemic hit in March 2020, they used the downtime to model financials, build a website, launch their Instagram, and scout a commercial space.
They opened their doors in January 2021 with roughly $2,000 in the bank, during pre-vaccination lockdowns, and still found a line out the door.
Wine Bar, Not Tasting Room: A Positioning Decision That Drove Growth
Francesca is deliberate about language. “We never identified as a tasting room,” she said. “We are a winery, wine bar and bottle shop.” That distinction shapes everything from hours (open until 10 or 11 p.m., six days a week) to hiring, to the absence of stemmed glassware.
The business now operates out of a 3,000-square-foot former auto body garage, produces 5,000 cases annually, and employs a team of 12 with a wine club of over 500 members.
Building an Inclusive Business in a Majority-Minority City
Philadelphia is a minority-majority city, and Mural City works hard to make the winery a welcoming place for anyone who walks in the door. Mural City partners with The Veraison Project, a California-based organization that places people of color in paid, full-year winery apprenticeships. Mural City will host its first apprentice starting in August, cycling them through winemaking, operations, events, and business ownership.
The Advice Every Food and Beverage Founder Needs to Hear
Francesca is pushing back against industry echo chambers of declining consumption and wineries struggling. “Why aren’t we talking about how much we’re paying people? Why aren’t we talking about creative benefits that we can offer our team?” she asked on the podcast. She wants more open conversations about revenue, margins, and shared resources between small producers because transparency accelerates learning for everyone.
Francesca’s message to fellow founders is straightforward, whether they’re in wine, hospitality or another altogether. Community and collaboration are competitive advantages, not risks.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage, and agriculture industries. Today’s guest is Francesca Galarus. She is co-owner of Mural City Cellars, Philadelphia’s neighborhood winery.
Mural City is a wine bar, winery, and bottle shop with a simple and admirable vision to source local grapes from small farms, create beautiful wines, with minimal intervention and share them with their neighbors while giving back to their city.
I am so delighted to wrap season eight of Spilled Salt with this interview. Not only was Francesca open about the high points and the low points of running a business and thorough in her description about what it took to get started during the pandemic, mind you, but she also has a positively refreshing outlook about the future of the wine industry.
Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey Francesca, how are you?
Francesca Galarus: Hi Maureen, I’m great, thanks for having me.
Maureen: Yes, I’m delighted to have you on the pod today. Thanks so much for joining me. Many of the folks that I’ve interviewed on the podcast have kind of always been in the wine industry. The folks that are in wine have kind of always been in wine, but that’s not your story. So take us back to the beginning and tell us a little bit about your background.
Francesca: Yes, definitely not born into this industry. Kind of found it through happenstance, through love. I run Mural City Cellars, which is a Philadelphia urban winery with my partner in life and business, Nicholas. And we met 14 years ago, working at restaurants.
So I always worked in restaurants. My mom wanted me to be independent financially. So it was the place where I could make the most amount of money, meet a lot of friends, and I was instantly addicted.
So, I went through college, working in restaurants, and graduated and realized that even though I had a degree in corporate communications and PR, all my experience and everything I loved was restaurants.
I continued in that world for a long time. Moved to New York City and I opened Beauty and Essex, which is a part of TAL Group. It was like a huge clubster aunt, early 2010s, with 10 managers under 30 and open until 4 a.m. So yes, it was quite the introduction. And then we were open until 2, I believe, but it stretched sometimes. And then I would be in the office checking servers out until 4 and then riding my bike back to Crown Heights while the sun was rising.
Maureen: Wow. my God. How could you be open till 4 a.m.?
Francesca: Eventually I was like, I can’t do this anymore. This is crazy. I was on vacation in Miami and I was like, I think I just want to move here.
So I did that and that’s where I met my partner Nicholas. And he was really the wine guy.
So he was studying to be certified sommelier and was starting to work in restaurants and build wine lists and really get into that life. And I’d always been around wine, I always appreciated it, but I never took a particular specific interest in it. And he left after we started dating and did his winemaking internships in Napa Valley with Truchard and then went to New Zealand so he could do two harvests in eight months.
He came back with the idea for Mural City and then we started making baby steps almost every day. So we moved back to Philadelphia where I’m from. I grew up right around here. A couple of years later we made our first vintage in my mom’s garage in the suburbs.
Maureen: I love it. Tell me more about those early days. You said that, you know, Nicholas kind of came back and had this idea and you guys started making the baby steps in the direction of where you wanted to take it, which just for the record, I’m a big believer of that from a like philosophical standpoint is that when you’re working towards something, especially when it can feel like such a big thing, like, oh my God, we’re going to start a winery or oh my God, we’re going to have a baby or we’re going to buy a house or we’re going to change jobs, whatever the case is.
I think that that’s a great way to approach it is what’s one thing we can do to move closer to it at a time. So tell me a little bit about those very early days. What did that look like? What were some of the baby steps that you took? What was scary? What was exciting?
Francesca: That’s such a great question. So I never pictured myself as an entrepreneur. I don’t know why, because I always had trouble with authority and I always felt like I had the best ideas and I always felt like I could do something better than my employer. So I guess the signs were all there.
But Nicholas asked me to be a part of it and honestly, I thought he was nuts. And this was, let’s see, he got back from New Zealand in 2017.
We just started looking at spaces in Miami and we were talking about it and we just started to dream a little bit. And it took me a really long time to kind of get to a space where I could dream because I’m such an action oriented person. When an idea comes to me or when ideas are presented to me, I want to start making it happen already. So it took me a while to kind of get into the exercise of like, we’re just dreaming and like, it’s okay to be in these rooms with landlords and asking for space, even though we don’t have a business yet.
There was some, I guess, blind male confidence on Nicholas’s part and some reservations on mine. But we just started kind of ideating and thinking and talking. And then we decided that Miami wasn’t the place for Mural City.
We really wanted a business that had a community focus and that was able to support a local economy. There’s just not a lot of grapes growing in South Florida. So we moved up here, like I said, which is where I’m from.
Then, we were here and we were working in restaurants and we were still talking and kind of paused a little bit because we just made a big move up the coast. And then one day, I love this because usually it’s Nicholas who’s the catalyst for these things. I turned over to him in bed and I was like, we came here to make wine, we have to make wine.
And he was working at a winery in New Jersey. So he was an assistant winemaker and we decided in the fall of 2019, we were going to do two harvests. So he was going to do his harvests at work.
And then I would support in any way I could. I had no winemaking experience. And we would make wine in any way possible. So my mom was like, if you clean out my garage, you can have it. It was no small task. So we did that. And we got some used equipment and we got a small amount of grapes. made about 500 cases in my mom’s two-car garage.
And it was crazy because we were driving back and forth. He was in New Jersey. So it was like crossing Philadelphia to go to the Western suburbs.
You know, the grapes need attention all the time, especially when you’re doing punchdowns. So I would go there after work, punch them down, sleep at my mom’s house, wake up, punch them down, and ride my bike to the train station.
Maureen: And what is that? Explain that to people, punch down.
Francesca: Oh, yes, sure. So we had big fermentation bins right there on the floor and the red grapes were macerating, just sitting with the skins and leaching out all the color and flavor and going through the primary fermentation.
And the top gets a little bit dry, so you kind of have to incorporate it. So we were doing it manually with our hands.
It’s actually my favorite part of winemaking because it’s so visceral. You can just feel it and your nails get a mess, but it’s worth it. It’s so cool. You get to feel the fermentation where it’s happening. It’s warmer in some spots and cooler in the others. And you’re just kind of hands on like facilitating the winemaking process, which is so cool.
Well, that’s what you get when you ask someone who is not a professional winemaker.
Maureen: Wow, I’ve never heard anybody explain it that way. That’s so cool. I think that that’s a very cool experience.
I also love the moment you said we’re here to make wine. We need to make wine. I think that is one of those transformational moments where it’s like sometimes you just got to get your shit together and like take that step forward.
I think about that in my own business, I had wanted to take my own business full-time. had been freelancing for 10 years. It was a side thing, a hobby, right? I really wanted to take it full-time, but it was scary, right?
All the things that you feel when you’re going through those transformational moments. I had this little card and like behind my computer at my desk that said, proceed as if success is inevitable. And just decided, I was like, I am going come hell or high water, I’m going to figure this out.
And worst case scenario, if I need to go get a job at McDonald’s, I can always do that, right? So sometimes it’s, I explain it to people who come to me for advice that ready is a mindset. It’s not a moment, right? When somebody comes to you and says, okay, you have done all the things, you’ve done all the planning, you’re now ready. Ready is your mindset and only you know when it’s time.
Francesca: Absolutely.
I love that because it’s similar to you’re never going to be ready, but it’s a more positive spin on it. Like, you’re never going to be ready. You’re never going to be like, everything’s in place, let’s have a kid. Like, everything’s in place, let’s move across the country. Like, you’re never going to feel that way. So you have to take that step.
And I love to proceed as if success is an inevitable statement. I just have so many, so many responses to that. But right now, I mean, we’re trying to purchase a building. I know I’m going way far ahead, but this just mimics that exactly.
We’re trying to purchase a building. We’re trying to get a loan to do so and then build out the space. And we don’t even know if everything is going to fall into place, but we have to take all the steps. Like we have to start the zoning process. We have to start working with the architect. We have to make a non-refundable deposit. Like we have to just do it as if this is definitely going to happen.
Maureen: Yes, because also when you do that and the right thing lands in your plate, in your lap, because you are ready, because you took all the steps, then you can leap, right, and be ready to receive the next step. And it’s like, my God, I can’t believe that this all fell into place. It’s like, well, really, you set this train in motion because you did all of those things. So.
Take me back to, we were just talking about the first 500 cases that you produced in your mom’s garage. What happened next?
Francesca: Yes, so then everybody knows what happened next because March of 2020 happened next. And Nicholas was, at that point, had left the winery and was serving part-time so he could dedicate time to Mural City or what would become Mural City. And I lost my job through the pandemic, but actually was connected with another one almost right away.
Maureen: And were you still in restaurants at the time?
Francesca: So yes, was, so actually I had pivoted to fitness and it still felt like a hospitality through line, but it gave me slightly better hours and I really liked it. And then I was in sales and I was working with small businesses, which was very rewarding and kind of opened my eyes to what happened down the road. So I was working as a relationship manager at a coworking space. So a lot of small businesses.
Yes, but that job ended in the pandemic, but somebody I had worked with introduced me to a virtual job in the ag tech world, actually. So I was doing that.
Just so many bounces and things that needed to happen by happenstance. But because of the pandemic and because I was working now from home and Nick was laid off from his restaurant job, we had so much time together.
So he found a spreadsheet downloadable online that just like put together, I guess now looking back at it, it was basically like a P &L in spreadsheet form. And we would just like pour over this like imaginary budget and be like, okay, like if we can make this much wine, if we can get it all bottled and reopen, like this is how much we can make, this is how much it would cause, you don’t need to get paid because you’re still working.
And we started to build our website and we just took these steps. Like, I mean, I would get done work and we would have nothing to do.
So we’d sit at the island in the kitchen and just start doing things. made t-shirts, so we had like a tiny bit of revenue coming in. Like we started to tell people, we started our Instagram. So yes, we just started to take those steps.
We also found a space during this time. So we were planning our move from my mom’s garage in Malvern to the city. It was only three blocks from our house. It was a very small, thousand square foot, subdivided warehouse. And we were working with the contractor.
Maureen: And that was your plan was just to make the wine there or you were also, you had a vision for a tasting room also out of that space.
Francesca: Yes, not so much a tasting room at that time. We still didn’t know what was going on. So we were like, we’ll just open as a store. We’ll see. You know, we’ll give samples and we’ll just see how it goes. But, you know, obviously construction was delayed.
We were working with our contractor who was also our landlord and we just were so unfamiliar with the process. And then on top of that, the pandemic. So it took so, so long. I think we finally got the keys in November of 2020.
Maureen: Tell me a little bit more about that. I love the fact that you started with the financial side of the business, right? And it’s interesting because your background in restaurants and your degree in corporate communications and PR.
Some people, myself included, really struggled for a long time and still, you know, when I meet with the financial people that helped me with the business. I’m like, you gotta explain that to me again, help me understand how these things are related or whatever.
So the sales part of it is so critical, right? So in those early days in 2020, March to November, as you were kind of modeling out what the business was going to look like, who sort of took on the financial aspect of it? Was one of you sort of leaning more than the other into it? And what were your plans for sales?
Because you’ve got your bottled harvest from the 500 cases that you made in your mom’s garage.
You’re now thinking we’re going to go into this space to be able to make more. You’ve got a scale up plan. What was your sales channel?
Francesca: Yes, I mean, I wouldn’t say any of those numbers were anywhere near accurate, but I think it just got us thinking and talking about it. You know, and we were like, OK, if it takes this long to sell these wines, if we sell them at this price, you know, what could we make?
And we’re like, OK, we can make seventy thousand dollars in year one. Like that’s what we were like, OK, we do this. That’s going to be amazing. And we were going to be open like two days a week. I mean, we were both still working.
We just asked ourselves, can we survive this first year basically? Like, could we do it? You know, and it was like a helpful model and exercise for us to kind of just think that through and start having those conversations.
I feel like in the beginning, Nick led it, which is so funny because he has almost nothing to do with the finances now. Like that is fully my wheelhouse. And I’ve kind of discovered this interest and passion for what most people would describe as insanely boring and the worst part of owning your business, but I really like it.
So yes, he really led it in the beginning and got us thinking about it. And he was the one who really pored over it and pored over it. And sometimes I’d be like, can we just have a martini? Like, I’m so over this. But yes, it wasn’t a helpful step.
So yes, we were able to finally open our doors in January of 2021. It was like the last day of January, 2021, and we had about $2,000 in our bank account and we were like, just open the doors, just do it. And it was at a time pre-vaccination. Walking down the street to your local new winery was an activity and we could only have five people in the space.
Maureen: Yes, tell me more.
Francesca: We got picked up by a few like local Philly Fishtown happenings and water ice and just a few local Philly influencers.
And I went out to put the sign because we were tucked behind on a teeny tiny residential street. Our address was actually the front of the building, but the entrance was in the back.
So we had a little sandwich board and I was walking out to put the sandwich board and somebody said, is that for the winery that’s opening today? And I was like, my God, people actually know about it.
So we opened our doors at, I think it was at noon or 10 a.m. or something and there was a line out the door just to walk in and look at the five different wines and try them. We had little tasting cups. People would remove their masks really quick, try the wine and so many people were like, I’ll take all five.
And we’re like, what is happening? I made a playlist that was two hours long and we worked that way for eight hours straight through. And Nick said, if I hear this caribou song one more time… It was the first song in the playlist. He was like, I can’t.
Maureen: Wow. My God. I think that some of that is, I think back to those days where we were so hungry for connection and something new and to get out in the world, no matter what that looked like, right?
And so your community was excited to show up for something new. And I think that there’s a respect that people have. You know how difficult it is too. I mean, obviously you and I do, because we own businesses, right?
But I think the general public knows how difficult it is to start something, let alone during a global pandemic, right? So I imagine that people were excited not only for a winery to be coming to town, but for somebody to be doing the brave thing, right? And doing that during a time where there was so much happening.
Francesca: Yes, I totally agree with you. Then, also on top of that, there was such a passion that I feel is lost now. Not totally lost because I feel like my neighborhood still holds on to this, but there was such a drive to “support local” and your neighborhood.
We were like all the neighbors were single-handedly keeping restaurants alive by buying gift cards that they knew they couldn’t use for a year. There was so much that was going on. We live in a neighborhood in Philadelphia that is filled with independently owned small businesses, which is so cool. And there was just this drive and passion to support all these businesses and our duty to keep them all alive, which was so beautiful.
Maureen: Yes. So take me to today. What does Mural City look like today?
Francesca: Yes, so Mural City has moved on through many different locations from that first 1,000 square foot warehouse. But we finally found our home at the corner of Frankfurt and Berks, which is an arterial street.
We’re in a big corner. We have a 3,000 square foot former auto body garage that we turned into a gorgeous space. The front two thirds is all guest facing, so there’s a long bar. We have living rooms and communal tables.
And then the back third is where we produce all of the wine. We’re open six days a week. We keep traditional bar hours. So we’re open late till 10 or 11 every night. We have a team of 12 and we’re producing like 5,000 cases.
Maureen: Amazing, congratulations. I have a few specific questions for you about location and about hours. So a brick and mortar business, of course, it’s all location, location, location, right? When did you make the switch from your first base to the one that you’re in now?
Francesca: Thanks! We officially opened our doors March of 2024. So it’s been just over two years in this location.
Maureen: Okay, tell me about how the business changed with the location change, because that’s a question that I sometimes get from folks that we work with who are in brick and mortar businesses.
When something is not going as you want it to, you’re sort of looking at all aspects of the business, right? Is it a product market fit? Is there something wrong with the taste, especially in food and beverage? Like, is it a taste problem? Is it an awareness problem? Do I need to be doing more to get people in the doors or is the actual location of the door the problem?
So tell me about that sort of thing and what the change from locations has meant for you guys.
Francesca: Yes, I would definitely say visibility is huge for us. We’re on an arterial street and the train stop that people get off to walk into the neighborhood is the direct path is right by the winery. So there’s just foot traffic.
And also, you know, we’re in the fifth, sometimes fourth largest city in the United States. So there’s a lot of people, which is really cool. We have WINERY in huge block letters written above our garage door.
So people just walk by and they’re like, what’s that? My God, a winery. How cool.
Although they still don’t know sometimes that we actually make the wine when they come in.
And then having the corner, we have a huge mural on the side. So it just is like a beautiful, colorful attraction to the neighborhood.
We have a seasonal wine garden across the street. So in the summer we have 50% of the corner. So a lot of front-facing opportunities.
We have live music, so it’s nice for people to hear jazz when they’re walking by and it brings them in.
Maureen: Can they consume, you said it’s across the street, that wine, that garden? Can people take their wine over there?
Francesca: So we actually have another bar. It operates as a not a separate business, but another location. We have another bar and yes, full facilities over there.
Maureen: Okay. over there so that you can leverage that space. So smart, love that. And then tell me about the hours because that is something that has always baffled me.
I’m in the Finger Lakes region of New York, right? There are many wineries that will close at five o’clock. And I’m like, what are you doing? People are not even out at work yet, right? So tell me about the hours. Why was that important to you?
Francesca: Yes, so something from the beginning is we never identified as a tasting room. We are not a tasting room. We’re a wine bar. And we actively avoid that verbiage and all of our marketing materials and our website.
When we talk about the winery, we are a winery, wine bar and bottle shop. So from the beginning, we were like, let’s leave this old model aside. It’s not what we’re doing at MuralCity. And I will caveat all of this with, again, reiterating, we are in a city.
And our primary audience is not tourists. It is not tourists that are coming for a wine vacation and spending all day tasting wine. And you know, I mean, really gone are the days of boomers going into a winery at 10 a.m., trying a few wines and leaving with, you know, two cases. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
We’ve really tried to maximize the on-premise revenue category of our business. And that means being open and accessible. So all day, Saturday and Sunday, we’re open 12 to eight on Sundays and 12 to 11 on Saturdays. We’re only closed on Tuesdays and Mondays.
It’s always difficult to get people drinking wine on Mondays, but we have a wine club of 500 plus members. And every Monday we do member Monday. So any member that walks through the door gets a free glass of wine. So that’s really built a nice community on those days and keeps the space full.
We’ve just always wanted to make it like a fun place. It’s not so serious about drinking wine. We don’t use stemmed glassware. We really try to find accessible and fun ways to describe our wines.
And we hire people from all different experiences in wine. So we have someone who just did a harvest last year and is so excited and super nerdy and wants to talk to everybody about all the intricacies of wine.
And then we have someone who’s like 22, who just moved here from Puerto Rico and doesn’t know anything about wine, worked as a barista, but she’s super friendly and bubbly and speaks Spanish.
And we just want to make sure that every consumer that walks through the door feels comfortable. And we tell our team, hey, if someone really wants to get into wine, like get into the nitty gritty and have a tour of the tank room and talk real deeply about this, grab this guest, you know, or grab this team member and introduce them and have them have that experience that they want.
Maureen: It sounds like the difference between tasting room and wine bar bottle shop is really important to you. Talk about that a little bit. Why? Why that purposeful difference?
Francesca: Yes, I mean, I think for us, the wine is important and we want it to taste good, but it’s not the number one focus.
The number one focus is hospitality and community. And I think by not making the wine so serious and not pushing it into a place where you’re like, you’re coming here to study and taste and evaluate, you know, you’re coming here to have a good time.
I hope you enjoy what’s in your glass, you know, but that’s just what’s in the vessel that keeps you there. But the reason you’re coming to Mural City is to enjoy yourself.
Maureen: Mm-hmm. Are you familiar with third space, the concept of third space? Yes, so that sounds exactly like what you’re talking about. And so for anybody who’s not familiar, the third space is the place that is separate from home or work where you intentionally go to hang out and spend time and find community and really create that togetherness that you’re talking about.
Francesca: Yes, I just wanted to add, too, we are intentional about that as well. We don’t take reservations. We don’t ever ask people to get up or have a time or an expiration on their time at Mural City.
We really want you to sit down with one person and then you’re like, my friends in this neighborhood, let me invite them. Like then you grab a bottle, then you stay, you start talking to people next to you, you order a little food, whatever. So it really is not like there’s no set experience. We want you to use the space how you’d like to use the space.
Maureen: And there’s a lot of wineries in particular that I’ve spoken to that have this concept of approachability, right? And you just talked about it in the sense of the ways that comes to life for you, with the example that you just gave about no reservations.
We want people to feel like they can just pop in, but also the diversity of folks that you’re employing on your staff to help people feel comfortable.
We were also talking before we came on about diversity in the wine industry from the beginning. So talk a little bit about that and how does that connect to your very proud presence as an urban winery? You talk about that a lot on your website. It sounds like that’s really important to you. Talk about that a bit.
Francesca: Yes, so Philadelphia is a minority majority city, and that means there’s more people of color than there are white people. And there is a huge Vietnamese population, there’s a huge Black population, there’s a huge Hispanic population.
So we want to make sure that the room at Mural City is representative of what Philadelphia looks like. So it’s really extremely important to us to make sure that nobody feels intimidated when they walk into Mural City, that they’re greeted and treated the same as anybody else would be.
And a huge way we do that is by the team that we hire, also the music that we play and making sure that there is music in various languages and various styles.
We work with an organization called The Veraison Project. They’re based in California, but they help people of color enter the wine industry through various ways.
One way is through an apprenticeship. It’s a full year-long apprenticeship for a person of color. They get to cycle through all departments of wineries. They’ve historically partnered with Silver Oak and we are their first East Coast Winery to take part.
So our application’s just closed. We’re so excited to meet the candidates, but they’ll be starting with us in August. It’s fully paid, full time. We offer benefits.
They’ll be starting in August with our winemaker, Leanne, and then they’ll move into operations with Talia, who’s our GM. Then they’ll move into events and marketing with Katie, who’s our creative strategist, and then they’ll move into business operations and ownership with me. So they get three months with each team.
Maureen: Wow, what an incredible program. I really think that, number one, I give you a lot of credit for really thinking through the details of what it means to make somebody comfortable in your space, right? I can walk into a place and see people who look like me. I know that this is a place where people like me are welcome, but the music is just, chef’s kiss, like a whole other level of detail that brings that comfort.
Maybe when you walk in there, you can’t really put your finger on what it is that makes me feel like I’m welcome here, but I either feel it I don’t. And that’s one of those things that kind of contributes to that.
The access to education, I really believe that with anything, having, I was going to say young people, but that’s not even the case, right? It can be anybody, like welcoming people in and sort of helping them, holding their hands through the process. And maybe that’s even the wrong language, but like, you know, just giving them the opportunity to learn all of the aspects of the business, to set someone up for success so that when they come out on the other side, they can say they’ve done fill in the blank.
Because if you don’t have access to those opportunities, it can be so hard to break in.
I hear this all the time at agriculture conferences that I go to. Dairy is one in particular, but also I hear it in ag tech and I hear it in wine and craft beverages as well, is that if you’re not already in, it’s so hard to get in, right? Because some of the first questions that people ask is, did you grow up on a farm? Do you have a farm background? Do you work with farmers already, producers or whatever the term is for your industry?
But if you don’t already have that traction, it can be so difficult to get in. And so sometimes it just takes somebody to say, come on in, to help. how, that Veraison Project that you mentioned, is that at scale? is how many folks are they placing?
I just, it feels like that is a good opportunity to start making change, like going in the direction of change, right? But can it be achieved at scale? What are your thoughts?
Francesca: Yes, I mean, we’ve been working with them for, I guess, three years now. We have not done the apprenticeship program. This will be our first year, but we’ve gotten involved in some other events.
So they have dinners, they get people together, just more informal gatherings. And then they have a large annual event every year on the West Coast. We’ve been able to bring our wine too, which has been so cool to share. I know that they’d love to get more wineries involved. And I think they have the person power and the drive to do so, to keep growing it.
They were really excited about an opportunity on the East Coast. So I think, you know, it’s not always achievable, even though TVP does offer additional funds to help people relocate and things like that. It’s not always achievable to leave your side of the country to go to Napa or Sonoma for three to four months.
Yes, I definitely think there’s an opportunity and I hope that they continue to grow and we’re excited to see what this year looks like.
I want to go back to those questions that you said that the dairy industry is asking and I wanted to kind of share some of the questions we ask in interviews because they really have nothing to do about wine. One of our big questions is, tell me about a time you either received or gave great hospitality.
And I just want to see their reaction. I want them to enthusiastically tell me a story about making someone happy or having someone make their experience extra special.
And we also ask a question because we have 40 seats. If you were throwing a party for 40 of your friends and you had no budget, what would it look like? And we just want to hear, you know, if they’re excited about something and then we get them excited about our wine behind the bar, like, how are they going to talk about it? How are they going to share that? And how are they going to tell a story?
So those questions are really important to us. We really never ask, what’s your favorite wine or what’s your experience in wine? We really want to just get them talking and have a conversation and to see what it would be like as a guest who sits at their bar.
Maureen: Yes, I see your restaurant experience shining through with that, right? You know, that it’s a thing that if you have the right mentality, approach to hospitality, work ethic, you know, adherence to the way that things should be done when you want to do it right, then you can learn the rest.
Francesca: I actually had to teach one of our team members how to open a bottle of wine the other day. I went into the office for two seconds to eat something andI said, just knock on the door if you need me. And she was like, can you open this for me? I was like, yes.
But she was so fun in her interview. Like we hired her and my partner was like, my God, she’s like a surfer from Connecticut. Like, can you imagine? Like she’s got this relaxed surfer attitude. She works with she does like occupational therapy during the day with kids and she just moved here and she wants to meet people like that’s the kind of person she is and like it’s i can teach you how to open a bottle of wine and I don’t care if you break the cork three times while you’re learning it’s fine because I can’t teach you to be a cool fun engaging caring person. That’s way harder.
Maureen: It goes back to what you were saying earlier when you were talking about, we’re not a tasting room, we’re a wine bar and a bottle shop and you were talking about how you describe the wine and that sort of thing and that it’s not so serious, right?
I see some parallels in that, a great mentality. And it also feels like when you hire people like that where you’re like, my God, this person is so fun and they’re going to be great behind the bar, they’re curating that kind of experience that you’re looking to create for people, not someone who is like, you know, all bent out of shape because the cork got broken as they were opening the bottle, right? That, again, is some of those moments where you’re walking the walk of the environment that you’re looking to create.
Francesca: Yes. Or even on the other side, if they’re opening a bottle and they’re making a big thing out of it and they’re like smelling the cork in front of the guests… I don’t want that either, you know?
Maureen: Yes. I can remember being in my early 20s and you’d be out to one of your first fancy dinners with a significant other, right? And you order the wine, because it feels like you should order a wine in this type of place and they pour the sample. It’s like, I don’t know what I’m tasting for. It tastes good, I guess. I don’t know.
But you want to, your goal is to create the type of place where number one, that it doesn’t feel like that, right? That there’s no preconceived notions about what they must do or not. You know, we walk like this, we talk like that, but also the type of place where people can say, why do they do that? You know, like teach me.
I want to know why they pour that first splash of wine into the glass and have me taste it at the fancy restaurant down the street before they pour the rest into my glass, right? Like, explain that to me and you want that, your establishment to be the place where people can feel comfortable asking any question.
Francesca: Yes, no silly questions and we have the knowledge to back it up so we can get, like I said, we can get real deep with you if you’d like to, but that’s not the purpose. not the requirement. It’s like the guest drives that.
Maureen: My favorite question for people, high point and low point from your career. What comes to mind?
Francesca: So this is something that kind of combines both of them. It was the same day. We were first put in Philadelphia Magazine, which is like, you know, it’s the regional magazine. It’s important. It’s a lifestyle magazine. People read it. People care about it.
We got Best Winery. I think it was in 2022. Thank you. It was so, cool. We had a picture. They sent a photographer out. It was so, so exciting.
Maureen: Amazing, congrats.
Francesca: And the very same day, I didn’t make payroll.
Maureen: Like you didn’t have the cash to make payroll or you forgot to run it?
Francesca: I didn’t make payroll and I didn’t have the cash for payroll. I ran it. It overdrew my account. It didn’t go through and I had to write every single team member paper checks like two days later.
And I remember Nicholas saying, don’t ever forget this because no one knows what’s going on. You can have all the splashy content. You can be, you can be a critic darling, you can have 60,000 followers on Instagram, but you have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes and the struggle that it takes and the things that you experience. I let my team down that day, badly. [And I was posing for a] magazine. That is a weird dichotomy. Just really, really bizarre.
Maureen: Yes. We recently had to make a change here with our finance manager who was responsible for AP and AR and running payroll and everything like that. And so I’m interviewing new potential partners for that work. And they were like, you know, if we could just do the AP/AR and you could run payroll, this whole thing would be a lot easier.
And I’m like, I can’t be trusted to run payroll because twice in the last, I don’t know, six or seven years since I’ve had employees, twice I have forgotten to run it. So Friday, Thursday night, Friday morning comes around and people are like, I didn’t get paid. I’m like, my God. So the first time it was so embarrassing. [I was saying] I can run it right now, but it won’t hit accounts till Monday. Does anybody need a bank transfer? Like I will do whatever you guys need.
And then when it happened the second time, within the same year, I was like, my God, I can’t be trusted with this responsibility, right?
And so those moments I think are great lessons, right? But also to your point, I think about that a lot, that balance of like what people see on the outside and what’s actually going on behind the scenes.
That’s why I’m a big, big fan of transparent communications, both on this podcast and my LinkedIn posts, all that stuff to really try to be transparent about the whole big picture. This thing happened and it was really hard because those moments that nobody sees that are the things that make it hard to own and operate a business are make or break moments that sometimes people think they don’t exist because they don’t see them.
Francesca: Yes. I’m lucky to be in a neighborhood, like I said, with many small businesses. And I have not less than five friends who are also women, who are also mothers, who are also entrepreneurs that I can call. And we have those candid conversations. And I’m just so happy to have that community. I feel so lucky.
Maureen: Amazing.That’s really great. Good on you for curating that group. Last, you know, sort of segment of questions here. I want to talk about the current state of the wine industry and where you see things going. What are your thoughts?
Francesca: If I hear one more time, Gen Z isn’t drinking, should we make non-alcoholic wine? Experience driven visits, blah, blah. I just feel like we’re in an echo chamber and I’m ready to have a new conversation.
I think we need to be talking about, wow, I just learned this because I just started working with a legitimate accountant. Like, my God, wineries have to pay for all the, like we pay taxes on all the inventory that we sit on.
We’re making wine in the fall. We’re not making money on that wine. It’s sitting in inventory, but it can’t go to our cogs until next year. Like, that’s crazy. Why aren’t we talking about that?
Like, why aren’t we talking about how much we’re paying people? Why aren’t we talking about creative benefits that we can offer our team? Why aren’t we talking about how to, I don’t know, how to optimize SEO in chats, like in chat GBT? Like, why are we having these more elevated conversations?
We are just fulfilling the stereotypes of what everyone thinks about our industry is that we’re behind. And I’m ready to elevate. I’m ready to elevate. I’m ready to go deeper.
I’m ready to start sharing resources. I think we’ve been really close lipped on a lot of things and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be sharing them. What’s your revenue? How did it change since the pandemic? Like, why can’t we be more clear and direct with one another?
So we can all get to a base of knowledge. So we’re not opening every conversation with, well, the wine industry is really suffering right now.
Maureen: Right, doom and gloom. How do you think that openness would change things? What do you think would happen if there was a sense of culture or community among all wineries to be the type of place where you can call yours, a winery in Wisconsin or New York or California or whatever to say, can we talk about what’s actually going on? What do you think would change?
Francesca: Well, I have with my fellow mompreneurs. There’s just so much knowledge to be shared and we’re all learning every day. So it’s like, we get it quicker if we share with each other.
I don’t have to pay this consultant because you’ve already paid them and now I know the information. Not that I’m trying to put people out of business, but just that we need to be more open with one another because, and that also shows, I think, to guess.
Yes, we’re friendly with this winery. We know what they do well and you should go visit them. It’s not always a competition. It’s so much more about community and collaboration. Yes, and borrowing equipment and I don’t know, there’s just so many things that transpire like a genuine connection and genuine relationship.
Maureen: Yes, and ideas too about, right. I think that there’s a lot that when that openness is happening, there’s a lot that people can learn about what’s working and what’s not to kind of get ahead, right?
So in my backyard here in the Finger Lakes, there’s a winery that recently made major, major updates to the whole thing. I think ownership changed and then there was a big influx of cash to update the tasting room and build out an outdoor tasting room, outdoor bar, music event space, you know, that whole thing.
And their lines were out the door every single weekend all last summer, while the winery down the street is like having trouble surviving, right? So I think that’s an admirable goal is that openness.
If the person who’s down the street having trouble can go knock on the door of the people who are seemingly doing well and understand number one, what the challenges are, which is they’re probably chasing the recoup of that investment, right? And they’re spending who knows what on marketing to bring that traffic in the door or something to your point of what you were talking about, what people don’t see but also can give some inspiration to the winery that’s struggling of, well, this winery has had a lot of success with XYZ. I think we would be a really good compliment if we did this other thing, to add to the community.
Francesca: Yes, there’s that opportunity, especially when you’re that close to compliment the experience. Like, they’re doing these really cool fireside dinners or whatever. What can we do to encourage people to come here before they go there?
There’s just so many opportunities for that. And then also, even if you steal my greatest idea, it’s not going to be the same because it’s coming from us. It’s coming from Mural City. And like you do the same thing as me. It’s not that people are going to be like, I don’t go to Mural City anymore because this winery also, I don’t know, gives their staff a thirty dollar comp budget a night. They’re not going to know that. They’re not going to feel the same from my winery to your winery. So it’s like even if you rip it like exactly, it’s not going to come off the same.
Maureen: Totally. It reminds me of this restaurant in the Finger Lakes that I went to for my birthday a number of years ago. And it’s a small 14 seat restaurant. They do two sittings a night. So they have a hard stop.
We were the first seating. And they got us out of there in the most graceful way that I literally found myself sitting in the next place. It was so graceful.
You go through this, I think it was like a four course dinner with wine pairing and everything, beautiful. It was called F.L.X. Table. They were named best new restaurant in the United States by USA Today a number of years ago. And so this was like the year after that. They were still just riding this beautiful high.
At the end of the dinner, they said, can’t remember if they gave us a ticket or just told us, if you go two doors down, they have these toasted marshmallows or s’mores or whatever that they’re doing for your dessert and they are ready for you.
And they had this partnership, yes, with the bar down the street, totally different owners, but like, what a win-win. You know, the restaurant needs to get the people out the door. The bar down the street would love to welcome 14 people in and feed them and give them probably a post-dinner drink, right?
It was just so well done. And those moments are ways that you can adhere to great hospitality, beautiful customer experience in a way that everyone can win.
Francesca:
And collaborate, yes. It’s like collaboration and hospitality at its finest.
Maureen: I was just going to say it’s so much better than the doom and gloom story that continues to be repeated. And I think that part of the reason why it continues to be repeated is to your point about echo chamber is that we are recycling the same ideas in some cases from what chatGPT or whatever, pick your fill in the blank of your favorite AI platform told you to say on social media about the current state of the wine industry, right? Or in the publication fill in the blank, right?
It’s all saying the same thing because we’re in this really weird moment where like original thought is sparse in the media, unfortunately. So I think that’s a great perspective.
Francesca: Yes. And also like out of struggle comes the best. Like we on the East Coast have such an opportunity, like not to put down the West Coast, but they’re really, it’s not great. I understand that.
Although I went out there last year and Ashes and Diamonds was full because they’re doing something different, right? So, but here on the East Coast, like we have an opportunity here. Like people want to stay closer to home. We have the population density.
Maureen: Totally.
Francesca: We haven’t pigeonholed ourselves. We can tell a new story and we can provide a new experience and we can provide this next generation or wave of the winery.
I just think there’s so many cool things we can do. And I just want to start, you know, 15, 20 minutes in from every presentation I’ve seen. Like, let’s start with this base knowledge and let’s go from there.
Maureen: Well said. I love your mindset about all of this. Thank you so much for taking the time with me today to be open and honest. I knew that’s exactly what this conversation would be. Thank you. I appreciate all of that and your time with me today.
Francesca: Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I just want to plug one thing. It’s not mine, but, you know, Setting the Table and Unreasonable Hospitality are the most important hospitality books ever written. I just got Will Guidara’s Field Guide. I’m excited to work through it.
Maureen: I have, that’s one of my favorites as well. Always an arm’s reach away.
Francesca: I got an opportunity to sit on a webinar with him yesterday and he just has so many pearls of wisdom.
And something I’m sitting with right now is the systemization of graciousness and making something that doesn’t always have to be an original idea or thought or your team member coming up with something that’s going to completely overwhelm a guest.
For us, it’s like anytime someone tells us they’ve moved into Fishtown in the last month, goes home with a free bottle of wine from Mural City. They have an experience, they come to their neighborhood winery for the first time, it sits in the fridge of their new house, and you better bet the next time someone visits them, they’re like, let’s go to my winery, my winery down the street that gave me this bottle of wine when I moved in here as a housewarming gift.
So it doesn’t even have to be anything huge. I mean, a bottle of wine is a big thing, but it doesn’t have to be huge, expensive. just leaves someone with that impression that you had when you went to F.L.X. Table. This end is so sweet that I just want to go back.
Maureen: I love it. Yes, great references. Will Guidara is the author of Unreasonable Hospitality and The Field Guide and also Setting the Table.
Francesca: Setting the Tables by Danny Meyer. Yes, they work together.
Maureen: Okay, great, thank you. Thank you for those references. And thanks again, Francesca. Take care.
Francesca: Thank you.