We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Francesca Galarus. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Francesca below.
Alright, Francesca thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. So, one thing many business owners consider is donating a percentage of sales or profits to an organization or cause. We’d love to hear your thoughts and the story behind how and why you chose the cause or organization you donate to.
Mural City Cellars proudly donates a portion of our wine sales back into the community. One dollar from every bottle of our CSW wines (easy-drinking table white, rosé, and red) sold is donated straight back to neighborhood initiatives. This program applies to all bottle sales, so DTC, wholesale, and wine club purchases are also included in this effort. MCC focuses on giving back to art organizations, hyper local neighborhood initiative, community beautification efforts, groups that support equity in the wine industry, and urban farming programs.
To date we’ve given over $10,000 to the East Kensington Neighbors Association, Fishtown Neighbors Association, New Kensington Community Development Corporation, and The Mural Arts Project. In 2023 we made a $4,867 donation to James R. Ludlow elementary school in Philadelphia. This amount is supporting the school’s efforts to create an outdoor learning center and agricultural STEM lab for students to learn how to grow healthy food and help escape food insecurity. Ultimately, we view ourselves as small business owners in Fishtown and East-Kensington as having a responsibility to our community and a mandate to give back.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Mural City Cellars (MCC) is Philadelphia’s first independently owned urban winery, founded by a female and Latinx team. We make minimal intervention wines in our small warehouse with grapes sourced from within a 300-mile radius of the city and work mostly with lesser-known hybrid varietals to showcase the wonderful grapes the East Coast has to offer.
MCC produces and sells wines ranging from easy-drinking table wines, to more experimental, small-batch runs of wines that change every vintage. We also host classes where guests learn about wine production methods and other local wineries.
We are proud to be at the forefront of Philadelphia’s growing wine scene and be leaders in creating a reputation for Pennsylvania and East Coast wine. We want to make wine “unstuffy,” enjoyable, and accessible to everyone using the bounty of amazing fruit available right here at home.
How did we get here? In 2016 my partner Nicholas moved away from restaurants to begin his winemaking career, and the early idea of an urban winery began to formulate between the two of us. Nicholas knew after only one harvest that he wanted to make wine for himself one day and I knew I was ready to take on the challenge of owning and running a small business. As he gained experience working wine harvests in California, New Zealand, and New Jersey we calculated exactly how much wine we would need to produce ourselves to be able to grow a small business. With several harvests under his belt, he knew he could manage the production side, while I brought the marketing, customer service, and management experience needed to run the business side. One of our core ideas was to make wine with only fruit and supplies available in the Northeastern US. We wanted to be as sustainable as possible and sell all of our wine in the local area without shipping. We moved to Philadelphia in 2017 with the intention of opening Mural City, making our very first wines in the Fall of 2019, and doing it all in my mom’s garage. We signed a lease on a small production space meant to be ready in mid-2020. In March 2020 the pandemic hit, construction stopped, and we both lost our jobs. With the extra time on our hands and wine already in production, we committed to working full-time on getting Mural City off the ground. We opened the doors in January 2021 to an incredible reception and a line around the block. It was a natural fit to open and run MCC because Nicholas and I have such different and valuable perspectives. Mural City benefits from combining corporate practices with the personal touch of a family-run business and always with the highest level of hospitality.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
As Pennsylvania natives, Nicholas and I are in love with Philadelphia’s food and beverage scene, its deep hometown pride, and its rooted sense of community. We are excited to be a part of it with Mural City Cellars and feel an immense sense of pride that the city has embraced us and MCC as a Latinx – owned business.
Within our neighborhood, we are incredibly fortunate to own our home and to operate our business within the same few blocks. The vast majority of guests who visit us are neighbors themselves and often engage with other locals sitting next to them, realizing they have kids at the same school. The atmosphere is convivial and truly neighborly: we all wave hello to each other while on coffee runs the next morning and frequent the same parks and dog-walk routes.
In addition to MCC’s community-minded atmosphere, it’s also extremely important to us to engage with other small local businesses and organizations. Almost all of our partnerships are with other business owners in the neighborhood, and we’re proud to help give a platform to the businesses we believe in. We host markets like the Philly Queer Flea, bring in different food vendors and restaurants for daily pop-ups, collaborate on co-branded products with both nonprofits and businesses, and more! We also showcase local art on our labels, working with artists in the PA-DE-NJ tri-state area and highlighting their work through multiple channels.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
MCC is a nimble organization that embraces any opportunity to get ourselves in front of our neighbors. A great example of this is the seasonal Wine Garden that MCC has run for the Summer and Fall of 2022 and 2023. In 2022, while still a small and growing business, we were given the opportunity to work with a local non-profit and activate a formerly empty lot on the border of Fishtown and East Kensington–merely two blocks away from our production facility. The lot was bare bones with no infrastructure and sat unused since before the pandemic. Through lots of sweat equity–long days in the garden with our small team cleaning the place, landscaping, and working with our partners to restore a 1940’s trolley car into a functioning bar–we were able to transform the garden into a bustling, family-friendly oasis for neighbors to gather and enjoy our wine. Operating for two seasons, we successfully partnered with different local businesses (food, arts & crafts, yoga, local musicians) to bring both exciting programming to the garden as well as visibility to these other small businesses. We also continued to work with our non-profit partners to bring community events to the space such as family movie nights, kid’s crafts, and sing-a-longs. This project was a huge success that allowed us to grow in both visibility and our operations. We created ten new seasonal jobs to the neighborhood that started at $20 per hour pay, as well as allowed us to sustain three full-time salaries. The reception from the neighborhood was incredible, and we are so proud of this accomplishment.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.muralcitycellars.com
- Instagram: muralcitycellars
Image Credits
Adrian Garcia (vineyard photos) Gab Bonghi