Three generations in business in Washington, DC.
My family has run small businesses in Washington, DC for three generations. This is the one that stuck — decades on the same Mount Pleasant corner, and counting. The shop has changed plenty. What we stand for hasn't.
The corner, before us.
Long before our sign went up, this was a working corner. The building in this photo — shot sometime in the 1950s — held a ladies' and men's tailor and a neighborhood cleaners. Mount Pleasant has always been a street of small storefronts run by the families who lived here.
That's the tradition we see ourselves as part of — working for ourselves, one storefront at a time. My dad ran several businesses around the city, but Mount Pleasant was the one that felt like home.
My dad's store, 1980s.
My dad opened Irving Wine & Spirits at 3100 Mount Pleasant Street in the 1980s. It was a different shop then, but the feeling was the same — a small-town store in the middle of a big city, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone's name. The neighborhood was a mix of immigrants and longtime residents, and Irving sat right in the heart of it.
I grew up in those aisles. I stocked shelves, broke down boxes, and learned the block by watching who came through the door. The Mount Pleasant Day parade went right past the window every year — that's the shop in the photo, crowd and all.
I try to offer something different — products you won't see at every store, and maybe the nudge to try something new.— Jesse, owner
Still the same.
Fifteen years ago I took it over. I'd spent years in tech as a product manager, and I came back to the shop thinking about it the way I'd think about any product worth making — not how much we could stock, but what was actually worth carrying.
So I started tasting everything, building relationships with distributors, and going deep on the things I love: amaro, natural wine, the bottles you'd never find at a big-box store. The shop today is smaller in selection and bigger in conviction. Every bottle on the shelf is here for the same reason: I tasted it, did the research, made sure the label reflected the quality, and would buy it for myself.
Historic Mount Pleasant.
Mount Pleasant was Washington's first streetcar suburb. A horse-drawn line began carrying people up the hill from downtown in the 1870s, and when electric streetcars reached the street itself in 1903, the neighborhood took the shape it still has today — block after block of front-porch rowhouses, with the apartment buildings and storefronts that line Mount Pleasant Street.
It has never been a quiet place. For generations this has been one of the most diverse corners of the city — longtime families who never left, alongside a Central American community, many from the town of Intipucá in El Salvador, who put down roots here starting in the 1960s. The neighborhood was named a historic district in 1987, but the history I care about isn't in the architecture. It's on the sidewalk: the bakeries, the bus-stop conversations, the Mount Pleasant Day parade that still passes our window every year.
This is the corner my dad chose, and the one I've spent my life on. Pick up a bottle, then take a walk — Mount Pleasant is still a stretch of small, family-run storefronts, full of the kind of history and character that's hard to find anywhere else in the city.
Come in. Tell me what you're cooking. I'll find you a bottle.
Open Monday through Saturday. Or give us a call and I'll set something aside.
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