Glunz Family Winery & Cellars

The Glunz story began in 1879, when Louis Glunz I arrived in Chicago from his native Wesphalia, Germany. In Chicago, Louis found a bustling port city struggling to recover from the Great Chicago Fire.

With little more than the clothes he was wearing and the dream of starting his own business, Louis took a job as a deliveryman with Wacker & Birk, a Chicago brewery owned by prominent civic leader and businessman Charles H. Wacker. He worked hard, learned all he could about the brewery business and saved his wages to begin his own company.

Louis became a favorite of the Wackers. They showed their gratitude in the form of a business loan. In 1888, Louis set up shop as a wine, beer and spirits merchant at Wells and Division streets where his grandchildren and great grandchildren continue to do business today.

Shortly after Louis I opened his beer and wine business, he acquired a tavern next-door and sold beer and sandwiches. Meanwhile, his retail business was growing. He was bottling his own beer, wines, cordials and spirits and becoming a supplier to the wealthy leaders of Chicago industry.

Each day he delivered kegs of beer and baskets of wines and spirits to the German taverns along Lincoln Avenue. In the basement of the two stores, he bottled beer for the next day’s orders, and bottled, corked and labeled wines to be laid down in his cellars.

In 1893, his friend, Charlie Wacker, who was then a director of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was instrumental in making Louis a bottler of Schlitz beer for the Exposition.

Married to Elizabeth Mitterbacher, Louis and Elizabeth had three boys and three girls who would all play roles in the Glunz story: Louis II, Bertha, Joe, Edwin, Cecelia, and Anna. A tradition was established in the Louis Glunz family that united each succeeding generation – by the age of 5 or 6, each of Louis’s children was learning the business as he had – from the bottom up.

Armed with the Schlitz distributorship, and its reputation for fine beer, wines and spirits, the business expanded and the family continued to prosper until November 18th, 1918, when the U.S. Congress passed the temporary Wartime Prohibition Act, banning the sale of alcoholic beverages having an alcohol content of greater than 2.75 percent. Louis guided the company through these difficult years by making sacramental wines and medicinal products the mainstay of the business.

Louis Glunz I died in 1931. Louis II took over the family business.

Louis II and his wife, Clare Stubing, raised five children: Louis III, Patricia, John, Barbara and Joseph. At midnight on the day of the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, Clare and Louis II went to the railway yard for the first delivery of beer barrels. It was bedlam at the station and chaos later on Wells Street as the sidewalk was stacked high with new barrels ready to be lowered into the long empty cellars under the Glunz store.