Raise A Glass To Entrepreneurship

Greg Fischer, the founder of Wild Blossom Meadery and Winery, is the paradigmatic entrepreneur. His story shows how a lifetime of experiences can add up to a unique entrepreneurial vision—and how IJ’s Clinic on Entrepreneurship can help cut through Chicago’s bureaucratic red tape to make that vision a reality. 

When Vision Meets Bureaucracy

From an early age, Greg loved to tag along as older relatives engaged in their hobbies. Through that shared time, he learned about beekeeping, winemaking, cycling, and more. As an adult, Greg pursued a career in the wine industry working across the country. But his passion for bees remained. In his free time, he sought out the fields and forests that bees love.

All these experiences snapped together when Greg first tasted artisanal mead, a wine-like drink made by fermenting honey with yeast. Mead is believed to be the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage, with roots tracing back thousands of years. It became Greg’s mission to make meads as popular as grape wines and beer. Increased demand for mead would be a boon for Greg’s bees and for the environment. According to Greg, for each bottle produced, bees pollinate some 2 million flowers—which in turn produce some 20 to 40 million seeds destined to become new flowers. 

One day, on a bike ride through a forest preserve on the far South Side of Chicago, Greg found a vacant, deteriorating warehouse where his vision could become reality. He transformed it into an elegant, sunlit tasting room and production facility and set up his hives nearby. He completed all the city’s requirements, including environmental remediation, building permits, and zoning changes. He acquired the “wall of licenses” he needed to make and sell food and alcohol, to have an outdoor patio, and more. Wild Blossom became the first meadery in the state of Illinois. 

Then Greg hit a wall. To survive and grow his business, he needed to attract new customers. He decided to offer entertainment, such as poetry readings, karaoke, or salsa lessons. But to do that, he’d need an entertainment license—a requirement the city makes almost impossible to secure. 

An Entrepreneurial Experiment

Enter the IJ Clinic. Our involvement did not suddenly make licensing easy—in fact, we are still pushing against the forceful tide of bureaucracy on Greg’s behalf, along with a broader campaign to reform the entertainment licensing requirement altogether—but it did give Greg the hope and confidence he needed to continue building his business. 

Our Clinic on Entrepreneurship was itself founded in an entrepreneurial manner. After attending an early IJ Law Student Conference, two students from the University of Chicago were determined to establish the first transactional clinic in the United States dedicated to helping entrepreneurs navigate regulatory barriers to opening a business. Law school clinics allow law students to learn through real-world practice while in law school, like a teaching hospital does for medical students. 

The IJ Clinic on Entrepreneurship trains law students to apply our theories of economic liberty to real businesses with real problems.

Those enterprising students were Mark Chenoweth (now the head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance) and James Ho (now a federal judge on the 5th Circuit). IJ collaborated with them to found the IJ Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Law School in 1998. In the years since, the IJ Clinic has: 

• Provided extensive legal counsel for more than 100 small businesses.
• Trained more than 360 students to assist entrepreneurs with a focus on individual liberty and free markets.
• Inspired countless community members with events like South Side Pitch, which highlight the stories of courageous entrepreneurs.  
• Reformed state and local policies to make it easier to be a street vendor, to hang a sign, to be a barber, and much more.

The Clinic gives IJ a home in one of the country’s top law schools—at the intersection of legal academia and everyday legal practice. There, we train law students to apply our theories of economic liberty to real businesses with real problems. They learn about contract drafting, of course, but they also learn deeper lessons about the role of entrepreneurs in struggling neighborhoods and the real-world harm caused by government’s frequent interference.

From Chicago To The Nation

That learning runs in both directions. Just as students gain theory grounded in practice, IJ gains a perspective on small businesses that we can’t get anywhere else. The Clinic sees the effects of excessive regulation and slow bureaucracy up close, one client at a time. It knows where the problems came from, how Chicago’s decisionmakers think about these issues, and which arguments actually move them. 

That ground-level knowledge flows back into strategic planning across every IJ department, sharpening which fights IJ takes, how we frame them, and where reform is within reach. The Clinic doesn’t just serve clients and train students in Chicago; it helps IJ advance our broader mission nationwide.

If Austrian economists visited Chicago today, they might enjoy sitting in the pollinator garden behind Wild Blossom, drinking a tasting flight of jewel-toned meads, and discussing the story of Greg’s business. Hayek would recognize that Greg cultivated knowledge no urban planner could have assembled, or even known to look for, yielding a business that no one else would have imagined. Schumpeter would have seen an entrepreneur’s defining act: growth through experimentation and permissionless innovation, pivoting and redesigning a business to suit customers who didn’t know what they wanted until Greg poured it for them. Wild Blossom, like many of the Clinic’s clients, is classical liberalism made concrete—its core ideas, and the cost of ignoring them, in a single warehouse on Chicago’s South Side.

Now that law students have worked closely with Wild Blossom, they could echo that same conversation. They’ve heard Greg’s wonderful vision firsthand. They’ve seen him struggle to meet the city’s confusing and counterproductive requirements so that vision can survive. In short, they have learned economic liberty through hands-on work more effectively than they ever could by simply sitting in a classroom or discussing a reading assignment. 

And that is what the IJ Clinic is all about. So please join us in raising a glass of Wild Blossom mead to the entrepreneurial spirit—and to IJ’s Clinic on Entrepreneurship!