Got a Minute? The Buttermores, owners of Laurel Park Wine Market

Where are you from and what brought you to Henderson County?

Susan: We’re from Atlanta originally. We made our way to Hendersonville after we retired. We’d been coming up here for a number of years and we knew we wanted to be here, and this is now called ‘after retirement.’”

George: It’s a very interesting thing to do. We’d been studying wines for about 40 years and have an extensive wine cellar in our home. When we moved here, we were looking for shops like this. There were a lot of grocery stores, but they didn’t really have a lot of wines at really great prices. We like to match up wine and people’s tastes. That’s one of our specialties — matching the wines. Also, we taste every wine in this store before we bring it in, and we make sure they give us the very best wine possible.

Susan: Working together is different. We’ve both run businesses before, but never together. It has some fun aspects and it has some challenges.

Susan: It is a business, but the people who have come in here have become our friends. And so for us, it is a business among friends. That’s just a wonderful environment to be in. There’s no one that walks through that door who we don’t like.

George: We ask them questions — what their likes are, what prices they want to spend. That’s really the main challenge — to find the best wine at the best price for that person. We take into consideration what their tastes are. Everybody has a particular taste set that they’re comfortable with, so in knowing how all of these wines taste, we can point them in the direction of a wine that will taste good to them.

Susan: Ten thousand different wines, 10,000 different tastes, and we like to match them up. Wine is fun. We want people to be happy.

George: Yes, and I would generally categorize the bad ones into poorly crafted wines.

Susan: When we try wines, there are some definite wines that we have not liked and have not felt were worth the money. We try to bring things in that, quite frankly, just taste better than they cost.

Susan: In our spare time, we visit wineries and travel.

George: We play in the Brevard Community Band.

Susan: George plays tuba, and I do ceramics, and every once in a while you’ll find one of my handmade chillers in here.