A small bitter obsession

There are things you expect to find in a farm shop in northern Småland.

Cheese, for example. Maybe apple must, marmalade, honey, meat from animals that grazed nearby and potatoes from soil that still remembers the hands that cleared stones from it.

You might also expect coffee, ice cream, a goat behind the fence and a shelf of things you did not quite know you needed.

But you do not expect seventy varieties of tonic.

And yet there they are.

The shelf that should not exist

At first you think you have seen it wrong. You have just passed the cheeses, perhaps stopped at the Eldost, perhaps read a jar of honey or wondered which marmalade would suit the blue cheese. Everything follows the logic you have begun to understand: small-scale, local, carefully chosen.

Then comes the tonic.

Not one kind. Not three. More than seventy.

Here the farm shop suddenly changes rhythm: from country store to cabinet of curiosities, from Småland terroir to bitter botanical expedition.

You could say that Margaretelund may have the largest tonic selection in Småland. Or at least a selection that makes the question feel entirely reasonable.

A question from Nässjö

The story begins with True Selection in Nässjö.

They import and sell tonic and asked whether Margaretelund’s farm shop might become a kind of showroom: a place where the varieties could be seen, compared, bought and discovered by people who were not necessarily looking for tonic but were happy to be surprised.

It could.

Then, as so often at Margaretelund, it got a little out of hand.

It did not begin as a strategy to create a tonic institution in the forest. It began as a collaboration between a local company and a shop that had already decided to be more than merely practical.

Bitterness as flavour

Tonic is easy to misunderstand. For many people it is just something you mix with gin: a practical sparkling liquid that fills the glass, cools the evening and carries a slice of lemon.

But anyone standing in front of the shelf at Margaretelund quickly notices that tonic is more than that.

It has a flavour world of its own: bitterness, acidity, sweetness, spice, flowers, minerals. Some are light and clean. Others are darker, drier, more adult. Some feel fresh as a walk through citrus trees; others lean toward herbs, bark and something almost medicinal.

It is a small lesson in how much difference there can be between bottles that seem to do the same thing.

And perhaps that is exactly why tonic belongs here.

For those not in a hurry

There is something special about standing alone in an unmanned farm shop reading tonic labels.

Nobody rushes you. Nobody asks if you need help. Nobody waits behind the counter for you to decide. The shop is open around the clock and time moves differently inside.

You can walk one lap, then another. Pick up a bottle, put it back, compare it with another and wonder whether you are the kind of person who wants something classic or something more adventurous.

Maybe you are after lemon. Or elderflower. Or something dry, clean and strict. Maybe you just want something sparkling and bitter with lots of ice, without alcohol at all.

Tonic does not have to be a supporting role. It can carry the glass on its own.

A farm shop with side tracks

It would have been easier to carry two standard varieties. One regular. One sugar-free.

That would have been enough for most people. It would have been rational. But Margaretelund has not really been built on rational minimums. This is a place where a cheese hut became a large farm shop, where an ice-cream kiosk got handmade gluten-free cones, where cheeses were given names and faces, and where a tonic shelf was allowed to grow until it almost became a destination of its own.

Those side tracks are exactly what make the shop human.

You can tell someone has had fun. Someone said yes a little too quickly. Someone discovered that there are more kinds of tonic than reasonable and then decided that reason is not always the best principle for a farm shop.

At Margaretelund there are many careful choices. But there are also joyful excesses. The tonic selection is one of them.

“Then, as so often at Margaretelund, it got a little out of hand.”

The unexpected souvenir

When you leave Margaretelund, it is easy to imagine the obvious things in the bag: Eldost, perhaps a piece of blue cheese, a jar of honey, something from the region, ice cream if it is summer.

But it is not impossible that you also carry home a bottle of tonic.

Maybe one you have never seen before. Maybe two, to compare. Maybe one to drink on a veranda, in a camper van, by a lake or back home several days later when you want to remember a shop glowing in the forest with far more kinds of tonic than any reasonable person could have predicted.

It is a good souvenir, in its way.

Not because it sums up Småland. Because it sums up Margaretelund: a little local, a little international, a little too much, very deliberate — and impossible to find by accident unless you first happen to turn off the road.