No one would mistake the rippling fields of L. Mawby Vineyards for those of France or California-not with those big hardwood trees off in the distance, weathered barns on the horizon and the quintessentially Midwestern Larry Mawby himself tending his wee parcel of northern Michigan`s tiny wine country.
One summer afternoon, Mawby wore a gray T-shirt with ”pinger” printed on it as he checked the progress of his vines. When a visitor asked him to explain the outfit, the story took a good five minutes, because Mawby always finds beauty in the details.
He talks discursively about his grapes, as well, and about the wine he makes. But first, the shirt.
It seems Mawby, who had majored in English literature at Michigan State University, once tried to use ”pinger” in a Scrabble game. The official Scrabble dictionary didn`t list it at the time, and his move was disallowed.
”A pinger,” he had argued, ”is something that makes a pinging sound.”
To commemorate the disagreement, somebody had the ”pinger” T-shirt made up and gave it to him for his birthday.
His version of the story took awhile, delving as it did into several amusing byways, including a discourse on sonar.
Similarly, his account of How Winemaking Came to Northern Michigan begins with the Ice Age and twists like the woody stem of a pinot gris vine until it reaches 1991, which promises to be a vintage year.
Boosting production
L. Mawby is the smallest and perhaps most precious of the five wineries operating near Grand Traverse Bay in the northwestern corner of Michigan`s lower peninsula. Another 13 operate in the southwestern part of the state, and together they have boosted Michigan into its position as the fourth-largest grape-growing state and fifth largest in wine production.
At least 30 states appear to take their winemaking seriously, and in the past few years, northern Michigan producers have been striving to get their own output ranked among the best in the U.S., if not the world.
In an area where vacationers march to the beat of a severely short summer season, wineries have become part of the tourist route. When clouds shroud the beaches or the fish aren`t biting, one can always visit a local wine-tasting room.
Sophisticated oenologists once assumed, with some justification, that those backcountry wineries were just an extension of the roadside stand, selling a liquid version of the homemade jams and jellies so pervasive in the Great Lakes fruit-growing belt.
Now, however, judges in some of the most prestigious of the world`s wine societies are beginning to recognize Michigan`s contributions to viniculture. In addition to L. Mawby in Suttons Bay, the wine tasting tour would include Boskydel Vineyard, Lake Leelanau; Chateau Grand Traverse Ltd., on Old Mission Peninsula; Good Harbor Vineyards in Lake Leelanau; and Leelanau Wine Cellars Ltd., Omena.
White table wines constitute the bulk of their output, and some have created vin ordinaires of extraordinary quality, according to the connoisseurs who gather at international competitions. All five wineries refuse to stop there, however. The owners keep trying new varieties, unique blends, as they attempt to find out how far they can go in this often-brisk, occasionally balmy corner.
Quirks of geography
Bruce Simpson at Good Harbor, for example, has been struggling to grow exceptionally good red grapes on a fraction of the 32 hillside acres behind his modern winery, but he says progress has been slow.
”My vineyards are mostly planted to riesling, chardonnay, seyval and vignole-all white varieties,” he said. ”I planted some cabernet franc last spring to see if we could come up with some kind of palatable red in Michigan, and there haven`t been many so far.
”I think we need a longer growing season. Our climate favors white, which is good, because that`s what most people want to drink anyway.”
Only quirks of geology, geography and weather encourage any kind of winemaking at all in that part of the country. Simpson and Mawby`s family trees are laden with fruit farmers, the men and women who made this region the nation`s tart-cherry capital.
Later generations reasoned that grapes might respond well to the same conditions as the other fruit crops. Mawby found his wine muse while backpacking through Europe in 1970. Simpson, also a graduate of Michigan State, went on to study at the University of California-Davis, which is the U.S. citadel of oenology.
The land and the prevailing winds set the stage, and the intelligence of Mawby, Simpson and the rest capture nature in a bottle.
”Lake Michigan acts as a sort of big energy sink, an inertial engine in the climate,” Mawby observed. ”The water becomes quite cold over the winter, and then it takes it a long time to warm up. That slows down the growth of the plants early in the spring if they`re within 15 miles of the lake, so they won`t be injured by a late frost.”
Like Alsace
After the tardy onset of warm weather, the lake retains the heat of summer long into the fall, moderating the Arctic winds and extending the growing season.
”Wine grapes are tender, so we like as long a growing season as we can get,” Mawby said. ”Climatically, we`re kind of like Alsace (northeastern France) or Chablis (north central). We`re a little warmer than most of Germany and warmer than Champagne, but we`re cooler than most of Burgundy.”
Grape vines also can thrive on the sandy, gravelly soil that characterizes lakeside Michigan. ”This area was all glaciated, and the first 100 feet or so is glacial junk,” Mawby said.
The retreating ice left ripples in the earth with distinct ridges running north and south. The ridges are called drumlins, a killer word on any Scrabble board.
”We`re standing on a drumlin now,” Mawby told his visitor. ”They provide elevation, which is nice for frost protection. Because the cold air is heavier than warm air, it sinks down the sides of the slopes to the valley. We also get a lot of lake-effect snow, so the ground doesn`t freeze very often in the winter.”
Even though the conditions for viticulture have existed for ages, an industry did not take hold up here until the early 1970s. The pioneer was Bernie Rink, a former college librarian, who began experimenting with hybrid grapevines in 1965 and opened his Boskydel winery a decade later.
Rink remains small, selling his French-American hybrid table wines only at his retail outlet, a beautifully situated cellar overlooking Lake Leelanau and surrounded by pine trees.
”I`m committed to what the French would call vin de pay, good local country wine that people can afford to drink every day,” Rink said.
Winning wines
With an output of 6,000 gallons a year, all of it sold on the premises, Rink has removed himself from the more competitive aspects of regional winemaking, which has an atmosphere of cooperation balanced by an edge of one- upmanship.
”Mawby is the best winemaker up here, in my estimation,” Rink said,
”but they`re all pretty good. I don`t get wrapped up in it the way they do. We`re the first vineyard-winery up here, but that`s all. I don`t go to competitions, so those guys win a lot of awards. Good Harbor wins more than anybody. Ed O`Keefe of Chateau Grand Traverse is the purest of the bunch, sticking strictly to vinifera-riesling and chardonnay.”
O`Keefe, now working with his son Ed Jr., takes pride in the fact that all his estate-bottled wine comes from vinifera grapes, wherein hardy American root stock is painstakingly grafted onto delicate, high-quality European grape stock. Hybrids, the result of cross-pollination of American and European stock, are thought to produce slightly inferior grapes.
”Absolutely no hybrids are allowed here,” said Ed O`Keefe Jr., sounding a little like the wine police. The 58 acres at Chateau Grand Traverse were carefully developed over several years, beginning in the mid-`70s. Ed O`Keefe Sr. brought in wine experts from Germany and California, bulldozed his hilltop on the finger-like Old Mission Peninsula until it faced just the right southwesterly direction and now puts out an annual 15,000 cases of varietal wine a year, which is mass-production by area standards.
”The hybrids produce a very high-quality wine,” O`Keefe Jr. said, ”but on a world scale, they will never, in my opinion, be up there with a chardonnay or a riesling. A lot of times somebody says a certain vignole is as good as a chardonnay, but you never hear somebody say, `This chardonnay is every bit as good as a vignole.”`
A vintage year
Leelanau Wine Cellars in Omena has leapt into the vinifera movement, under the direction of winemaker William Skolnik. The company produces 17,000 cases a year, and hybrids are allowed.
”We consider ourselves pioneers in red vinifera,” Skolnik said as he welcomed a couple of visitors to his wine-tasting room. He poured samples from one of the company`s prestige labels, Renaissance Red, named three years ago to celebrate a reorganized management team and a hoped-for resurgence in company fortunes.
Like everyone in the industry, Skolnik expects a vintage year in 1991, because of the unusual run of sunshine that blessed the vineyards.
”It`s not even really the heat that`s been so good to us,” Skolnik said. ”It`s how early the heat came.”
While he chatted, Rootstock, his chocolate Labrador, nudged a piece of vine across the floor, as if it were a bone.
”We`re probably 3 1/2 to 4 weeks ahead in vine growth. We`re going to get grapes that are riper, higher quality, with more balance, very full, very rich flavors, good body, longer lived.”
Rootstock looked up and wagged his tail.
”In a marginal year, you really have to work with the wines and coax them along, keep the temperatures in the winery a lot lower. A vintage like this, you just let them go. They baby themselves along, ferment just right and have all these nice, rich flavors.”
Undoubtedly, the word will get out when the superb Michigan `91s begin making their appearance, but most of the nation may have difficulty finding them. All the wineries report that nearly all their output is snapped up by residents and visitors. Bernie Rink markets Boskydel only from his tasting room.
Staying small
The others are beginning to make tentative forays across state lines. Grand Traverse, for one, can be found in Chicago at Foremost stores and at such restaurants as Printers Row, Prairie, Gordon and Harry Caray`s. But the companies are small, and local demand taxes the supply most of the time.
Larry Mawby seems content to remain miniature. His customers often order from a newsletter he distributes. L. Mawby aficionados have become almost clubby.
”He`s a big guy and he likes to make big wines,” Skolnik says with admiration in his voice. ”His wines are really made to live for a long time, and they`re huge in character. He`s got the kind of luxury to pull that off, because he`s concentrated on a few wines, small production. Because of our size, we compete in a different kind of market than he does.”
As Mawby peers through grape leaves at the growing fruit, thoughts of marketing and competition seem far away. Out on the drumlins he has 14 pinot noir clones going, 12 clones of chardonnay. He seeks to expand his subtle range of flavors, rather than fill vast warehouses with wine.
”I want this to remain a small winery,” he said. ”All of the vineyards up here were started by people who have something wrong with them, I guess, something that makes them want to do something different.
”Me, I just hate tart cherries, and that is the dominant horticultural crop up here. I just think they`re dumb. And yet I really like the area and I like wine growing as an aesthetic thing. I think it`s nice to grow grapes and make wine and express yourself artistically that way.”
