Winemaking

Our winemaking process starts with a principle:

Let the wine express itself.

It takes a lot of time and patience to make a stand-out bottle of wine and while it’s tempting to make wines that answer to deadlines and constraints, we’re constantly refocusing to make it all about a product that reflects the labor of the vines and the joy of tasting a piece of Leelanau.

Each year, different parts of our vineyard will show us how its grapes want to be expressed.  You might taste the slope of the hillside in the rich flavors that develop only with constant sunlight exposure or the minerality in our soil that yields complexity often missed in Michigan wines.  These are just a few examples of things we take into account during each growing season.

It’s after this that each wine is processed and matured separately in a manner that is determined by what we witnessed the vines saying in the vineyard.

Our fermentation, barrel selection, aging method, and release date for each wine changes each year.  For this reason a vintage of a particular varietal might taste much different than its predecessor simply because the grape grew differently that summer.  Each year you’ll get the truest taste of the Leelanau Peninsula as the grapes want you to taste it.  We wouldn’t have it any other way.