Region's vineyards are booming
By Wine Atlas, Tuesday 3 October 2006 :: Wine - United-States :: #121 :: rss
State sales are up 80 percent over last 8 years
Shawn Walters started in the wine industry as a "cellar rat" more than a decade ago. Now he's responsible for crafting some of Michigan's most popular wines.
Walters works at Leelanau Cellars in Omena and he'll be hard at work this month; grape harvest will find him toiling seven days a week, up to 16 hours a day.
The effort is needed to meet a growing demand for the Leelanau County winery's product, part of a continuing surge both in vineyard acreage and wine production across the state.
"It can be smooth, or it can be very difficult," Walters said of the harvest that in some areas began last week.
Nowhere is the growth of the region's wine industry more evident than at Leelanau Cellars. The 31-year-old winery will open a new tasting room this fall in the former Harbor Bar along M-22 in Omena, and it planted almost 40 acres of new vineyards along M-204 between Suttons Bay and Lake Leelanau.
This winter Leelanau Cellars will move its wine-making operations into a former cherry processing plant north of Omena, and it's become the second-largest wine producer in Michigan.
Walters said the company expects to sell 85,000 cases of wine this year, up more than 40 percent from last year and more than double what was sold two years ago.
Better than 1,000 acres of vineyards dot Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties, according to local agriculture officials. That figure increased about 30 percent in the last three years, but it's nowhere near the saturation point. Leelanau County extension director James Bardenhagen said demand for vineyard land remains strong on both the Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas.
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