About TCWY

What is Traverse City Wine Year?

Traverse City Wine Year is a weekly series documenting visits to each of the region's fifty-ish wineries, one per week over a year. It is not a review of hospitality or businesses; it’s a lighthearted celebration of each winery's current vibe and offerings, including two different glasses of wine plus comments on what to love, what to do, and what to hope for in each place. This framing is a convenient structure inspired by a famous quote "Rules for Happiness." I believe any of the region's wineries can be a source for happiness and through loving wine and doing these weekly visits I'm hoping to prove it. Our simple rating system for the actual wine is explained here.

The idea for Traverse City Wine Year came to me at the end of 2022, a time of year many of us start reflecting on the year that was and set goals or resolutions for the approaching New Year. I’ve loved wine for a long time and lived here since 2015, and wine tasting/winery visits have been among my most treasured days and activities as a resident. Yet, there are still dozens I have never visited, still more I’ve been to only once. Some blame can be placed on a global pandemic and new motherhood, and now that both of those phases have mercifully passed, I just needed a goal and a way to make it fun.

The Origin Story

My (now) husband and I moved here from Chicago in 2015, attracted by the four seasons of outdoor recreation, the natural beauty, the reputation of the schools, the culinary scene, and my affinity for the area as a native Michigander/Yooper and childhood visitor to Traverse City.

The transition from our city lifestyle in Wicker Park (me) and Avondale (him) to a so-called “micropolitan” or “large small town” was probably easier than it should have been. It’s notoriously difficult to find both housing and living wage employment in Traverse City. It’s notoriously hard to make friends as an adult when you move anywhere. We needed to buy a car. We needed to buy snowshoes and at least four new pairs of skis. 

I’ve been interested in wine since about 2002, when, at age 22, I worked my first grown up job as the wholesale trainer for a (then locally, now internationally) famous Chicago coffee roaster, Intelligentsia. This job brought me into hundreds of world-class restaurants in the off-hours before service when I could talk with and offer training for chefs, sommeliers, wait staff, managers, and the many supportive and purposefully invisible contributors. We focused on techniques to prepare the best tasting coffee and (arguably more important) cleaning procedures.

Our Intelligentsia team of trainers and salespeople would sometimes be invited to stay and share “staff meal” (also called "shiftie" or “family meal” in some restaurants). The chef de cuisine or other person in charge would pass special and new dishes while everyone ate, took notes, and asked questions. Other times, we’d be warmly encouraged by chefs, owners, or managers to join for dinner another day by making a custom reservation on a future Monday or other slow night, where we’d exchange continued goodwill for a complimentary first course or dessert as part of some of the most memorable and best meals I have ever had (we paid for our own meals in this scenario).

Wine pairings were always a part of these experiences. I wasn’t someone who bought or consumed a whole lot of wine at home at the time, but the international and cross-cultural aspects of wine, my expanding sensory skills and vocabulary from working in specialty coffee united by my overall love of learning anything created an irresistible gravity toward drinking more wine and learning more about it. I kept journals, requested for wine textbooks for Christmas gifts, and started getting comfortable asking questions at Binny’s, Chicago’s premier wine retailer, and also an Intelligentsia reseller. 

Coffee was my first culinary love and also my source of income and as such, required a more serious pursuit with higher stakes. But wine could just be fun; an outlet of trying new skills in perceiving acidity and memorizing maps, styles, techniques, and region names.

The World Is Your Palate

The next twelve years included moves to Los Angeles and then back to Chicago and work travel that can only be described as extraordinarily privileged, drop-shipping me into the world’s most exciting culinary hubs and unexpected gems. The grueling nature of event production work made the payoff of a job well done more special and spectacular: dinners where colleagues could decompress over local fare and usually wine. A lot of coffee people have strong sensory skills and knowledge of coffee, and many also shared my interest in applying these to wine and having fun with it. 

I’ve never been a wine expert, but I am comfortable putting myself out there with tasting notes, wine and food pairings, and what to expect based on basic production techniques, with excitement to keep learning and a quasi-relief that it will never be possible for me to learn everything about wine and that I don’t have to do it for any reason except my own entertainment. 

Goodbye, Chicago

In June 2014, we decided to move to Traverse City. We visited as often as we could, trying to figure out how to overcome the above-mentioned hurdles of finding housing, work, and friends. We did a lot of brainstorming at a winery and tasting room located in town called Left Foot Charley, where the unbelievable quality of the wine was only exceeded by the kindness and professionalism of the staff, many of whom are still good friends of ours and still happily working there.

One of these days spent doomscrolling and procrastinating at Left Foot, I saw a Craigslist post that would lead us to our little rented home in the middle of town near Oak & Ninth Streets. Another day at that little rented home, Dave answered a message from someone on LinkedIn asking him to come in and interview: he got the job, and I got the person that would become one of my closest friends and current favored playdate of our combined families' three young children.

In these past 8+ years, visiting local wineries has been one of my favorite activities. This region is famous for wine events, wine tours, and wine buses, and it has long outgrown its 1980s reputation as a place for sweet wine only (especially of the cherry nature). In the 2000s I guess people also assumed only white wine could be produced here. There are legit wine experts here that continue pushing against these old modalities and toward the new - innovations in production, agriculture, employee welfare, and marketing. 

However, I found myself in late 2022 disappointed in how many of these wineries I have still never visited. A global pandemic, new motherhood, friends that work in wine businesses, and let's face it, the inevitable continued draw to Left Foot and its new sister business The Barrel Room, have all been reasons I haven’t gotten to all of them. At the time of year where reflection toward making a New Year’s Resolution is pretty normal, I wondered if I might try to just visit one winery/tasting room per week. A quick google search confirmed that there are about 50 wineries operating in the region right now. A winery per week would take about a year. Taking a nod from the idea of a “Big Year” in birding, I thought this was something I could actually do.

I decided to create some structure and commit to writing about my experiences not only as a means to entertain myself (and anyone somehow finding themselves reading) but also to hold myself accountable and provide a journal of the experience. Maybe deciding where to start is intimidating for people visiting the area with so much good to go around? This region swells from 110,000 people in the micropolitan area to a half-million in the summer - maybe there isn’t great intel of what’s going on in January and February?  I have lived here long enough to see that people still visit, and locals explore differently outside of our prized June-Augusts.

There are plenty of existing sources for reviewing wine and hospitality experiences, including publicly-traded Fortune 50 companies, established tech platforms, and tools and experts that already and will forever do that better than me. What I can offer is the perspective of a year-round resident, a potential jumping-off point, and an orientation to having fun and being happy with the bounty of these diverse and interesting businesses. I am structuring my commentary using a favorite quote from 19th century philosopher Immanuel Kant:

“Rules For Happiness: Something to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”

Starting with Week 1 which will be Rove Estate, January 1-6, 2023, I will systematically cover the two major sub-regions Leelanau and Old Mission Peninsula along with the nearby outliers that don’t fit into either exactly, and share my thoughts kind of like a travel memoir: photos, a bit about the winery and its current feel and ongoing events, and comments on two different glasses of wine. I’m toying with the idea of including a playlist- we’ll see how that goes. 

Welcome to Traverse City Wine Year, 2023.

~Ellie