Believing that making wine is like
creating art, Larry Mawby defies labels
by taking a hands-on approach
at his northern Michigan vineyard.
By Lori Hall Steele
SUTTONS BAY, MI — Winemaker Larry Mawby will tell you he doesn’t exactly make wine. Rather, he raises it like a child, composes it from the earth up, mentors its transformation from vine to bottle. “It doesn’t have to be an industrial process,” the 48-year-old northern Michigan vintner says, “it can be an art form. As an artist I want to get my hands dirty.”
Amen. This self-acknowleged “local wine character” keeps his 25-year-old operation spartan so he can do just that: get messy at every stage of wine rearing. He crunches through snowdrifts with vine loppers. He fills 60-gallon oak barrels with a “little community” of fermenting whites. He writes verse for labels (on Blanc de Blanc: “She’s not French, / but her kiss / makes your tongue dance”).
Inside Mawby’s tasting room, which overlooks rolling cherry fields and rows of buxom grapes, there’s Ronald Reagan’s face on a poster announcing “No Reds” to visitors, which Mawby really means. With the exception of the annual short-run Thanksgiving beaujolais, Turkey Red, this is a vin blanc, white-on-white world.
Mawby’s is among the smallest of about a dozen wineries in northern Michigan’s young and growing grape-stomping region, located along the 45th parallel on latitudinal par with celebrated French and Italian wine-growing regions. Great Lakes wines, first introduced commercially three decades ago, are growing up, becoming more consistent and often tasting unlike they’ve never tasted before. “In some cases,” Mawby says, not naming names, “some wines have dramatically increased in quality.”
Mawby’s 12-acre vineyard also is considered among the more eccentric wineries around, sometimes compared with the quirky and fabled Bonny Doon Vineyards in California’s Santa Cruz mountains. Maybe it’s the haikus on Mawby’s answering machine or the free verse on his bottles (“And so we drink the heart of agriculture / & so it is we / are sustained”). Maybe it’s his hippie-era sensibility — wine is self-expression and he has no interest in mass production, thank you — or the dedication to ancient technologies like gravity, which he uses in conjunction with time to clarify wine, rather than rigging up a high-tech centrifuge that could do the job in minutes. What’s the hurry? Mawby asks.
Located in the hills north of Traverse City, the winery is a Petoskey stone’s throw from the sailboat-dotted blues of West Grand Traverse Bay and the gingerbread boutiques of Suttons Bay. This is the heart of sports-utility vacation country, Detroit and Chicago’s playland. Want praline fudge? Got it. An unbroken canvas for fishing? Yep. Epic fall color? Check. How about some poetic eccentricities with your wine? Head to Mawby’s, host also to waiting-listed summertime picnics.
These days, Mawby is straying from the pack of regional winemakers — which soon will include Madonna’s father — by shifting production from whites like vignoles, pinot gris and riesling to sparkling wines, made using the French methode champenoise, or champagne method. Effervescent wines, which require not-too-ripe grapes, are suited to Michigan’s sometimes moody growing seasons, Mawby says, and though these cork-poppers require more work, it’s worth it.
Three years ago, sparkling wines made up only 15 percent of the winery’s annual 2,000-case output. Today, champagne-style bottles comprise 70 percent of L. Mawby-label wine. Mawby’s bubbly now is served up by such tony up-north restaurants as Tapawingo and the Rowe Inn. The Detroit News this year hailed his Cremant Brut, saying it “has fooled enthusiasts into thinking it’s French-made.”
But Mawby isn’t much wowed by praise or gold medals awarded to some of his wines. He’s busy searching, joyfully, for his Holy Grail: a wine that will transport people in spirit to the tip of Michigan’s pinkie. Mawby sees each bottle of his wine as an envoy that can “speak to you of their birthplace, of the land of the Leelanau, the vines, the season.” Think of it as an ambassador, one that’s ready to party.
“Wine can play a magical role in the lives of people who are living in an urban area,” Mawby says. “Any time they taste the wine from that area, it’s unlocking pleasant memories. That’s the major reason that wine is so appealing to people. It’s that connection.”
A need to connect to the land first lured Mawby to grow grapes in 1973. The Michigan State University English grad decided to take up the family business, fruit farming, but downsized and shifted crops so he could make a living independently. He ended up with 32 acres and paths of grapes. And the ability to call himself self-sustainable. He likes that he can take a crop from start to finish: growing, processing, packaging and selling it, all from those 32 acres. He likes, to, that his own winemaking reverses bigger-is-better trends in agriculture.
“My great-grandfather farmed 80 acres; my grandfather farmed 360; my father farmed 1,200 acres,” Mawby said.”I didn’t want to be part of that. The idea of bigness for bigness’s sake is not good.”
From the window of the winery’s tasting room, near a wall of quotes — “Real wine has sediment / Real wine has sentiment” — Mawby points out the window to the boundaries of his property. To the rustling poplar windbreak, over there past the apple trees, and there beyond the vines on the hill.
“Here I get to say, ‘here, I grew this,’ “ Mawby says. “This is an expression, as best as I can make it, that speaks to people of this land and of this time. And every year is different.”
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L. Mawby Vineyards, 4519 S. Elm Valley Road, Suttons Bay; 616-271-3522 or larry@lmawby.com. Open May-October Thursday-Sunday, 1-6 p.m. or by appointment.
Published in HOUR Detroit. Reprinted in University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Center for Sustainable Agricultural Systems’ Extension and Education Materials for Sustainable Agriculture: Vol. 10 — Small Farming Systems for the Midwest and Reintegrating Agriculture and Community in the Midwest.
