Wine, cherries make Michigan a delicious place

Water, weather and sun combine to make Traverse City the epicenter of the state's winemaking industry
 
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - The Old Mission Peninsula is a colorful place.

It starts with the multi-hued waters of the Lake Michigan bays. The water looks like it came from the Caribbean with its aquamarine and turquoise colors.

More than 2.6 million cherry trees were in snowy bloom and the vineyards were coming alive with greenery. You are surrounded by a touch of the North Woods, too.

My wife, Pat, and I spent a delightful weekend in a winery in May on the fingerlike Old Mission Peninsula just north of Traverse City.

What, you ask, does one do in a winery? Very simply, we relaxed and sampled wines at Chateau Chantal, a place that calls itself an Old World inn along one of Michigan's wine trails. It is a warm and charming place, with superior wines that are among the best in Michigan and are comparable to Napa Valley and, dare it be said, European wines.

The winery/bed-and-breakfast with its 11 rooms sits on a ridge, surrounded by vineyards and cherry trees. You can see bays to the west and to the east. The rooms and suites are decorated in French country style.

The winery was established in 1983 when owners Robert and Nadine Begin (a former priest and a former nun who married) replaced cherry orchards with grafted vinifera grapevines, the types grown in the French Bordeaux region that sits at the same 45th latitude.

The 65 acres are planted in pinot grigio, chardonnay, riesling, pinot noir, gewurztraminer, merlot and pinot meunier grapes. The winery produces about 50,000 gallons of wine per year.

Like many other nearby wineries, Chateau Chantal has a public tasting room with free samples of its 27 handcrafted wines, from dry to sweet to sparkling.

Each bed and breakfast guest is entitled to a full glass of wine per night. Also, like visitors to the winery's tasting room, you can get samples. But the big plus is that when the tasting room closes at night to drop-in visitors and the staff leaves, it remains open to the bed and breakfast guests.

The bed and breakfast also features a great room with piano and fireplace, and an outdoor patio with tables and chairs. There is a computer for guest use plus a library. The local newspaper is delivered to your door.

Chateau Chantal - it is not the only Traverse City winery that offers lodging - serves up a killer breakfast for guests. An optional tour of the winery in the basement is offered after breakfast. You are on your own for other meals, but there are plenty of options on the peninsula and 12 miles away in Traverse City.

The winery offers an array of cooking and wine-tasting classes and seminars, tapas tours, concerts and other events.

Many pleasures to uncork

Chateau Chantal is one of 64 wineries in Michigan that annually produce wine worth $800 million. The wineries attract 800,000 visitors a year and that aids the economy by an additional $10 million. Eight new wineries have opened this year.

The Traverse City area is the epicenter for Michigan winemaking. There are 32 wineries in northwest Michigan with seven on the Old Mission Peninsula and 20 on the Leelanau Peninsula. Traverse City itself is the No. 2 tourist destination in Michigan with more than 2 million visitors a year, behind only Mackinac Island. It draws heavily from the Detroit and Chicago areas and has been a tourist hot spot for 150 years because of its beautiful setting.

TC - as it is called locally - is known for its sugar-sand beaches, golf courses, imposing sand dunes, Indian casinos, ski areas, winter sports, summer tall ship cruises, lighthouses, shops, galleries, bike trails and a world-class music school (Interlochen Center for the Arts).

But everything in Traverse City seems to revolve around its waters. The city has 181 miles of shoreline on 32-mile-long Grand Traverse Bay and Lake Michigan, and 149 inland lakes.

The west leg of Grand Traverse Bay is filled with parks and fronts on the downtown; the east bay is hotels and cottages. The city can be charming, old-fashioned, touristy, a bit snooty and crowded, especially on summer weekends. It has a lively after-dark scene.

Traverse City is heavy on motels, each with its own patch of bay beach - upwards of 4,200 rooms for visitors.

It has a compact downtown with 100 shops and eateries. It is surprisingly sophisticated, with quality restaurants and microbreweries for a city of 15,000 and a metropolitan area of 142,000. It is home to a culinary institute and a strong local-grown movement. A specialty is artisan cheeses.

Chocolate to cherries

One place you can't miss is New York chocolatier Jacques Torres and his shop on East Front Street.

An old Victorian state-run asylum is being converted into a shopping area. It is called the Village at Grand Traverse Commons and sits about 1½ miles west of downtown.

There are 50 shops and stores in the basement shopping arcade. More are planned in the imposing structure, built in 1885 to house 3,500 people. It closed in 1989. More shops, restaurants and even a hotel are planned on the campus near the hospital.

Nearby Leland on Lake Michigan is known for its historic and picturesque Fishtown area docks filled with tiny wooden shops along the Leland River.

You can take ferries from Leland to North and South Manitou islands.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore with its 400-foot-tall dunes, 35 miles of beaches and 55 miles of hiking trails is only 30 minutes west of Traverse City on the Lake Michigan shore.

Just north of Chateau Chantal is the Old Mission Point Lighthouse, with its 30-foot light tower built in 1870.

Old Mission Peninsula itself has a breezy country vibe with its vineyards and orchards.

A warning to anyone visiting Traverse City: It is the unabashed Cherry Capital of the World.

A big 150-event cherry festival runs for a week every July.

Cherries pop up on local menus, and it is said that you can purchase 370 cherry-containing food items at the Cherry Stop with stores in Traverse City and Glen Arbor. Sweet cherry wine is also big.

The city also loves to host festivals throughout the year.