Last Saturday (July 4th) while we were staying in Northport, Lauren and I drove around to some of the local wineries. Leelanau Peninsula is very proud of their wine and a few of the wineries like to point out that they're located along the 45th parallel (north), which is the same parallel as some of the finest wine producing regions of Italy and France. Presumably that implies that they have the ability to grow the same grapes as those regions and thus produce comparable wines. I think there is more to it than that but its not like I would know the differene one way or another.

The last stop we made for the day was at 45 North Winery in Lake Leelanau. I believe this winery is relatively new (less than 10 years old), but they are certainly on their way to becoming an outfit like Black Star Farms. They are in the process of building a tasting room, but for now have things set up on the floor of a bottling building. We tried another 8-10 wines here, but were rushed because of a large crowd and a small bar. In the end we bought three bottles from this winery, but I don't know what they were. It was here that we discovered northern Michigan wineries seem to buy into the idea that corked wine bottles have outlived their usefulness. Everything was a screw top cap. We found that to be very disappointing. I understand the technological argument that says screw caps work as well or better, but it still feels cheap and childish. When we got back in the car we checked out earlier purchases and noticed that all but one or two were also screw tops. Oh well. By the way, 45 North has won awards at some pretty impressive sounding wine competitions, but at the moment they aren't in stores outside of northern Michigan. One of the employees gave me information about how to get in touch with their distributors that have Grand Rapids area connections, but it didn't sound like the type of thing you would go through to get just one bottle or two.