June 30th, 2009
Finally made it down to the SW neck of Michigan’s wine industry. My family vacationed in South Haven last week and my husband and I visited Contessa Vineyards - that’s where the pic above was taken - and neighboring Karma Vista, where I snapped the under-construction wine production building, below (click it to see larger.)
The visits also made me a believer that print marketing still has a role to play. Like a lot of people I do most of my vacation planning online, from choosing and booking the rental cottage to the Mapquest 
directions to get there to the forecast to know what to pack. But then it turned out the cottage lacked wireless Internet. The South Haven Visitors’ Bureau guide provided in the cottage only listed one winery (Fenn Valley, which I’d already visited) with a phone number and address. Fenn Valley had the only ad, too. So we went to the physical bureau office and got a Lake Michigan Shore wine trail brochure, which allowed us to navigate to the wineries (albeit with three turnarounds after guessing wrong about our location on the not-to-scale map.) Whew. I was determined to make it to a couple. But I’ll bet someone less determined would have looked for something else to do about an hour sooner.
Posted in Southwest wineries, Tasting rooms, Wine production, tourism | No Comments »
June 9th, 2009
My posting has been pretty infrequent lately, so I’m making it official: I’m taking a summer vacation. You can still read my monthly columns in Crain’s Detroit Business (here’s June’s, on Douglas Valley, the organic vineyard mini-utopia planned for Manistee County, just posted today) and the TC Business News. And I may drop in with a post now and again. I’ve got a vacation planned to southwest Michigan in two weeks, and hope to finally visit a winery or two around the 42nd parallel. But rather than regular posts, for the next couple months I plan to take my kids to the park, to the beach (if it ever warms up) catch up on some reading, garden and work on my other, personal blog, Matrilineal Matters.
To keep up with the wine industry, my best recommendation is Joel Goldberg’s MichWine. Thanks for reading and have a great summer.
Posted in Vineyard Management | No Comments »
May 22nd, 2009
Brys Estate Old Mission Peninsula
Cherry and apple blossoms have peaked on Old Mission Peninsula, as shown in the background of this photo, taken May 20 from Brys Estate. Meanwhile, regional vineyards are just starting to show some green.
And for something completely different, read this New York Times story on a Sonoma County winery willing to pay $10,000 per month to a “lifestyle correspondent” to post on Twitter and Facebook. Wow.
Posted in Old Mission | 1 Comment »
directions to get there to the forecast to know what to pack. But then it turned out the cottage lacked wireless Internet. The South Haven Visitors’ Bureau guide provided in the cottage only listed one winery (Fenn Valley, which I’d already visited) with a phone number and address. Fenn Valley had the only ad, too. So we went to the physical bureau office and got a Lake Michigan Shore wine trail brochure, which allowed us to navigate to the wineries (albeit with three turnarounds after guessing wrong about our location on the not-to-scale map.) Whew. I was determined to make it to a couple. But I’ll bet someone less determined would have looked for something else to do about an hour sooner.
