News

Finishing Touchés

A finishing touché in fencing indicates the final hit or touch with the epee or sword indicating ultimate victory, but in literature it is also a final acknowledgement of a telling or obvious statement. Now that you’re horribly bored, I’m using the title of this blog entry as a play on words as the tasting […]

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Extended Holiday Hours

We’ll be open later, 3-8pm, on the next three Fridays, Dec. 4th, 11th, and 18th, to give you more time for your holiday shopping. We’re now offering gift baskets, gift certificates, and of course, many great wines. Come out and visit!

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Post and Beam

One might wonder about the title, Post and Beam, thinking it might be a newspaper, i.g., the Detroit Post and Beam, or possibly a personal injury attorney group, Post and Beam. Fortunately, neither is the case and it refers to the barn construction type for Forty-Five North’s new tasting room. The terms refer to the […]

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Tasting Room

Dissecting the term, “Tasting Room”, requires deeper analysis of both “tasting” and “room.” Tasting, as in winery, is defined as the olfactory experience of sampling wine, and as a privileged taster at an event in Napa with a select number of Australian vintners, I experienced wine judges doing what they do best: gargling, sucking, aerating […]

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Forty-Five Carat!

So, what’s better than 22-carat gold? Forty-Five Carat Gold, of course! The title of this missive would indicate that once again gold has been discovered on the 45th parallel and not only once, but thrice. Last fall, the San Francisco Wine Competition deemed our Hard Apple Cider worthy of gold. Second, at the Finger Lakes […]

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Beam Me Up!

Coming with Forty-Five North’s Michigan Winery License in 2007 was an automatic licensure of a tasting room; imagine our excitement upon receiving that news. Since then, picture if you will, a tent, a production room wannabe tasting room, an antique barn heretofore designated as “tdb” (that darn barn; see photo), a raised trunk lid, and […]

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New Website

If you had ever visited our old website, a small graphic in the upper-right read, “actual website coming soon.” Well, what was meant to be a temporary website served as our website for 1.5 years and offered little more information than what was included in the blog entries. Although it’s taken quite a bit longer […]

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Nouveau, a Pinot Noir Rosé

While researching names for new release wines, I have found a multitude of names and vintages among the perhaps fifty percent of the wineries who release them. The word “Nouveau”, French for “new”, is easily the most popular name associated with these wines. Wine to many connotes an aged grape product that improves with age. […]

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Barn and Winery Update

Although we had originally intended for the resurrected barn to be the tasting room, the structural integrity has been questioned, rebutted, and headache-produced on a Biblical proportion. Because the overall intent of this project was to be positive, fun, and productive for the citizenry of Leelanau, it has evolved into anything but that. For that […]

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Barn Raising!

Although I’ve searched the Mormon family tree website, I can find no documentation of an Amish-Grossnickle connection; however, this weekend I felt the DNA connection with the raising of our tasting room barn. My good friends, John Clay and Steve Curley, helped as we assisted David Ciolek and his able bodied aide, Cody, in the […]

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