After 11 years as a coastal science and policy specialist in Boston, Chantal Lefebvre and her husband Mike Newman moved to Northwest Michigan in 2007 to be closer to family that’d recently relocated there. With no particular plans, Lefebvre thought it was her chance to reinvent herself. “I took some time off and got a job — really just to meet people — in a tasting room out on the Old Mission Peninsula,” she says. That, ultimately, led her down a path in wine.
In the years that followed, she worked at vineyards Left Foot Charley, Bowers Harbor, and Brengman Brothers, doing all aspects of the business, from the tasting room, to selling, to growing. She quickly learned that producing great wine in the region isn’t easy: Snow piles high from November to March, after all. Winter temperatures can rival those of Antarctica. For Lefebvre, the challenge became part of the draw. “I really fell in love with the work,” she says.
Lefebvre and Newman first sowed the fruits of WaterFire Vineyards in 2009, after purchasing the 26-acre farm property. Sandwiched between Lake Michigan and Torch Lake are WaterFire’s 10 acres of riesling, sauvignon blanc, and Grüner Veltliner. The fruit basks in those moderating bays, she says, which essentially softens and lengthens the transition between seasons: “It’s just a big buffer.” It’s a grape-growing sweet spot that the vinter has to work hard to maintain.
Michigan’s wines in general, particularly its rieslings, are garnering increasing attention and accolades: In 2019, Wine Enthusiast announced the state was “sailing toward world-class wine production,” giving 90 points-and-higher rankings to 16 affordable bottles. (The cheapest, at $13, was a 2013 riesling by Chateau Grand Traverse.) But Lefebvre and other grape growers face an overheating world that’ll eventually make their jobs much harder. That could affect the $5.4 billion Michigan wine economy that, according to a 2017 study, “directly creates nearly 28,000 jobs.” And it might also permanently alter the taste of Michigan’s wines — the bold fruit flavors — that seem on the cusp of breaking through to the big time.
Grape growers in the Midwest — Michigan, Ohio, Minnesota, Wisconsin — are largely spared from the raging wildfires that threaten vineyards on the West Coast. But they do have to navigate how the region’s increasingly erratic weather patterns and changes in the environment will affect their product — the timing of ripening, alcohol content, acidity, and even the color of the wine. “If you’re able to achieve better physiological ripeness, then you’re going to have more complexity in your wine, which of course is sort of the unique fingerprint of your wine,” says Lefebvre. “Getting that balance just right between sugar and acid can be extremely challenging certain years.” In extreme years, temperatures dropping low enough during the winter or climbing high enough in the summer could kill the vines.
It’s complicated to tease out the exact effects of climate change in the Midwest. A 2019 study by researchers at Michigan State University and the University of South Alabama found that a changing climate has helped Michigan literally branch out into the wine industry in some ways. Paolo Sabbatini, co-author of the study, found that the time grapes have to ripen has dramatically increased over the past few decades. And that leads to increased production: Maria Smith, a viticulture outreach specialist in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences at the Ohio State University, says that “pushing back the first day of freeze [later] into the fall ... benefits us a lot more in terms of actually being able to get the fruit ripe.”
