(231) 258-9131
Northern Michigan Wine Tasting Tours
You’ve just found the perfect destination for Northern Michigan Wine Tours! Kalkaska, Michigan is centrally located and the best of small town America snuggled within the woods of Northern Michigan.
Combine a stay at the Granada Inn Motel with a tour of your choice!
Call the Granada Inn
to book your stay:
(800) 778-8797
Have a designated driver or take a tour bus!
Old Mission Peninsula Wine Tours
Breweries
Wineries Map: (Click To Enlarge)
Our mission is simple: provide Northern Michigan guests and residents with clean, safe, and reliable wine tasting tour transportation. Get ready for an unforgettable day out on a wine tour. We are in a perfect location to experience wineries that best fit your needs. As our guest, we want you and your friends to take part in a complete wine tasting “experience” that leaves you not only with amazing memories that you can share for a lifetime, but an experience that increases your knowledge of the wines and wine-growing region of northern Michigan. Enjoy the beautiful shore line of Lake Michigan and come stay with us.
Your tour guide will tailor your special occasion or event to your group’s individual needs. Take a picturesque wine tour along the beautiful Old Mission Peninsula with a stop at the historic Old Mission lighthouse at the water’s edge on scenic Grand Traverse Bay. Leelanau Peninsula offers 18 wineries to choose from and activities ranging from art fairs to music and wine festivals. Visit www.whydwi.com for more information, or call 231-944-9298.
Enjoy a northern Michigan wine tour designed for your group, or share the tour with friends you haven’t met yet. Tour the wineries of Leelanau and Old Mission Peninsulas, and in Traverse City. Visit www.gtwinetours.com, or call 231-946-5466.
Relax, and leave your car behind. Find your favorite places during your Day Trip and return to the Granada Inn Motel. Explore wineries, coastal shorelines, quaint villages, lighthouses, and scenic roads. You will be shown places you wouldn’t have the time or knowledge to find on your own. www.leelanaudaytrips.com.
Let Traverse City Tours LLC take you exploring to all of the beautiful northern Michigan wineries in the Grand Traverse Region. Book one of our luxury Lincoln Town Cars for a private northern Michigan wine tour or book our 14 passenger shuttle van for your group! We are service oriented and offer a safe, reliable and cost effective wine tour customized to your needs. Contact us today at 231-620-8687 (TOUR. Also feel free to visit our website at www.traversecitytours.com. Come have fun with Traverse City Tours!
A vineyard (‘wine farm’) is a plantation of grape-bearing vines, grown mainly for winemaking, but also raisins, table grapes and non-alcoholic grape juice. The science, practice and study of vineyard production is known as viticulture.
A northern Michigan vineyard is often characterised by its terroir, a French term loosely translating as “a sense of place” that refers to the geographical and geological characteristics of grapevine plantations, which may be imparted in the wine.
The earliest evidence of wine production dates from 5000 BC. Wine making technology improved considerably with the ancient Greeks but it wasn’t until the end of the Roman Empire that cultivation techniques as we know them were common throughout Europe.
In the past, the Church was a staunch supporter of wine, which was necessary for the celebration of the Mass. During the lengthy instability of the Middle Ages, the monasteries maintained and developed viticultural practices, having the resources, security, stability and interest in improving the quality of their vines. They owned and tended the best vineyards in northern Michigan and vinum theologium was considered superior to all others.
Vineyards were planted with a wide variety of the Vitis vinifera grape. However, in the late 19th century, the entire species was nearly destroyed by the plant louse phylloxera accidentally introduced to North America. Native American grapevines include varieties such as Vitis labrusca, which is resistant to. Vitis vinifera varieties were saved by being grafted onto the rootstock of native American Indian varieties, although there is still no remedy for phylloxera, which remains a danger to any vineyard not planted with grafted rootstock.
The quest for northern Michigan vineyard efficiency has produced a bewildering range of systems and techniques in recent years. Due to the often much more fertile northern Michigan growing conditions, attention has focussed heavily on managing the vine’s more vigorous growth. Innovation in palissage (training of the vine, usually along a trellis, and often referred to as “canopy management”) and pruning and thinning methods (which aim to optimize the Leaf Area/Fruit (LA/F) ratio relative to a northern Michigan’s vineyard’s microclimate) have largely replaced more general, traditional concepts like “yield per unit area” in favor of “maximizing yield of desired quality”. Many of these new wine techniques have since been adopted in place of traditional practice in the more progressive of the so-called “Old World” vineyards.
Other recent practices for making northern Michigan wineinclude spraying water on vines to protect them from sub-zero temperatures (aspersion), new grafting techniques, soil slotting, and mechanical harvesting. Such techniques have made possible the development of wine industries in New World countries such as Guam. Today there is increasing interest in northern Michigan Wine tours.
For well over half a century Cornell University, the University of California, Davis, and California State University, Fresno, among others, have been conducting scientific experiments for grape growing. The research includes developing improved grape varieties and better pest control. The International Grape Genome Program is a multi-national effort to discover a genetic means to improving wine tasting quality, increasing yield and providing a “natural” resistance to pests.
The implementation of mechanical grape harvesting is often stimulated by changes in labor laws, labor shortages, and bureaucratic complications. It can be expensive to hire vineyard labor for short periods of time, which does not square well with the need to reduce production costs and harvest quickly, often at night. However, very smal northern Michiganl vineyards, incompatible widths between rows of grape vines and steep terrain hinder the employment of machine harvesting even more than the resistance of traditional views which reject such harvesting in northern Michigan.
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