Charles assertively shakes Harrison’s hand. Harrison doesn’t give the impression of appreciating crowds or assertive handshakes. “I need a drink,” Harrison says. It’s Charles’ cue to set down bottles of Whaleback White and Good Harbor Golden on the signing table. Joyce immediately recognizes the labels and wags a long finger. Charles had finally found a way.
It’s my turn. I tell Harrison that I’m an aspiring wine newsletter writer and that his work with Kermit Lynch is inspirational. “I get nine cases for that piece,” he says. We both chuckle. I believe I’ve formed a bond with a foremost man of American letters but it could be I’m slightly drunk from the glasses of Irish whiskey I had for dinner. There’s some talk of cinema with Tom McGuane and more book signing before we speed out of East Lansing by the light of fireflies.
That was a fitting eve of a recent family vacation to the Leelanau peninsula, Michigan’s pinky finger and Jim Harrison’s home for decades before he moved to mountains west. Leelanau is wine country but we’ve already done the tours. The plan was to generally avoid tasting rooms and haul a box of new and favorite wine from our favorite downstate wine merchants.
Our place was a little studio apartment above a garage on 21 acres of mature beech-maple forest a mile south of the historic Grand Traverse Lighthouse and open freshwater sea. It had a large deck and comfortable Adirondack chairs. Upon arrival we swiftly unpacked and poured healthy glasses of 2004 Clos Roche Blanche Cuvée Pif. We inhaled the candy blossom aromas and sat and watched as two deer scavenged the forest before us.
You might call Pif our house wine. We adore the tart red fruit flavor and how it takes a slight chill well and how it seems to always offer something new. It’s not bad with burgers and even better as a cocktail on a deck in the woods. The two deer stuck around until the coyotes began to howl. It’s somehow comforting to realize first-hand that a natural food chain still exists.
Sunrise and then I’m behind my puppy, Ginger, as we explore the trail network of Leelanau State Park. A brisk walk through old-growth forests of more beech and maple then white cedar and eventually sand dunes makes an animal hungry. Ginger for liver sausage, me for a bottle of 2006 Domaine Du Vieux Chêne from the southern Rhone VDP region of Vaucluse. It’s an equal blend of grenache and syrah with a nose of cherries, ripe black olives, purple wildflowers and their stems, and finally the rain-steam off of hot concrete. A sip is bright fruit tempered by mild tannins and some chewy twig. I believe this falls into the category of value wine. I hope there is enough to go around.
Leelanau is abundant with fruit orchards. We were eating a quart a day of dark, sweet cherries and also making the most of the fresh whitefish catch available for purchase in Leland’s historic Fishtown. One cool evening the whitefish was grilled with salt and pepper and simply adorned with a lemon-butter sauce. It drew out the grapefruity flavors of a crisp, dry 2006 Thomas Labaille Chavignol Sancerre. Above the wine were intoxicating scents of preserved lemon, marsh grass, sun-dried cotton and broad garden leaves. We spent the remainder of the evening in a canoe among the Eastern Kingbirds and Northern Flickers of Kehl Lake.
It seems everything I do on vacation makes me thirsty, even drinking. Aperitifs of Bell’s Two Hearted Ale inevitably led to a bottle of wine. A swim-tired dog gazing absently beyond the wood led to a bottle of wine. Leftover fried clam strips from the tavern down Manitou Trail led to a bottle of wine – 2005 Cascina Degli Ulivi Gavi Filagnotti to be precise. This scandalously floral Italian white has been a favorite since discovery. Replete with salty lemon cream and a muscular spine of minerality it commonly causes things around me to glow. As I finished off the bottle a tiny Ruby-throated hummingbird buzzed down to hover gracefully mere feet from my face. It was decidedly unlike looking into a mirror.
Chippewa legend speaks of a great fire on the western shore of Lake Michigan that drove a mother bear and her two cubs into the water. Nowhere to go, the bears were determined to make the far, opposite shore but after many miles of swimming only the mother bear was able to achieve it. Exhausted, she climbed a high bluff of the Leelanau Peninsula and curled to sleep and wait for her cubs. The cubs never made it—where they drowned the Great Spirit created the North and South Manitou Islands. The mother lies there still, the monument of Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.
Besides miles of hiking trails, dunes and glacier cut hills, Sleeping Bear is blessed with a multitude of lakes and rivers. The geography of Glen Arbor is such that I was able to drop our canoe at Glen Lake and leave the car in town at the Crystal River take-out only a mile away. Possibly influenced by reading too much Hemingway in my youth I devised a plan to tie off a bottle of 2007 Bargemone Rosé to the thwart of the canoe and let it cool in the clear water, where the soft green hair of weeds cover anxious yellow perch.
It quickly became obvious that the water wasn’t nearly cold enough to chill pink wine, so I reluctantly popped the bottle into ice and found a swimming hole. It was a short wait. At drinking temperature the rosé easily slid down the throat in waves of light, bright fruit with a steady dried-herb finish. Out of our plastic boating cups rose aromas of strawberry, melon, wintergreen, cucumber and possibly a hint of juniper, although that aroma could have been from white cedar that lined the banks of the river.
And of course there are miles upon miles of Lake Michigan beach in the Sleeping Bear. Where Shalda Creek empties into big water we spent an afternoon at play, a fragrant beach fire providing the base for our activities. On the way out we spied Great Blue Heron fishing under verdant cover. On the way in we heard a loon’s doleful song. On the drive back to shelter our bellies rang with hunger.
Whitefish is wonderful but after so many goings-on one occasionally desires a piece of fat-marbled protein, particularly when a bottle of 2004 Ulive Mounbé Barbera waits in sight of the grill. With a striking nose of asphalt, plums, red cedar and arugula this was the most memorable wine of our vacation. It is nectar wrung from the petals of dark purple flowers, a blackberry reduction, a glass of warm tannin and tingling acidity. This rousing meal was accompanied by a simple dish of sautéed summer squash in butter and wild leeks (ramps) that grew abundant in the woods around us. We took our last sips as the orange twilight turned into moon and stars.
If natural beauty, fruit and fish aren’t enough, Leelanau Peninsula also offers several charming harbor villages for dining and shopping. It seems every other storefront is an art gallery, many filled with bleary, severely-colored paintings of Lake Michigan’s sand dunes and sunsets. But Sutton’s Bay Galleries is not the standard “vacation art” store. Browsing rare lithographs of Russell Chatham’s extraordinary paintings is a half hour well spent.
There is no shortage of book stores, either. Most of them with several shelves devoted to Jim Harrison and other Michigan authors. At The Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor I found a signed first edition of Dan Gerber’s book of new and selected poems, A Last Bridge Home. Russell Chatham’s paintings have appeared on the covers of both Jim Harrison’s and Dan Gerber’s work. For years Dan Gerber and Jim Harrison were co-editors of Sumac Press. Connections linger around every corner for the alert.
We celebrated the book discovery with a bottle of Francois Chidaine Montlouis Brut and its fine aromas of thick-cut marmalade on wheat toast. Drinking dry and minerally like licking lemon rocks along a dusty riverbed it finished complex yet refreshing and paired brilliantly with a snack of smoked whitefish pate.
This bubbly has occasionally been known to arrest the souls of wine drinkers at every level, invoking a fever-dream of caresses falling from velvet sky. At any rate, it seemed an apt wine to sip as our vacation came to a close. Soon we would be belted into a full car, heading south on concrete ways, a combined total of seventy-one mosquito bites and twice as many memories.
