Local Guide
The Leelanau Wine Loop
Laid-back country wineries, a Fishtown lunch, and dinner straight off the farm. The loop we run when friends come into town and we want the day to feel like the peninsula, not a checklist.
Our Take
About twenty-five tasting rooms are scattered across Leelanau, and between the two of us we have sat at most of them. What follows is not a ranking. It is the loop we actually drive when friends come into town, picked as much for the sitting spots and the road between them as for what is in the glass. Plenty of excellent wineries never come up below. These five are the ones that make the day feel right.
Our Home Peninsula
Leelanau is where we live, so take the bias as given. The federal government made it a wine appellation in 1982, the tenth in the country, on a petition written by Larry Mawby, a local grower who had decided the peninsula's short cool summers were not a handicap but the exact thing Champagne-style grapes want. He turned out to be right, and spent the next forty years proving it one bottle of sparkling at a time. The founding generation here has that flavor. Bernie Rink, a community-college librarian with five sons to keep busy, planted the county's first commercial vineyard in the 1960s, ran the tasting room like a man who would rather be reading, and for years refused to take a credit card. If you were short on cash he told you to mail him a check.
The wine has grown up since then. People still show up expecting only the sweet cherry stuff and leave having reconsidered, because the peninsula now turns out dry Riesling, real traditional-method sparkling, and cool-climate whites like Grüner Veltliner and Auxerrois that almost nobody else in the country bothers to grow. The reason is water. Lake Michigan on one side, Grand Traverse Bay on the other, and Lake Leelanau down the middle all work like a flywheel: the cold spring water holds the vines back until the frost danger passes, and the warm fall water keeps the fruit hanging long enough to ripen this far north. It is the same math that makes Champagne work, which was Mawby's whole argument.
What you notice on the ground, though, is the lack of polish, and we mean that as praise. There is no Napa here, and not even the composed estate-on-a-hill feeling of Old Mission across the bay. Leelanau rambles. M-22 traces the shoreline the whole way, scenic enough that the road sign itself became a bumper-sticker brand somebody fought the state over in court, and between the vineyards you pass cherry orchards, an inland lake, and a working fishing village. One of the vineyards up here was planted by Madonna's father. Nobody makes a fuss about it, which is the most Leelanau thing about it.
How a day actually runs
Our pacing for a sit-and-stay loop, not a race. Times assume a 1 pm start and a Farm Club dinner.
- 1:00 pm Pull out of the Observatory
- 1:25 pm Shady Lane Cellars, back patio
- 2:45 pm Dune Bird, espresso reset
- 3:45 pm Lunch in Fishtown, feet in the lake
- 5:15 pm Bel Lago, golden hour over Lake Leelanau
- 6:30 pm Farm Club for dinner
- ~8:10 pm Back to the Commons
Trim the back end and you're home by mid-afternoon. Add a beach detour and you'll roll in after dark. Either is the right answer.
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Shady Lane Cellars
Head up first and take a seat on the patio. The tasting room is a 1915 fieldstone chicken coop, an actual coop that held actual chickens for eighty years before two friends who bought the old fruit farm spent two years turning it into a cellar. It is one of the older estates on the peninsula, and it changed hands again last year: Amanda Danielson, who built Trattoria Stella into Traverse City's best-known restaurant, bought the whole hundred-and-forty-five acres and is slowly turning it into a food-and-wine project, with the big barn set to become the tasting room. What has not changed is the winemaking. Kasey Wierzba, a Traverse City kid who spent seven years in Napa before coming home, is one of the few female head winemakers in the state and one of even fewer people up here growing Blaufränkisch, an Austrian red she has quietly made the estate's calling card. Order the Grüner Veltliner, rare enough in Michigan to justify the drive on its own, and the Blaufränkisch, which they bottle as "Blue Franc" because that is what the word means. Fridays in summer there is live music on the patio until seven.
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Dune Bird Winery
A few minutes on toward Northport, and the reason to come is the room. Dune Bird took over a twenty-year-old vineyard in 2021 and rebuilt the tasting room into something warm and modern: glass garage doors that open onto the hill, a fireplace with a blue velvet couch, and a full espresso bar sharing the counter with the wine. The name is half the story, "Dune" for the dunes nearby and "Bird" for the pilot who started it, with small aviation nods on the labels if you look. It changed hands again in 2024, to the same family that owns Bel Lago later on this loop, but the espresso machine and the feeling stayed. This is our reset stop. Order the "Pure Leland" sparkling and a cortado, carry them out to the hillside seats, and let the day slow down for a minute. It stays open later than most rooms up here, which also makes it the fallback if you are running behind.
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Detour: Leland & Fishtown
Time for lunch, and Fishtown earns the stop even if you buy nothing. It is a huddle of gray fishing shanties and smokehouses on the Leland River, right where it drops into Lake Michigan, one of the last working commercial fishing harbors on the Great Lakes and the most intact one you can simply walk into. A fourth-generation fisherman named Bill Carlson spent years buying up the shanties to keep them from turning into condos, and a local nonprofit now owns the heart of it and still works the river with two old tugs, the Janice Sue and the green-hulled Joy. Get in line at the Village Cheese Shanty, in a shed built in 1958, for a sandwich on pretzel bread the owner bakes fresh each morning until it runs out. Buy smoked whitefish from Carlson's, which has sold it on this dock since 1904. Then walk two minutes to Van's Beach, put your feet in the lake, and look down for "Leland blue," the blue-green stones on the sand that are actually slag left from the town's iron-smelting days a century back. Cash or a check at the Cheese Shanty, so come prepared.
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Bel Lago
Cross to the west side of Lake Leelanau and climb the slope to Bel Lago, which means "beautiful lake" and delivers on it. The deck faces southwest down the water, so if you have paced the afternoon right this is your golden-hour stop. Charlie Edson, who holds a doctorate in viticulture from Michigan State, planted the first vines here in the late 1980s and has run the place like a research station ever since. He grows something like a hundred grape varieties on thirty-seven acres, including thirty-two different clones of Pinot Noir, the kind of number that makes other winemakers shake their heads. The one to order is the Auxerrois, a soft Alsatian white almost nobody else in America plants; Edson calls it "a well behaved child, particularly when compared with my other favorite child, Pinot Noir." If someone else is driving, the ciders and the low-alcohol seltzer here are unusually good.
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Farm Club, on the way home
Close the loop here, on the Leelanau Trail seven miles out of town, at what is somehow a farm, a restaurant, a bakery, a brewery, and a market all at once. Farm Club opened in 2020 when the couple behind Loma Farm teamed up with the couple behind The Little Fleet downtown, and the idea is exactly what it sounds like: most of what reaches the plate was grown in the fields you are looking at. Nic Theisen, the farmer half of it, taught himself to bake naturally-leavened bread in a wood-fired oven and came back from a trip through Mexico obsessed with corn, which is why the Thursday pozole is built on their own nixtamalized kernels. Order the farm board, whatever vegetables are in season, and one of the farmhouse ales, brewed with a wild yeast they caught on the property. Two things to know before you point the car here: they take no reservations, so aim for a little before or after the dinner rush, and they allow no dogs at all, which for a place this rural surprises people. Leave Poppy home for this one.
Host's take
The whole loop is an argument that you don't need polish to be taken seriously. Rolling farm country, a working harbor, and wine that has quietly gotten very good, all of it about forty minutes from our door.
Only Have One Afternoon?
Leelanau earns a full day, and this loop assumes you can give it one. If the calendar is tighter than that, the Old Mission wine loop is the shorter answer: one road, fifteen minutes from our door, with the lighthouse at the end. We wrote that route up the same way as this one.
Planning a trip?
The Observatory is our loft in the Grand Traverse Commons, a restored 1885 building with restaurants, a winery, and trails on-site.
Check Availability →Without Leaving the Commons
Left Foot Charley pours in the same complex we do, the Grand Traverse Commons, the old state asylum reborn as shops and lofts. Bryan Ulbrich started it after eleven years making wine on Old Mission, on a quietly contrarian premise: no estate vineyard of his own, just fruit from about eighteen small family growers around the region, so each bottling is a portrait of somebody's few acres. The dry Riesling is the flagship, but ask about the Missing Spire late-harvest Riesling, named for one of this campus's towers that was pulled down decades ago. You can still see the gap in the roofline. The ciders tend to surprise people who came in for wine. It is the right first move the night you arrive: taste the local style a few steps from your door, then drive out into the loop the next day with your bearings.
The Ones We Skipped
The route above is the day we drive, not a verdict on everyone else. A few worth your time on another trip: MAWBY makes nothing but sparkling and does it seriously, and Larry Mawby is the grower who wrote the 1982 petition that put Leelanau on the federal wine map, so a glass of his bubbles is a glass of the origin story. Good Harbor grew out of a cherry-farming family and helped start Michigan's first wine trail. Leelanau Cellars pours right on Grand Traverse Bay up in Omena. And Boskydel, Bernie Rink's place and the county's first winery, closed in 2017 when he was in his nineties, so that one is history now, but it is the reason the rest of this exists.
Reservations, Dogs, and Getting Home
Most rooms take walk-ins for a standard tasting, so you rarely need a reservation unless you are a party of six or more or you want a private seated flight, in which case call ahead, especially on a summer weekend. Tasting fees run about ten to fifteen dollars a person. Some rooms credit that toward a bottle and some do not, so ask when you sit down rather than assume. Two scheduling things trip people up: Farm Club takes no reservations and seats first come, first served, so time your arrival around the dinner rush, and a handful of rooms close Tuesday and Wednesday, more of them off-season, when hours shrink to weekends or by appointment. Coming between November and spring, call each stop the week of.
Dogs are welcome on a lot of Leelanau patios, Shady Lane and Dune Bird included, leashed and outdoors. It is not universal. Farm Club allows none at all, inside or out, so that is the one stop where Poppy stays home.
On getting home: do not lean on Uber or Lyft. They work for a hop around downtown Traverse City but thin out fast on the peninsula, and a pickup from a rural winery at closing time is not a plan. The three that actually work are a designated driver, pacing yourself and using the spit bucket, or a licensed wine tour that picks up in Traverse City and does the driving, of which there are several. And if nobody wants to drive at all, Left Foot Charley is a few steps from our door.
Questions Guests Actually Ask
How many wineries are on the Leelanau Peninsula? About twenty-five, spread across the whole county rather than lined up on one road. The peninsula became a federal wine appellation in 1982. You pick a loop for the day; you do not see all of it.
Do you need reservations, or can you walk in? Walk in, at almost every room, for a standard tasting. Call ahead only for a group of six or more, a private seated tasting, or a busy summer weekend. Farm Club takes no reservations at all.
How many wineries can you do in a day? Four or five, with a food stop in the middle. Tastings run close to an hour and the rooms are ten to twenty minutes apart, so the sixth pour is usually the one nobody remembers.
Is Leelanau or Old Mission better? Leelanau for a full day and more variety; Old Mission for a half day on one road that ends at a lighthouse. Our Old Mission wine loop guide covers that route the same way we cover this one.
Can you Uber back from the wineries? Not reliably. Plan on a designated driver or a licensed tour with Traverse City pickup instead.
Best time to go? Late June through October. Summer weekends are busiest; the shoulder seasons are quieter and, honestly, better. Call ahead November through spring, when hours shrink.
Can we bring the dog? On most patios, leashed, yes. Not everywhere, and not at Farm Club, so check the last stop before you build the day around the dog.