The vines at Mari Vineyards.
Sipping Sustainably Eco-friendly farming takes root at NoMi wineries By Craig Manning Northern Michigan’s wineries are famous for their breathtaking beauty, with rolling green hills and rows of grapes as far as the eye can see. In many cases, a glimpse of the Grand Traverse Bay shimmers somewhere in the distance. It’s no wonder that many of the region’s top wedding venues or scenic photo-op spots involve vineyards. What’s more surprising is how many local wineries are taking steps to make sure that their stewardship of the land does justice to the bountiful beauty of the spaces they call home. Sour Grapes Historically, the wine industry hasn’t scored top marks for eco-friendly protocols. Heavy use of chemical pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers is common practice in the wine world, as is monocropping—when a field is used for a single crop—a farming philosophy with a long list of drawbacks. Collectively, these practices can damage environmental ecosystems, degrade the quality of the soil, and create hazardous conditions for vineyard workers. Just how common are these practices? California alone—the heart of the North American wine industry—tracks the use of more than 200 million pounds of agricultural pesticides each year, per the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation. That number accounts for California’s entire agricultural industry, which reaches far beyond just wine grapes, but there is data to suggest that winegrowers are
disproportionate users of pesticides. In France, for instance, wine vineyards make up just 4 percent of the land occupied by agricultural uses, but account for about 15 percent of all pesticide use, according to the French Agricultural Ministry. It’s not unheard of for these chemicals to show up in the actual wine, either. In 2019, the United States Public Interest Research Group tested 20 popular wine and beer brands for glyphosate, a chemical used in the weed killer Roundup that is commonly linked to cancer. Of the 20 brands tested, 19 of them showed traces of the chemical, including major commercial wine brands like Sutter Home, Beringer Estates, and Barefoot. A Glass Half Full The good news is that a growing number of northern Michigan wineries are pushing back against the tacit assumption that bad environmental practices are a necessary cost of doing business in the wine world. In recent years, local winegrowers have taken huge steps to ditch harmful chemicals, build healthier soils, and protect the environment. The best part? Not only are these strategies better for the land and water that make up our northern Michigan homeland, but they can also yield better wine. “If you’ve ever had a carrot from your own garden that was organically grown in good compost, it tastes worlds apart from a carrot that you buy from Walmart that was conventionally grown.” So says Tim Hearin, who co-owns the Northport-based Green Bird Organic Cellars & Farm along with his
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wife, Betsy Sedlar. “It’s the same thing with wine and cider. You can taste when a winery is using fresh, organically grown grapes or fresh, organically grown apples that were grown the right way.” Green Bird was established in 2005 by a different set of owners, with the winery component coming online in 2014. Hearin and Sedlar bought the business in 2019, viewing it as the perfect melding of two of their passions: sustainable farming and drinking wine. “Being farmers first, we’re stewards of the land,” Hearin says. “Part of making the best fruits is having healthy trees and healthy vines, and using chemical pesticides or chemical fertilizer or other unsustainable practices doesn’t produce healthy plants. So instead, at Green Bird, we use a lot of specific practices that build an ideology of regenerative agriculture into our farm. For example, we don’t use chemical fertilizer; we use animal manure, and we run our pasture-grazed chickens and sheep through our vines, and through our orchard, and through our vegetable garden. They are our resident mowers and fertilizers.” Diversity = Beauty One term for the philosophy Hearin describes above is biodiversity, which views farming not just as individual crop types, but as a self-contained ecosystem of plants, flowers, insects, and animals. This diversity of life on a farm, it turns out, can help the growing process in countless ways. Take Mari Vineyards on Old Mission Peninsula, a winery whose sustainability commitments include everything from
irrigating crops with recycled wastewater to using waste from the grape-pressing process to create nutrient-rich compost. One particularly notable piece of Mari’s sustainability mission is a bee and butterfly sanctuary program, wherein Mari works with a nonprofit called the Bee & Butterfly Habitat Fund to replace standard lawns with sunflowers and other pollinator habitats. “The insectaries are going to help create natural habitats for honeybees and monarch butterflies, and will hopefully help us regain a healthy balance with predatory insects,” says Bonnie Hardin, sales and marketing coordinator for Mari Vineyards. “And then, on top of that, the pollinators are going to help diversify the vineyard ecosystem,” Hardin continues. “They’ll pollinate the wildflowers in the sanctuary, and they’ll also pollinate the clovers and the cover crops that grow between the grapevines. … By adding the diverse cover crops between the rows, you benefit the microflora under the vines and create healthier, more beneficial soil, which all comes back around to the vines.” Hardin notes that, in addition to pursuing more biodiversity throughout its vineyards, Mari hasn’t used herbicides or inorganic fertilizers since 2017, and in 2021 treated 100 percent of its crops with organic sprays rather than chemical pesticides. Kicking the (Chemical) Can Peter Laing, a partner at MAWBY Vineyards and Winery on Leelanau Peninsula, says their business has also taken steps in the past six years to go herbicide-free.
