The Fizz #48: John Keller of Neu Cellars is putting Michigan winemaking back on the map.
John Keller speaks about how he got into winemaking, what makes Michigan special, how he’s planting his current vineyard, and where his wines are going.
For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke with winemaker John Keller at Neu Cellars in Michigan’s Old Mission Peninsula. I came across a bottle of John and his father’s Pinot Meunier in a wine and food shop called Vessel and Vine in Brunswick, Maine and had to try it. I was delighted. The wine was zippy with tons of summery berry flavor and a little bit of a sparkle. You can read about that wine, and some of the Michigan wine history here.
Michigan isn’t the first place people think about when they think of American wine, but the region has a deep history of winemaking and currently grows 3,375 acres of grapes. I’m extremely excited about the growing landscape of winemakers in the region, a movement which John and his father are a part of. In this issue, we spoke about how John got into winemaking, what makes Michigan special, how he’s planting his current vineyard, the kinds of wines he makes, and where he’s going from here. I’m thrilled to introduce you to this passionate maker, and can’t wait to see his project evolve.
Margot: How’d you get started in the wine industry?
John: In college, I was at Ohio State studying biochemistry to go into medicine or something ridiculous like that. I realized that lifestyle was a little bit too demanding for me, and it was having a toll on my mental health. I just thought—I'm going to keep studying what I like to study and then find another way to use this.
I found a couple of classes that struck any 20 year old’s interests—beer and wine in the Western culture and Brewing Science. I love drinking beer, but I think like the process is too much of a process for me to fully fall in love with it. I started figuring out that there are actually careers called winemaking. That's not something you're very familiar with when you're a 20 year old who grew up in Ohio.
I've always enjoyed drinking wine. I'd bring a bottle of shitty wine to a house party in college, and everyone would make fun of me ‘cause I'd be drinking gas station wine, but I just couldn't take another Natty Light. I went down that path and started doing research of how to get into that career, especially from a Midwest state with zero experience. I stumbled upon U.C. Davis out in California and their masters program for viticulture and enology and started that process to try and get admitted there.
In the meantime, I found an internship at a classic Midwest winery called The Winery at Otter Creek where labels were created using like Microsoft Paint. It was a nice entry level into wine. Meanwhile, I was trying to apply to the schools out in California and interviewing. I ultimately didn't get in. They only took 13 or 15 people in the world that year due to the fact that they over admitted the year prior. It was a good experience though, and everything happens for a reason.
I had an internship lined up at Ravenswood, so I was still planning on moving out there and getting some experience with a reputable winery on my resume, and maybe I’d reapply to this program again the year following. I packed my bags and went out to Sonoma for the internship. I was working in the lab at Ravenswood and once again, couldn't really find my space in wine yet. I was at the point of just getting my feet wet and I realized there that what initially drew me into wine was the balance of science and art.
Like, I love playing music. There's a left right waltz that goes on, and finding that balance is really my happy place. At Ravenswood it was all left—filling out Excel sheets and testing each tank, like hundreds of tanks in the morning, writing down pH digits and entering them into spreadsheets. The winemaker would come through and say we're going to do this addition or subtraction based on these numbers—it was like a mathematician. It was lacking art completely. At that point, it was classic, someone in their early twenties saying well now I hate wine again.
I bailed on the whole U.C. Davis thing. I missed my family and decided to move back to the Midwest and figure things out again. I moved to Cincinnati and was going to get my MBA. At night I started working, and I reached out to a wine bar called 1215, and they said they didn't have any availability, but they're opening a sister restaurant called Pleasantry OTR, which was all natural wine focused. I had no clue what that was. In the first staff meeting, we tasted through the wine list. It was the first time I had natural wine, and I remember Pax Wines, which had another project called Wind Gap, I think—they had a Trousseau Gris. I tried that and was just like, oh my God, this is so electric with laser acidity, and it just danced on my tongue. I just thought wow, this is exactly what I was looking for. Here we go again falling back in love with wine.
I made sure to keep all that technical knowledge I learned at Ravenswood—I learned about the machine as a whole and how one thing affects another thing. You do learn a lot of what you don't want to do—it's like preventative medicines. How do I not get sick? Or how do I make the wine not sick? They were pretty much prescribing medicine to fix shitty grapes. I was pretty much making wine in my basement after that, trying to get repetition cycles to have a cohesive product.
Then I did this really small project in Cincinnati while I was working at Pleasantry called Loquat. I was working with the sous chef of Pleasantry to make these edgy rough wines with any fruit we could get our hands on. It was a nice experience because we had to deal with liquor control and licensing and all that. It's just a build up, build up, build up to where I'm at now. After that ended, I wanted to make wines that taste clean but authentic, trying to use raw fruit and not do anything to it other than give it the right conditions to succeed. First step was finding out where I can get my hands on good fruit around where I lived.
Margot: How did you choose Michigan?
John: Michigan was interesting. We've had a little cottage in Northern Michigan where my family would get away since I was a kid. We finally decided to buy a little wooded acre lot and build a cabin there, and we've been going there for the past 22 years. Seeing the momentum in the wine industry up there was a crazy thing. The styles of wine built for that region, like sparkling wines, are ones that I love and lighter reds and whites and things like that. The vinifera capabilities there were just a match made in heaven for me. So I went out and tried to get my hands on fruit, just to see what can you actually make up here?
The first year was 2018. In 2018, I got fruit from this old retired professor on Old Mission Peninsula who grew it the way I wanted it grown. He put a listing out there and I bought around half a ton from him, and once again, just made it in my basement. The fruit was so clean. It was Pinot Meunier and Chardonnay. I was just doing, sparkling and a couple of co-ferments and it all it tasted so good for like a 10% or 11% ABV wine that I thought okay, we're going to have to go fully on board.
In 2019, I did all the licensing. We're currently just making it in a garage adjacent to the cottage right now. It was a huge nightmare getting that approved through liquor control and the Department of Agriculture, but we did it and it's a temporary thing, but right now we're a micro-scale winery. Not even micro-scale, I would say we're a nano-scale winery. We make 250 cases a year right now, just due to the fact of input restrictions that we have.
Margot: So you live full time in Cincinnati, but you make your wine in Michigan. Is that right?
John: Yeah, I travel up there way too often. I've spent too many hours in the car. I'm up there very frequently in the summer, maybe every other weekend, and almost every weekend during harvest. I'll obviously be living there weeks at a time during the busy times. Come November through April or May when we start bottling again, I'm just not anywhere to be found because it's so isolated up there in the winter and very cold, and I don't have a car built for that right now.
Margot: That makes sense. You have your own vineyard, but it’s a little on the early side, so you're mostly working with other growers, is that right? How are you getting the fruit?
John: It's two things right now. We're getting the fruit from a single grower who has multiple vineyards and it's all on Old Mission Peninsula, but simultaneously, in September 2020, we bought 15 acres over on Leelanau Peninsula. We just started planting that last May. We’re 5x planting what we did last year, this year in May again. We're trying to become self-sufficient—like I said, it's an input problem. That's why we're a nano-scale, because we just can't get our hands on enough grapes.
Margot: As you are planting your vineyard—are you traveling all the time? That's tough to plan and take care of a vineyard and not be there full time.
John: Yeah, I'm trying to get my dad to deal with it. My dad's my partner. The vineyard is like his retirement journey. I want to be out in the vines maintaining, but that's still probably a four or five-year runway for that. Right now, with planting, we’re up there frequently. I hate to admit this, but everything was so far behind because of COVID last year, that we couldn't get a well dug in that property or even electric. So the vines weren't irrigated at all. Immediately after they went into the ground, there was a three-week spout of no rain. We were freaking out. It eventually started raining pretty well up there, and I've been tracking that just to make sure—do we even have to irrigate? It's probably 50/50, it just depends on the year. I was hoping for a rainy year, but we lost a few vines. It's not the end of the world.
We did all of the planting ourselves last year, which was so difficult—it’s way harder than any harvest type of labor. This year we're going to hire a professional team to go out and plant because it's just way more efficient.
Margot: You mentioned that you were working with the grower because they grew grapes the way that you wanted them to be grown. What does that mean?
John: I wanted the grapes to be grown organically. If not organically, at least as sustainably as possible, There are a few wineries that are certified organic up there, but in the actual winery, they like bomb it with sulfites and stuff. You did all that hard work and then you just absolutely ruin it. This guy, he grows it organically, but he doesn't have an organic certification. He's sustainable certified and has been since 2019 when they started handing those out. He's had the same growing practices for the last 20 years, so that's about as good as it can get out there.
Margot: Are you planning to grow organically in your vineyard?
John: Yeah, I personally want to grow biodynamically as well, but I don't know if I I can convince my dad to do all that “weird stuff” yet. I'll have to get him a few books, but I think that those wines are in a different tier. We'll start with organic and then go from there.
Margot: That makes sense. Can you talk about what Michigan climate and soils are like and what some of the challenges are around growing organically up there?
John: The soil is pretty much just sandy loam everywhere on top. As you go down too, it’s really healthy sandy loam and promotes these vines to shoot down and find water, just because of how quickly it drains up top. It doesn't get that humid, which is nice. In the summer it gets a little bit of humidity, but not like the Midwest. You do have to worry about the cold, but they get so much snow up there that it forms a blanket on the vines, especially when they're really little to prevent death due to the cold.
The deer and the raccoons are out of control up there. There are definitely ways to mitigate that risk, but that's something that I'm going to have to learn. I've never grown grapes before, so this is a giant experiment, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of failures and plenty of learning opportunities, but there's always going to be a strict line on how we're going to grow it. Everything else is going to be a sacrifice, so if there's diminishing yields or things like that, we'll have to figure it out. It's not my livelihood right now, so I have the ability to take that stance and not have the dependency of putting food on the table, growing an organic product in a tough region.
The temperature control from the sides of the lake really helps growers on the Peninsulas. What those do is insulate and regulate the temperature changes and swings. Frost doesn't hit there for weeks after you see it 20 miles south, for example. You do have a little bit of leeway for these late harvesters. The grower we have now, he almost neglects the vines in a way. He’s a very hands off grower.
These things are like bushes. You have to dig under them to just find fruit. The Pinot Meunier vineyard, we've only been able to harvest once in the last three years because it got rot and that's just from neglecting the vines. It's another reason for us to really control our inputs so we can have a good output.
Margot: Definitely. How are you doing as a new viticulturist learning about the space? Do you have mentors in the Michigan wine community?
John: To be honest, I'm not at that phase yet. I try to think about incremental progress, otherwise I get overwhelmed. Right now, my focus is on how do we set and structure this vineyard to where we don't have any regrets? You only get one chance to really set it up. Once the vines start getting settled in, you can't re-arrange them or you’ll have all these headaches. It's book knowledge around studying the data out there, like wind directions and weather patterns. How do you want to lay out the rows?
[John pulls out The Grape Grower: A Guide To Organic Viticulture] This is a really old book, maybe outdated, but it has some nice knowledge on how to grow grapes organically. For example, you're going to have deer running through your vineyard. What are you going to do about it? When we're there growing vines full-time ourselves, that's when I'm going to be reaching out to local growers. There's a guy up there I heard about from just word of mouth, he's all about biodynamics and he's converting all these vineyards to biodynamics. I don't know what their wine tastes like, but he'd be a good resource to have locally, because it's such a different terroir.
You have to have a local knowledge. I can't go to someone in California and say hey how do I grow vines in Michigan, because they won’t know. I mean, I'm sure they have a better idea than me. I'm not going to be cocky about that. I have a lot to learn. There's a local knowledge that you have to facilitate and find your way around. We just have to get our vines in the ground and then we'll figure it out incrementally.
Margot: There’s a real depth of history around Michigan winemaking that I find super cool. Do you feel connected to that history?
John: I feel connected in a way that I can appreciate it, and know that I'm a small part of something that's bigger. That's everyone's dream in life, isn’t it? Life's pretty big. You just want to be a small piece of the big pie and hopefully contribute in a way that makes you happy and helps other people out. I like having that background and seeing a newfound momentum in Michigan. I'm seeing a lot of people from the West Coast return home to find cheaper real estate and make wine in a high momentum area.
There’s a really weird interesting wine history in the Americas. Starting on the East Coast and Virginia, then Ohio at one point was the leading producer of sparkling wines. That was back in the 1800s so you know they weren't using Round Up. They just had local knowledge. That's what I'm trying to tap back into.
If you think how big our country is compared to Europe, where they've had thousands of years to study and find the best five acres to make this type of wine, we haven't even tapped into that knowledge. This new wave of winemakers who are just testing new boundaries, like making wine in Michigan, Missouri, New York, why not Texas? Why not Arizona? There's a bunch of places where we haven't really discovered the terroir—Colorado, high altitude, what's going on there?
That's an exciting piece of the pie that I want to be a part of. In Michigan, even when it's not about wine, it's just a really pure region with clean water and fresh air, and you can make a fresh product up there.
Margot: I love that. You mentioned Ohio as one of our United States historic sparkling wine producers. There’s a really deep history of working with hybrids in your area. Is that something that's interesting to you?
John: It is. I was fascinated by hybrids because you don't really get to drink them that often, unless you go to the winery itself. I’ve never searched out Cayuga White or Baco Noir really. Some of the most fun wines I make are with those grapes. We have planted a small amount of hybrids in the new vineyard, but that's mostly a small hedge for a really crappy year.
Right now, I'm kind of taking the really risky road of saying hey instead of Baco Noir, let's be like the first to plant Trollinger in the Midwest. We’re trying to push the boundaries, and maybe we’ll end up screwing ourselves, but we have the ability to risk that until we settle into what we know will work. Right now we’re throwing stuff out there to try and create something different in the Midwest.
This year we're making a vermouth. I’ve started to see them come out of New York, and I think it’s the next big wave. I know Matthiasson has a really good one. I’m really excited about experimenting with it. I think it's a nice change-up for natural wine.
Margot: I’m excited for your vermouth—definitely agree that it’s one the come-up, I’ve seen some awesome creations lately. Where do you find the joy in your work?
John: I have to think about that because there is a lot of joy. There's this spark or an engine when it comes to this work, where it allows you to think cohesively and it allows you to create at the same time. One of the biggest life lessons is that the end is out of your control. I know that you can manipulate wines and turn them into things that you hope for. It's like almost like shameful parents, like forcing your projections onto the child. I just want to give this wine the right conditions to become what it wants to become—a reflection of its environment.
I feel like I'm a babysitter of wine. I just like to give it like a clean space to ferment and give it the right conditions and try not to fuck it up. Whatever it is, it is. If people love it, that's satisfying because it’s a reflection of where it came from. If people hate it, well [shrug]. It's crazy. It's a crazy region. It was a cold year. It's an eight and a half percent Riesling that's really acidic. But guess what? I didn't add sugar and I didn't add sulfites.
I've always been told just some minimal amount of sulfates would go a long way. I know that. Just getting out a chemical bag with something that has a risk with inhaling, it just feels wrong. Putting that in food and then slapping a natural wine label on it feels wrong. Some people who say they’re using minimal sulfites, if you look at a pH curve, that's an over-adequate amount of sulfites and you're calling it minimal. I just like to be a babysitter and see what the product can do and what it can become and embrace the criticism and embrace the positive feedback and just be a neutral middleman with a project that I'm passionate about.
Margot: I’m excited to see your process of learning and getting set up in this really special region. Thanks so much for taking the time with me, and I’ll be on the lookout for more of your wines!
You can support John and Neu Cellars by buying their wine on their website, and following them on Instagram. Ask for the wine in your local wine shop.
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