Name: Summer on the Great Lakes | Sailing, Wine Tour & Delicious Food in Michigan
Uploaded: 2026-03-15T18:04:04.000Z
Duration: 11 min 46 s
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You're watching Vagabrothers and we're drinking wine in Michigan.

It's a beautiful day here in Traverse City, Michigan.

It's our second day exploring the city out here with Traverse City Tourism, and

First things first, we're grabbing a coffee at a place called Morsels.

We can get some food, and then we're boarding a ship, so make sure you guys stick around.

We're going to be sailing on a tall, mass ship.

These are ships that used to ply the Great Lakes region in the 1800s.

This was a major, major thoroughfare for shipping, and

we're gonna go get a taste of that maritime heritage, and

then later in the day, enjoy some good food, some wine, and some cider.

They say 20 years from now, you'll be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than the things you did.

So cast off the bowlines, sail from safe harbor, get the trade winds in your sails, and

So in the early days, shipping was a really important way of moving people and goods.

Here in Traverse City, it was a big lumber community, so they were taking a lot of the hardwood here and using it to build cities around North America.

Manitou Passage right here is one of the main waterways.

It's a huge shortcut, but it's really dangerous.

The weather on this lake can change really quickly because of strong winds and strong currents.

There's tons of shipwrecks off the shore.

But these bays right here are actually really protective.

And to this day, Traverse City is a safe harbor for massive cargo ships who come here during storms.

It's time to hop off the boat and go check out a big surprise for me personally in this region.

We're on the Leland Peninsula, and this is one of the northernmost wine growing regions in the country.

It's the 45th parallel, which also passes through Bordeaux and Northern Italy.

So we're gonna go see what they're growing here at Blackstar Farms.

You guys, we just got to Blackstar Farms.

It's a local winery here in the Leland Peninsula.

He is going to be showing us around and explaining a bit more about making wine up here.

Most important part, when people think of Michigan, they don't necessarily think of wine and grapes.

So how long has wine been cultivated up here?

Actually, Michigan, Oregon originally was one of the biggest wine producing states in the country before Prohibition.

And then it wasn't until about 30 years ago Bernie Boscadel started opened a winery up here.

And it's just exploded over the last 30 years.

I feel like I'm just gonna throw this out there, but

to become a winemaker, you do need to have an element of, like, mad scientists.

Because everything that you're doing is experimentation.

You're taking different ingredients, you're fermenting them for different periods of time, you're blending them.

Especially when you get into these complex wines where you have multiple grapes and percentages how, like, what's the inspiration for creating, like, things like this?

If we all made the same thing all the time, it was just boring.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, so we've hopped into the car, and

now we are driving up to the town of Old Mission and a lighthouse that's basically at the northernmost point of this little peninsula, at the bottom of which is Traverse City.

We're going past all these little lake houses and these cottages just built right along the shoreline.

There's sailboats, there's vineyards, there's orchards, and it's just really, really nice.

You know, as you might know, these were really treacherous waters.

Lake Michigan is one of the most dangerous lakes in the Great Lakes.

There's crazy currents here, and so the lighthouses were important for safety.

But we're right on the 45th parallel, which is halfway between the equator and the North Pole.

I don't know if any of you are Ernest Hemingway fans, but

he used to summer in Lake Michigan, just not far up the coast from here.

He wrote all those Nick Adams stories about baseball canoeing on this lake, and

It's a beautiful part of the world, and so far we've discovered some really awesome things.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we have just arrived to the beautiful historic town of Leland.

This is called Fishtown, and you should be able to gather why it's called that.

The village still harbors a commercial fishing fleet, but

before the advent of gas powered boats, there's mostly sailboats and line fishing.

And you can see a lot of that heritage reflected in the buildings and the boats in the harbor.

It's like right on this river, there's a little waterfall.

Kind of feels like a little elven village.

The opening scene of Hook when Robin Williams wakes up back in Never Never Land and he has to pretend to be a pirate.

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Summer on the Great Lakes | Sailing, Wine Tour & Delicious Food in Michigan

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