In a Chicago Alley, a Local Winery Gets Creative with Michigan Grapes

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Things are constantly bubbling at Middle Brow. It’s not just the effervescence of their sparkling wine, carbonation of their beer, or air bubbles in their bread and pizza dough – it’s also creative ferment. Pete Ternes and Bryan Grohnke began harnessing fermentation more than a decade ago, trying to brew beers unlike any others on the market. They sunk their hands into pizza and bread when they took over a building at 2840 W. Armitage in Logan Square with Ternes’ wife Polly Nevins some six years ago. That building became Bungalow by Middle Brow, a restaurant, cafe, bakery, and brewery. They started experimenting with wine around the same time, and are now building out another location and production facility in southwestern Michigan to handle their ever-growing slate of low-intervention natural wines.

“If you have ever met the guys that founded Middle Brow, you know that being around them is like standing near a beehive,” Leah Matthews, the wine director at the acclaimed Logan Square restaurant Daisies, writes in an email. “The only evidence of the numerous lines they have in the water is the buzz or hum of constant busyness that you can sense when you speak to them.”

Like a beehive, the Bungalow space is narrow and small: you might expect a brewery to fit in it, but certainly not everything else that goes on inside. The team behind Middle Brow is restlessly creative, flitting from one experiment to the next. “This whole building is kind of hilariously over-confident or cocky,” says Ternes. “Every time we come across something that we like, we think, ‘Well, let’s try to make it ourselves.’ It’s not as if we think we can make it better, it’s just that we think we can make another version of a good product.”

Their sourdough crust pizza may have been called the best pizza in Chicago by Chicago magazine in 2019, but they continue to develop other versions: thin crust tavern-style at Bungalow on Tuesdays, bready Detroit-style in a permanent residency at Avondale’s Beer Temple soon. They might have been named a national James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program in 2024, but they continue to try out new beers and wines without adhering to doctrine or dogma. They want to try and fail and learn and explore, letting the wild processes of fermentation take their course to spotlight what nature and excellent local ingredients can do. “That’s the kind of winemakers we are, that’s the kind of people we are: we learn as we go, we do all the research we can,” Ternes says.

“Ask a bunch of questions,” Grohnke chimes in.

“Poor gardener…wise bee,” reads part of the description of their honey-scented white wine Pollen, made from Gewürztraminer grapes hand-harvested north of Traverse City on Michigan’s Old Mission Peninsula. It may as well be their creed.

Making Wine Off a Chicago Alley

When you picture a winery, you might imagine an elegant chateau nestled amongst terraced vineyards with a picturesque view over mountains from a sun-drenched patio. Bungalow by Middle Brow is not that. There is a cracked asphalt patio filled with rough-hewn wooden picnic tables and benches, but the building is a workaday brick rectangle with glass-block windows and the view is of a well-used Chicago street – it’s certainly not over anything, not in this flat city. Here, grapes are brought by truck to a garage door and unpacked in an alley before heading inside a cramped space that looks like a garage brewery – which it is, in part. Dumpsters and the rears of residential buildings provide the backdrop, not mountains.

“We’re always running into things,” says Ed Brady, who helps make Middle Brow’s wine and beer. He means that literally: he often sports a bruise or two from jamming into a handle or corner in the tight quarters. “Luckily, I’m a small guy, so it works out.”

He and Tommy Auer are in the process of squeezing the juice from some Gamay grapes that were harvested on Michigan’s Old Mission Peninsula, picked up at five in the morning, and driven to Chicago some eleven days earlier. Wearing rubber boots, they’re carefully transferring clusters of grapes from a round stainless steel tank into a press using four-tined plastic pitchforks. It’s drizzling outside, so they can’t spill out into the alley for extra space, as they often do.

The press is only the size of a barrel, so squeezing all the grapes takes time. (“It’s way too small for what we’re doing,” says Grohnke.) Once it’s filled with grapes, it’s covered with a plastic dropcloth. An interior bladder is inflated with water, gently squeezing the grapes against the perforated exterior, releasing their juice to drip down into a waiting bucket. Auer and Brady deftly switch out buckets as they fill up, pouring the magenta juice into a square tub whose lid is weighted by an empty beer keg, lest the wind blow it off.

When a press is complete after some 15 minutes, Auer and Brady toss the residual grape pomace into a clean vat, where it will soon be joined by recently harvested Pinot Gris juice. Ideally, they would have harvested the Pinot Gris grapes themselves, giving them control over their maceration, but time and staff limitations prevented that. Adding the Gamay pomace to the Pinot Gris juice is their attempt to give the Pinot Gris a bit more depth and bitter tannin, which can come from grape stems and skins.

“The juice extracts flavor compounds, aromatic compounds, textural compounds from the skins, just like water on tea leaves,” Ternes explains. (Hence “skin-contact” wines; this is also why low-intervention producers like Middle Brow don’t filter their wines.) They have no idea if the experiment will work.

For now, Auer and Brady are focusing on the juice they have squeezed from the Gamay. At this point, the juice is very sweet, with a slight scent of yeast and greenness. Whereas most grape juice is turned into wine via yeast converting the natural sugars in crushed grapes into alcohol, these grapes have undergone carbonic maceration, which starts the fermentation inside the grape itself, without the help of yeast. The grapes had to be hand-harvested – a machine would crush or bruise too many of them, and carbonic maceration requires whole grapes – and protected from oxygen by resting for several days in a sealed vessel filled with carbon dioxide with the help of dry ice. After they are pressed, they continue their fermentation conventionally, but with chemical and flavor compounds still present from the carbonic maceration.

The method results in a lighter, fruitier wine that is usually drunk young, or soon after harvest. One of the most popular instances of carbonic maceration is in France’s Beaujolais Nouveau, which is made from Gamay and released within months of harvesting. (Most wines are not released until they have aged at least a year, if not many years – the year listed on a label is when the grapes were harvested.) The day of the Beaujolais Nouveau release is always the third Thursday in November and is heralded with fireworks and festivities.

Hybrid Grapes in Michigan

This year, Middle Brow hosted its own Beaujolais Nouveau Day in Chicago, when the first snow of the season was coming down and turning the city streets gray with dirty sleet. They would soon be offering turkeys for pick-up for Thanksgiving and evergreen trees for Christmas, but for now they were celebrating wine. “THE SHOW MUST GO ON EVEN IF THE SNOW MUST GO ON,” Ternes wrote in an email that morning. Middle Brow was not just releasing a nouveau but also offering tastings of some 20 of their other wines, in a bid to start distributing wine to more Chicago restaurants now that they had three vintages to offer from several years of winemaking. “we got the north in our blood, us. and we won’t wither or dither in the face of wind or weather,” Ternes continued. (Ignoring capitalization is one of Middle Brow’s quirks.)

Such unpredictable weather highlights both the challenge and the promise of grapes grown in Michigan, as many of those used in Middle Brow’s wine are. Wine grapes do well with long, warm summers and rain during winter and fall; there’s a reason many of the world’s storied wine regions have similar climates. Snow and frost can kill a vine, or at least ruin its grapes.

But climate change presents a host of challenges to traditional winemaking regions. Enormous wildfires can devastate winemakers by burning grapevines or tainting them with smoke: California’s wine industry suffered damages of $3.7 billion due to wildfires in 2020, and Spain, Portugal, and France have also borne similar destruction. Increasingly common and long droughts obviously impact all forms of agriculture, including heavily water-dependent viticulture. Warming temperatures affect how grapes grow and taste, and present dangers to the workers picking them. Milder winters can cause vines to come out of dormancy too early, leaving them vulnerable to frost. And extreme cold events can destroy vines even while they are dormant.

“There was a report published out from British Columbia [in Canada] that there was 98% – you didn’t hear that wrong – 98% crop loss” due to a polar vortex in January of 2023, says Soon Li Teh, who leads the grape breeding and enology project at the University of Minnesota. The dangers of cold damage mean winemakers in the area “are now receptive to growing our hybrids.”

Plant breeders are “there to protect the sustainability of a crop,” says Teh, by ensuring that there is a cultivar resistant to an epidemic disease – or adaptable to a changing climate. The plant breeding program at the University of Minnesota is renowned: it’s responsible for the Honeycrisp apple, one of the most popular new varieties of produce introduced in recent decades. Additionally, the school has also become well-known for its grape breeding project, which has produced various grape cultivars that are now planted in cold climates such as Michigan and Canada. (Regions of both places also grow non-hybrid grapes known as common European grapes or vitis vinifera.)

“The first target is cold-hardiness, and then the second target is fruit quality,” says Teh of the goals of the grape breeding program. “Excellent wine also has to be backed up with vines that grow well.” Almost every wine you’ve ever had has been made from grapes of the vitis vinifera species. Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, Merlot, Riesling, Zinfandel – all of which are grown in Michigan and are made into wines by Middle Brow – they’re just cultivars of vinifera, as are most of the grapes you’ve eaten. (Strikingly sweet Concords are an exception that prove the rule.) But there are around 60 other species of grape in the world. While none might be as conducive to the purposes of humans as vinifera, they can offer specific desirable traits that benefit vinifera if paired in the right combination. Creating such hybrid grapes is what breeders like Teh try to do.

“Hybrid grapes offer a lot of promises because of the ability to withstand diseases, the ability to withstand frigid temperature, and a shorter growing season,” he explains.

Creating a worthwhile hybrid grape is extremely complicated. “Most likely, we get one winner in every 10,000, or one winner in every 100,000,” Teh says. Advanced DNA and genomic technologies have made sorting through those odds much faster, but creating successful hybrid plants is still a very long, very slow process. Even once a breeder manages to cross-breed a cultivar that has their desired traits, they still have to grow that cultivar and test it over many seasons. “It takes anything from 15 to 23 years,” Teh says, so that the breeder can be sure that the vine has been stress-tested by enough severe cold events.

But obviously agricultural grapes need to do more than survive cold; they need to make good wine. Despite the benefits of some non-vinifera species, they can have less pronounced fruit flavor, higher levels of acidity, and some undesirable flavor notes, according to Teh. “Those baggages are what we at the breeding program are actively working to flatten out,” he says.   

The result can be something entirely new. Says Middle Brow’s Ternes, “We’re proud of our Riesling that comes from Michigan, but if that’s all we’re doing, that’s a little less exciting. Whereas if we’re exploring different [hybrid] varietals and making wine that tastes like maybe no other wine anyone’s ever had, that’s what’s exciting to us.”

Take Marquette, a hybrid grape developed at the University of Minnesota that has notes of intense strawberry in Ternes' estimation or blackcurrant and cherry in Teh's. Middle Brow has made a wine from just Marquette, but Ternes likes it even more in a blend such as their flagship Pizza Wine, to smooth out flavors. The deeply colored, almost brown Baco Noir has a luscious texture and is “like black cherry pop,” Grohnke says, while Chambourcin has “a blueberry pie vibe.” Don’t take those descriptions to mean that hybrids are saccharine, like the fruit wines for which Michigan is known. Middle Brow’s hybrid white blends Float and Drift are two of Ternes’ favorites and highlight more floral notes. Michigan’s cooler climate also means grapes ripen more quickly, leading to higher acid and less sugar – which also makes wines made from those grapes ideal for enjoying with food, such as Middle Brow’s pizza.

“We just weren’t running into these flavor combinations in traditional European winemaking – coupled with the fact that these varietals grow much better in these climates, and so they could be farmed better, theoretically, if the farmers are willing to do it,” says Ternes. The hybrid varietals are “just more representative of what this region can grow well.”

Middle Brow is “bolstering the relevance and reputations of these cold-hardy hybrid grape varietals that have proven to grow successfully in the Midwest,” writes Daisies’ Matthews. Daisies has been serving Middle Brow wines on tap for about a year – reusable kegs reduce the waste of packaging bottles. “A huge part of sustainability is locality,” Matthews writes. “From Daisies’ perspective, it doesn’t get much more local than serving a wine that is made about 10 blocks from the restaurant.”

Looking Towards a Sustainable Future

While grapes have been grown and wine has been made in Michigan for decades, it’s only in the past few years that wines from the state have begun to be taken seriously, as more and more producers lean into the specific qualities of the region. Middle Brow is determined to be part of the shift.

That’s why they’re expanding to a second location in Sawyer, Michigan. While they will serve food and host events there, the facility will also provide them with more space to produce wine – and save some transit time of bringing grapes or juice all the way to Chicago. The dream is to one day buy a vineyard and grow grapes without pesticides or other chemicals themselves. But for now, they’ll allow like-minded winemakers to use the facility, one way of spreading an organic ethos throughout Michigan.

“There’s also other people who are trying to do this,” Ternes says. “When all of us are speaking with the same voice to particular farmers, the chances then are a lot better that they’re going to convert to organic… that means better grapes, better wine, and stronger communities around these places.”

He believes that working with local, organic farms contributes to the success and individuality of Middle Brow’s beer and pizza; it’s why Middle Brow has mostly shifted to Michigan grapes for wine, even though they started off their experiments with juice from California. “We could try to make Pinot Noir or a million other wines that people understand and know already, or we could pursue [hybrid] grapes,” Ternes says. “We know that we’ll be able to farm them in a way that’s kinder to the earth over the next decade or two, and we can really build a sustainable winery.”

After all, one of the most valued traits in a wine is terroir, the unique character that expresses the environment in which a wine was made and grown. Says Daisies’ Matthews, “It is so important for the planet for people to understand that they can get the best of something in their own backyard.” 

This article has been updated to properly characterize the role of plant breeders.