Dennis Devitt estimates that he planted nearly 10,000 acres of vineyards during the many years he spent working in California wine country. A viticulturist who is now a sales manager covering northwestern Lower Michigan for the agricultural business Wilbur-Ellis, Devitt saw how some Western grape growers were using terraced vineyards.
“My experience in Napa and Sonoma and the central coast of California … is guys will go in and terrace because … you’re in a great climate, you’ve got great soil, you just don’t have the right topography to plant it, to prune it, to harvest it,” he says.
Simply put, terracing is the process of carving rows into the side of a hill versus planting on flat land or rolling terrain as most Michigan vineyards do. Picture iconic scenes of grapevines chiseled into hillsides in France or Italy, for example.
In Michigan, a handful of growers are using terraced vineyards; Dablon Vineyards in Baroda is among them. The benefits of terracing, says Head Winemaker Rudy Shafer, include good air drainage and sun exposure, “not to mention the aesthetics and efficient land use.” About 10% of Dablon’s 45 acres of grapes are planted in terraces modeled after European vineyards.
“We’ve always had it,” Shafer says. “It’s just the geography of our land: We have hills and little valleys, and it’s an efficient use of the available land.”
Bel Lago had terraces installed in the winery’s Moreno Vineyard on the Leelanau Peninsula three or so years ago. Founder Charlie Edson says they were built across an entire west- and southwest-facing slope that the team “simply couldn’t utilize without terracing — it was just too steep.”
“What prompted us to use it was just the aspect of the slope, how it faces,” Edson explains, noting that Bel Lago and sister winery French Valley Vineyard grow about 63 acres of grapes in all, 3.6 of which are in the terraced section. “The sun hits it a little bit later in the morning, and it just gets bathed in the sun at the end of the day. So we planted all red varieties, which require a little bit longer growing season.”
“For a site like this that’s on the side of a hot hill,” he adds, “it’s going to be frost free, or [frost free] within reason.”
It’s not cheap to build terraces. There’s a lot of earth to move to make way for flat zones, which can range from one to several rows wide. Once terraces are in place, weed control takes more work than in traditional plantings.
“It’s fairly labor intensive and costly to do,” says Jimmy Spencer, a managing partner at Pond Hill Farm in Harbor Springs, which has about 8 acres of grapes, 4.5 of which are terraced. On the maintenance front, “we’re up weed whacking in the summer,” he says. “You can’t let it all turn into giant weeds. That blocks airflow, … and you can’t just run a lawn mower through the field.”
Bel Lago’s terraced grapes won’t be ready to harvest until at least 2026. Edson is looking forward to it.
“We really like red wine at Bel Lago,” he says. “It’s one of the things we really focus on, so to have a site that will create some nice ripe fruit in, we hope, most years, is really exciting for us.”
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