Brewvine: Amoritas Vineyards

2019 was a busy but fruitful year at in Leelanau County.

The young winery entered into some wine competitions, brought home a few golds, and produced some new reds.

“It’s been a really great second year for us in business,” said Emily Goodell, owner and viticulturist. “We submitted wines to a couple different competitions this year, medaled in everything.”

They may be relatively new to the Northern Michigan wine scene, but the family behind in Lake Leelanau is already making a name for themselves.

They recently took home a best in class ranking in a Michigan wine competition and two Jefferson Cup gold medals.

“It’s an invitational so only, I think, about 250 wineries in the country are invited to participate and then they choose basically wines that they think were real standouts that just deserve that extra recognition so taking home two Jefferson cups was a big win for us,” she said.

One big win came from one grape that has a fairly small footprint in the region.

“Our Fascinator dry Muscat is made from the Muscat ottonel grape, which is kind of lesser known. If you’ve had a moscato that is made with Muscat grapes but just like with a Riesling where you can go anywhere from super dry to super sweet, you can do that with Muscat too. So we had a lot of fun picking just a little bit of our Muscat in 2018 and making this dry wine from it.”

Even after a great award season, they continue to add to their wine list, heading to the west coast to bring back some new varieties.

“We recently released a California zinfandel just to kind of expand some of our red wines so we have another full bodied dry red,” Goodell said. “We also released our Pointes North and that’s just slightly semi dry red blend and that’s made entirely with Michigan fruit.”

All done in an attempt to satisfy every customers taste.

“So we now have everything from super dry bubbly whites to sweet Rieslings, reds from full bodied to soft and then we also have a nice cherry wine so really a little bit of something for everyone,” she said.