Crafting Wine, Cultivating Family

Gilchrist Farm and Winery is growing from the ground up

By Kierstin Gunsberg | Dec. 9, 2023

As the summer season wound down in Suttons Bay and crowds of beachgoers headed back home by M-22, Gilchrist Farm and Winery swung open its doors to the public. With their kids by their side, founders Elizabeth and Marc Huntoon celebrated the soft opening of their brand-new tasting room inside a renovated turn-of-the-century home with peekaboo views of the bay.

The St. Joseph Street location is only a meandering afternoon bike ride north of the family’s 85-acre South French Road farm established in 2018. Twenty-two of those farm acres are dedicated to growing grapes from all over the globe, including Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot, plus some winter-hardy varieties from Spain, Austria, and northern Italy.

Creating a Home Away from Home

Both Elizabeth and Marc are retired doctors turned vintners, but Elizabeth’s green thumb always kept her busy gardening and tending to hobby orchards before turning farming into a family vocation.

She and Marc admit that while they would have liked a summertime opening for Gilchrist Farm’s tasting room, the renovation timeline of their new digs just happened to put it closer to autumn. Despite the economic challenges of waiting another six months for the busy season to start back up, they plan to take the winter in stride.

“Starting a winery is a lot like medicine in the sense that one has to be prepared to delay gratification for several years,” Elizabeth says.

The upside, she adds, is getting to roll out a prolonged soft opening as they and their team—which includes two of their daughters, Laurel Huntoon and Alyssa Brittain, and son-in-law George Brittain—fine-tune the details for guests.

For Gilchrist Farm—a name chosen to honor Elizabeth’s mother’s surname—the details are everything. From the rich robin’s egg blue exterior where the family can be spotted romping around in muck boots and farm flannels, to the sunbathed interior furnished with antique touches, the tasting room and its branding were all designed by Alyssa. Her vision from the start was to carve out a homey, casual setting for both locals and Up North visitors to kick back with good friends and good wine.

“We wanted a comfortable, lived-in atmosphere that feels like eating at a friend’s beautiful home,” explains George, Gilchrist Farm’s business manager. “We believe a beautiful space can be inviting to everyone, so come as you are.”

From Ground to Grape to Glass

While the idea of swirl, sniff, sip, and savor might seem like a super luxe aspect of winemaking, the reality of bringing Gilchrist Farm’s wine to fruition (pun intended) begins with dirt, digging, sampling, and analyzing by Elizabeth and Marc’s youngest daughter and farm manager, Laurel.

A soil scientist, Laurel maintains the family’s vines starting at the roots through regenerative agriculture and nurturing the Soil Food Web. (For those of us who haven’t taken a biology class in a hot minute, the Soil Food Web is a collaborative community of organisms and microorganisms that live in the soil and interact—think: eat, excrete, repeat—to create organic compost.)

To help that process along, Gilchrist Farm gets grape must (crushed grapes) from local wineries and spent grains (the leftovers of beer making) from breweries to toss into their soil, creating a rich, healthy foundation for their grapes.

“At its core, regenerative farming is working with over-farmed land to restore the soil,” explains George. “Great wine is made in the vineyard. When winemakers work with excellent fruit, the wine almost makes itself.”

Working closely with Drew Perry, head winemaker of neighboring Aurora Cellars, the family has been transforming their vineyard rows into exceptional wines. The process involves Marc’s hands-on involvement, from sampling at each stage to making crucial decisions that shape the finished bottle.

The farm’s top-selling wines include Four Daughters, a red blend paying homage to Elizabeth and Marc’s own four daughters, and the Barrel Fermented Chardonnay, a white that George notes isn’t too “oaked or buttery.”

For gifting, he recommends the 100 percent chardonnay sparkling wine. “It’s very easy to drink and all about celebration,” he says. And, to thaw out from a crisp afternoon of snowshoeing the shoreline, George points to a warm glass of spiced mulled wine sipped inside one of the tasting room’s cedar patio chalets.

More Than Wine

Of course, Gilchrist Farm doesn’t only grow—or serve—wine.

“We always knew from the outset that we wanted to do locally grown and seasonal food,” says George. “We are farm to table in all things. Everything we do starts at our farm.”

To complement their drink menu, the tasting room’s chef-led kitchen offers brunch and dinner options, like a heaping bowl of locally-raised bison gumbo or a plate of creamy Basque cheesecake topped with cardamom cookie crumbles. Before anyone gets their heart set on one of these tasty dishes though, Chef Deanna Mikalauskas, one of Gilchrist Farm’s five chefs, says that to keep the menu and ingredients fresh, their daily offerings are unique and dependent on what the farm and local vendor farms have available.

Each day, the kitchen team inventories their own ingredients, then collaborates with other producers like Loma Farms, Guernsey Farms Dairy, 9 Bean Rows, and Fustini’s Oils & Vinegars to brainstorm one-of-a-kind meals for Gilchrist Farm’s guests. It keeps Chef Deanna and the rest of the kitchen testing their creativity from one dish to the next while ensuring a sustainable, minimal-waste kitchen.

Meanwhile, the five chefs are working in tandem with Laurel to plan next season’s edible garden in the farm’s newly built hoop house.

“I love this one very specific cabbage,” says Chef Deanna of her recent garden wish list request of Caraflex, a soft, sweet cabbage variety that can be sliced into salad or roasted as a main dish. “A week later, [Laurel] looked into it and texted me. She’s like, ‘Oh my god, we got the cabbage.’ So she’s planting seedlings for that now. We’re all weirdly excited about a tiny little cabbage.”

As for what winter farm visitors can get excited about, George says they’ll be hosting a Supper Club for noshing and mingling, and, after years of nurturing their vines, they’ll be offering their first estate wine, with ingredients grown completely on their farm, this spring. Cheers to that!

Photo by Alyssa Brittain