Happy Birthday! Mawby Sparkling turns 50 this year! Break out the bubbly! In this episode, Mike Laing, Director of Mawbyness, shares with us the history behind Mawby Sparkling Wine, how to pick out a good bubbly for your next event, and what some of his personal favorites are. You won’t want to miss this!
Links:
https://mawby.wine
4519 Elm Valley Rd.
Suttons Bay, MI 49682
Transcript
And realizing also that we can grow Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grape varieties that are, used to make high quality champagne. resulted in the realization that this is the right style to produce in Northern Michigan. And we still think that. Not every year is a great year. But every year you can make quality sparkling wine.
Cliff Duvernois:Hello everyone, and welcome back to Total Michigan, where we talk to ordinary Michiganders who are doing some pretty extraordinary things. today's guest, Mike Laing, he's the Chief Marketing Officer for Mawby Sparkling. But today's very special interview, though, for Mawby. And why is that, Mike?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Well, we're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year, Cliff. Yeah.
Cliff Duvernois:Happy birthday. Yes. Talk to us a little bit about the, 'cause you're not 50, so let's talk to us, talk to us a little bit about the history of Mawby Sparkling.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah. Gladly. Larry Mawby, our founder, with a background in agriculture planted grapevines in 1973 on the Leelanau Peninsula. At the time he was still working for his family's farm who, managed cherry orchards and apple orchards all the way from Rockford, Michigan up to the Garden Peninsula of the UP. And he planted grapevines on the side and started making wines in the late seventies and then in the mid eighties experimented with, traditional method or bottle fermented sparkling wine, Methode Champenoise. And then after a decade or so of experimentation in the late nineties, decided that Mawby would focus on sparkling wine. At the time that was only 15% of our, of his business was sparkling. So he took a big gamble by putting all of his nons sparkling eggs into the sparkling basket, so to speak. But it has proven to be a wise decision. We really think this region is right for sparkling wine, grape growing. And consequently sparkling wine production. In the mid two thousands, Larry Mawby added Pressure Tank or Charmat or Cuve Close, production Bubblies, which are faster to market, easier to respond to market demand, lower price. More economical options for folks. Because if you age sparkling wine for years en tirage, you have to have other products to sell in the meantime. So
Cliff Duvernois:Certainly
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:In the mid two thousands, he launched the Cuve Closed Brands, or Line of Wines, sex, Detroit, Us. Actually at that time it wasn't Detroit, it was Fizz. So Sex, Fizz and Us. And then my story, intersects Mawby in 2007. I came to Mawby, from a, from a teaching background, and I learned from the ground up how to make sparkling wine and sell sparkling wine. And, technically my title, I guess is Director of Mawbiness although I do see oversee marketing, I do, I also oversee production, and a lot of other things. But, but yeah, that's, that's kind of the history of Mawby.
Cliff Duvernois:Certainly. And so the question I got for you, taking a step back here for a second, is he started experiencing with creating sparkling wine back in the eighties. And then at some point in time, he's decided to like really make that his primary business. Why is that? Why not stick to just more of the traditional white wine? Red wine? Why go the bubbly route?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:As any strong brand, you gotta find your point of difference. So I think, and I'm putting words in his mouth maybe a little bit, but realizing that this is a short growing season that we have here in northern Michigan. And realizing also that we can grow Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grape varieties that are, that are, used to make high quality champagne. Realizing that over decades of experi experimentation resulted in the realization that this is the right style to produce in Northern Michigan. And we still think that. Not every year is a great year. But every year you can make quality sparkling wine. The fall makes or breaks our season. Well, it's not always warm in the fall. Sometimes it rains and gets cold and we don't need the fruit as ripe for sparkling wine. We pick earlier. Because we don't want as much sugar in the grapes because we don't want as much alcohol in the base wine because we referment the wine. And when you referment, alcohol can inhibit the second fermentation. So if it's too high, The base wine. If the alcohol's too high in the base wine, you won't have a successful second fermentation. Because the yeast will create an environment that's too toxic for themselves. They'll kill themselves. So there's a lot of other reasons. But short growing season, pick early, for sparkling wine. Those are, those are sort of the, the re the main reasons why, why that was the style decided upon.
Cliff Duvernois:And the second fermentation that you're talking about here, this is when sparkling wine becomes sparkling wine.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Correct? Yeah. So almost all sparkling wine, not all, but almost all sparkling wine goes through two fermentations. So in the fall we pick the grapes and we ferment the juice into wine. But then throughout the rest of the year we're refermenting. So we're essentially adding yeast and sugar and confining the wine to a closed vessel, whether that's the bottle or a pressure tank. And the bubbles produced from that second fermentation have nowhere to go. So they're trapped. So they dissolve into the, into solution. They dissolve into the wine.
Cliff Duvernois:Right? So right now in front of us, you've got a bottle of bubbly. Talk to us about that.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:So we're 50 years old this year. So I mentioned Larry Mawby planted grapevines in 1973. Currently this is 2023, so that's 50 years. And we're celebrating those 50 years with a 50th anniversary Cuveé and this Cuveé is unique in several ways. So there's only a set amount of this cuveé that we're going to produce, a thousand cases. Because this wine is finished with 20 year old oak aged grape brandy spirits. Let me back up. So, in 2019, that's the base year for this particular product. We picked chardonnay and Riesling grapes, pressed the grapes, fermented the juice. We refermented the wine in this bottle. And then it aged for three years. So the fermentation only happens for about a month. But the real magic happens with bottle fermented bubbly as it ages in the bottle and the yeast breakdown. And they give off their toast like bread, like aromas and flavors. And that's really what we're looking for in a bottle fermented sparkling wine. Well, when it's time to sell a bottle of fermented sparkling wine, The wine needs to be riddled. The yeast needs to be removed. So we riddle the bottle. Disgorge it. Disgorging is removing the yeast, and then we have to balance the acidity and the carbonic acidity with residual sugar. Otherwise, these products would be unpalatable, too sharp, to astringent. So we add sugar. Well, we added sugar in the form of a dosage, a liquer. in this case, the liqueur was made from 20 year old oak aged grape brandy that Larry distilled years ago and put in a barrel and forgot about. And sugar. So we mix sugar with these grape spirits and a little bit of potassium, meta bis, sulfite sulfur, elemental sulfur for preservative. But then we dose every bottle with about seven mils of these spirits. And the result is cognac, like aromas and and flavors. So it's very unique. It will not be repeated. Because, it'll be another 20 years before we have, oak aged. Grape brandy, and we're currently aging it in bourbon barrels. So it's not gonna be the same. So you can do a lot of things with the dosage. You can change a sparkling wine dramatically with subtle tweaks to the dosage. And that's what we've done here. and the result is our 50th Cuveé.
Cliff Duvernois:So let me ask you this question. Is it normal that you would put like a brandy or a cognac into sparkling wine or is
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:normal special that you did. It's not normal. What's normal is dosage is normal. so adding residual sugar to balance the acidity is normal. But using spirits to do that is not necessarily normal. we've done it before. We'll do it again. But no, it's not conventional. it's unique. We've added mead to the dosage to change a bubbly. We've added lavender tinctures. We've added what else have we added? apple brandy. We've added all sorts of stuff. and that's really where the fun is for us as a wine making team is, playing with those playing with all those different tools and, and, and creating new products.
Cliff Duvernois:So actually that brings up a good question. 'cause I'm imagining you guys sitting around all getting tanked trying on all these different
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:No, we spit. That's the pro, that's, how pros do it.
Cliff Duvernois:it Oh, that's right. You guys got the bucket or the little, what do they call those? I don't think it's a cistern, but you got something that you sit in and do
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah. Like a spittoon anyway, or spit it down the floor, drain, whatever. But yeah, you can taste better when you spit because you're coating your mouth and then, you pick up on different subtleties, and then you're not, you're not getting buzzed,
Cliff Duvernois:Yeah. Well, I'm gonna stick to the Cliff traditional way and get buzzed.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:There you go. All right. Sounds good.
Cliff Duvernois:So when you're talking about, coming up with these different flavors and I'm super intrigued and I'm very happy we get an opportunity to try this. When we're talking about coming up with these particular flavors, when you're mixing those, obviously you don't m make, you know, a thousand cases of something hoping that it's gonna turn out. You've done some experimenting beforehand so you can get an idea of what that flavor profile is gonna look like. Yeah. So walk us through a little bit about how that goes. do you just pour like a base bubbly into a glass and then just add a little bit of spirits to it? How does that work?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:We'll, we will, we'll disgorge remove the yeast from several different bottles and, add varying rates of a dosage, right? And then, Top 'em up, mix 'em, let 'em settle. And then taste and see what we like. and so yes, trials are, industry standard for how to come up with these decisions, how these decisions are made. Trials. We do trials on, pretty much all wine additions.
Cliff Duvernois:Because the, I believe before you mentioned that this had seven mils,
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:So 1%. Yeah, so that's a 750 milliliter bottle. So about 1% of the bottle contains these spirits. But even that small amount, can change the aroma and flavor of a wine dramatically. Certainly. So we just, we experiment. Yeah.
Cliff Duvernois:Yeah. Because I can imagine you try one at six, you try one at seven, you try one at eight, and then you're like, you know what, the seven's got that right balance, it's got the right taste that we're looking
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah. you know what? I think we did, I think in this particular case we did, as far as I'm remembering, we did five, 10, and 15 and then we narrowed it down from there. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's, that's the fun part for us for sure.
Cliff Duvernois:Certainly. And for our audience, we're gonna take a quick break to thank our sponsors. When we come back, we're going to dive into this lovely Cuveé that, Mike has set out. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about some of the flavor profiles and what you can expect when you come to Mawby. We'll see after the break. Are you enjoying these amazing stories? Michigan is full of people that are doing some pretty extraordinary things. If you want these amazing stories sent directly to your inbox, head over to total michigan.com. Enter your email address and get them today. What are you going to get? I'm glad you asked. First, you're gonna join our awesome Michigan community and it is quite awesome. Second, you will get an email that includes the top five interviews from the show sent directly to your inbox. This is going to include the powerful lessons that we've learned from these amazing people. Third, you're gonna get exclusive behind the scenes information about the show. There's a lot of things that are happening to grow this movement beyond the confines of just a radio show and a podcast. You'll get advanced notice of upcoming guests and early access to their interviews. You'll also get a link to our Facebook group. Now to get all these goodies, just head over to total michigan.com/join. Enter your email address and join our awesome community today. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Total Michigan, where we interview ordinary Michiganders doing some pretty extraordinary things. I'm your host, Cliff DuVernois. Today we're talking to Mike Lang, director of Mawbiness. This.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yes
Cliff Duvernois:At Mawby because it's your 50th. And what wetter better way to celebrate the 50th than with lots of bubbly, which is what Mawby is known for. That's what we do. Yes, that's what you do. So before the break, we were talking a little bit about the Cuveé the special blend that you guys have come out with for your 50th. So obviously Mawby's got a lot of other Bubblies. And we could probably spend the next day talking about them all. So why don't you talk to us first about Grace. What is that bubbly? What can people expect when they're trying that?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Sure. So we make bubbly in a variety of styles and, excuse me, in front of us we have Grace, the 50th and, and another wine called Sandpiper. But yeah, grace is a bottle fermented sparkling wine, Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Gri. It's aged two and a half years in the bottle. So we pick the grapes in the fall, ferment, and then we re-ferment in the bottle and age it in the bottle for two and a half years before we remove the yeast and finish with a red wine dossage, making this wine pink. It's not actually a, a rose until we, disgorge and add our red wine dosage. So we were talking a little bit about subtle tweaks that you can make to a dosage to change the aroma, flavor, even appearance of a wine. And in this case, we added red wine to change the color and it also impacts aroma as well. Grace is a brute rose and it's my favorite wine that we're serving and selling right now. So I brought it here, to talk about. I love the balance between the acidity and the fruit, the yeast and the fruit notes as well. It's very clean, fresh, would pair really well with Brie or, I would say grilled salmon or things like that. Maybe, maybe roasted chicken and, I don't know. I really like this wine. It's one of my favorites. So, so I brought it here to talk about it. It's not what's in our glass, by the way. If it was, it would be, pink. This is the 50th cuveé in our glasses.
Cliff Duvernois:yes. And it is quite delicious. And 'cause when you were talking before about when you added the red wine dosage to the bottle, I know that there's another way too, that you can add a certain red or pink, and that's by leaving the skins.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah. There's a couple different ways. Yeah. usually, yeah, usually there's, some skin contact, between, juice and the red grape skins to extract color. And that's the conventional way to make a rose. But here, here, we've added red wine to a white wine, at the final stages to create the rose. So there's, there, there's, several ways to make rose. But, yeah, Grace is, technically a blush if you are being picky.
Cliff Duvernois:Ooh. There's a term I haven't heard before. Blush. I know that there's Rose. I know there's white and there's red, but a blush. Okay, Cool. Learn something new every single day. This is awesome. Now as far as Grace goes, this particular bottle from Mawby, is this also something that people can find in stores around michigan?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah, both the 50th Cuveé and Grace are available, at select retailers across the state. But the other wine here in front of us, Sandpiper is only available here and online. Cannot find this wine anywhere else. We gotta have a reason for people to come see us. And, and we sell, we sell a lot of Sandpiper to our tasting room. Because it's, we believe a real value. as well as, kinda that middle ground, sweetness level wise. So again, appeals to the dry and the sweet drinker. and it's really nice for mimosas. It's really nice for, wedding toasts. It's really nice for, it's really food friendly. anyway, that's Sandpiper. which we can talk about next if you'd like.
Cliff Duvernois:Yes, and we will, because Sandpiper is my favorite. That Mawby actually, yes, it does. every, and I sometimes I can't remember the name, but I just remember it's got a duck on it.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah. Yeah. the Sandpiper is a bird. That's, I. native to this area. that's what it's named after. And it's a blend. So it's a blend of everything we press. when we press grapes in the fall, we fraction the juice and the harder we press, the more, varietal character and as stringency and bitterness you extract. Well the hardest press fraction is used for Sandpiper, of everything that we press. So it's a blend of, geez, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc, Seyval, Cayuga, Traminette. it has at least seven different varieties in it. And it's finished off dry, so it's finished with just over 1% residual sugar. So, um, yeah, fruit forward, fresh drink now and, very affordable.
Cliff Duvernois:Yes, it is. So let's talk a little bit about, 'cause I wanna give our audience a little bit of scale. 'cause we've talked about Grace. You've got your 50th Cuveé here and we got Sandpiper. I'm trying my best not to call it the duck. That's okay.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:It's all right.
Cliff Duvernois:So for Grace, if we're looking at, on a scale of let's say, one to 10, where one is it's just, it's dry. Dry. Dry. Dry. Yeah. 10 is just like super sweet. Where would you put brut on that scale?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:In champagne, they define the brut scale from, I think zero to 1.4% residual sugar, but one point, 1.4 is pretty high. Grace falls in the 0.9 to 1% residual sugar. And 1% residual Sugar means. 10 grams of sugar per liter. Okay. so this is not a full liter, this is three quarters of a liter. So if it's 1% residual sugar, then that means there's 0.75 grams per liter. Okay? Or sorry, per bottle, right? Or
Cliff Duvernois:would,
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Sorry, my math is fuzzy, but
Cliff Duvernois:7.5 the math teacher, the math is fuzzy.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:well, no, I corrected it pretty quickly, but
Cliff Duvernois:Don't worry. I'm a recovering engineer. I would've followed you right down that path. So then if I'm translating this correctly, it would probably fall on maybe like a six or a seven.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:10. What is 10? Like a
Cliff Duvernois:10 would be like
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:moscato? okay. like no, I would put this more Grace is more like 1, 1,
Cliff Duvernois:1 to two. Okay. Yeah. Great. Because it's dry. Okay. Because, and I'm asking the question because I know sometimes, especially with people that are a little bit newer when it comes to wines or even to bubblies for that matter, just to get a little bit of perspective. A little bit sweet can be just an absolute hit. So if somebody was going to a party or something, I was just trying to give them a little bit of a frame of reference to be able to say, okay, so if you, if you're going somewhere where maybe people got more discerning pallets Then the Grace could be a really good option.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah. If you see brut, you know, it's dry. So, and that's la It's, yeah, It's labeled as such. And then, you know, with Sandpiper, We use little different naming conventions on Cuve closed or Charmat style Bubblies, where we're calling the semi-dry versus trying to, label those products with champagne style sweetness
Cliff Duvernois:Because for me, the almost called it the duck side winder. Sandpiper, See? Oh, I should've just called it the duck. Anyway, I gotta have another one of these. so the, the Sandpiper, to me is like a great blend. cause I've got experience tasting. So I'm not like overly sweet. But, I take this somewhere to a party or something and it is gone. People really love it. And these are, these are people that are typically like, maybe don't drink a lot or, they're, you know, they're, they're cracking up a bottle of beer or something else like that. This disappears quickly when it's at a party.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Well, that's great. That's the goal. But also, the reason I think is again, because, it kind of hits that, that middle zone between not too sweet and not too dry, right? So it's pretty approachable, right? For most people. And, also affordable. it's the wine we pour for people when they walk in the door here at Mawby. To again, start that conversation about sweetness level and, and what they like, what they don't like. Do they wanna go sweeter? Do they
Cliff Duvernois:go dryer,
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:drier, et cetera.
Cliff Duvernois:Yeah, it, would be, I could totally see that. This is a very nice starting point. Yeah. For people to sit there and say, oh, I like my wines dryer, or I like my wine sweeter. And then you go from there. 'cause how many do you, how many different bubblies do you have?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Right now? As we sit here in midsummer, we've got quite a bit. We've got probably somewhere between 15 and 20 different bubblies on the menu. And a lot of those are seasonal small batch releases that will fade as sales, you know, as they're, as they deplete. But then we bring new stuff back in the fall. And then new stuff back in the spring. So we're trying to, we're trying to create excitement around new products. At the same time, create consistency with, Mawby staples, like blanc or Sex, or Detroit or US or things, wines like that,
Cliff Duvernois:Which I see those at a lot of stores. Oh, that's good. Throughout michigan. A lot of them I hear that. Always looking for the Mawby label when I go out looking for bubbly in case I need it. So it's really nice. Now the one thing is with Mawby, and you kind of alluded to this before, is that you do have a wine club. Mawby's got a wine club.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Of course. little bit Okay, so it's pretty simple. It's free to join. But what you're committing to, you're committing to purchases. And you're committing to two purchases a year of six bottles. But you can customize those shipments. If you don't like what we suggest, we always suggest six bottles. But you can customize. And you can add, you can swap Big Little wines out for Mawby Wines if you'd like. So Big Little wines, are options for customizing your order. Those shipments are in April and September and, that's pretty much the minimum commitment. Now, addition, additionally, wine club members receive complimentary flights to the tune of six per year when they visit the tasting room. There are deals on shipping inside Michigan, outside of Michigan for wine club members. There are discounts on wine and merchandise all year round, as long as you're a member and you get access to, limited release wines as well as events
Cliff Duvernois:Certainly, and for somebody that's thinking about like joining. What would be, what would be a couple of the, the wines that you would think that they should try first? Like maybe they don't have experience with all 15 or 20 that you're doing. So just give us like a few, cause I know we've talked about today, we've talked about grace, qVE and sandpiper. Yeah. The duck.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:The duck.
Cliff Duvernois:But what would be some, like you would sit there and recommend and just say, hey, you know what? try this.
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:when we put together our six bottle, selection, what we're doing is we're selecting both wines that people know about or wines that are more popular, as well as new release wines. So we're suggesting a blend of options. Gotcha. Now what are we most known for? Sex is what we're most known for. That's actually half of our entire production. So that's the wine that most people will be, introduced to Mawby, through. But then we've got wines like Us. These are, these are, the big movers for us, US, Blanc, Sandpiper, Detroit, and Grace. And then outside of that, yeah, we're always trying to seasonally feature new things and excite, those wine club members or those thinking about joining the wine club, to pull the trigger and, and have access to those limited release products.
Cliff Duvernois:Certainly. And, Mike, If somebody's listening to this and they're thinking to themselves, man, I wanna know more about this. I wanna get bubbly delivered to my door, right?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:Yeah.
Cliff Duvernois:I wanna learn more about what it's you're doing. I wanna stop by the tasting room, whatever that might be. Yeah. What's the best way for them to start connecting?
Mike Laing, Mawby Sparkling:With so we spent, a lot of time and a lot of money developing our new website. Mawby, Mawby.Wine. Thank you. I appreciate that. So there's a lot of info there. And there's as much or as little as you want to, as you want to know about Mawby. It's easy to navigate. It's easy to get to where you want to go quickly. It's also easy to dig in and learn more. So Mawby Wine and, that's the best resource. you got information, you got, you got, a lot of detail on the product pages. There's some videos there. There's information about our vineyard practices, information about the wine club, and, information about events. So on and so forth. Mawby.Wine is by far the best. the best place.
Cliff Duvernois:Awesome. Mike, thank you so much for taking time outta your busy schedule to be with us. Great. Appreciate it. And for our audience, you can always roll on over to Total Michigan.com. Click on Mike's interview to learn more about the great bubblies that are coming your way from Mawby this year. We'll see you next week with another great episode of an ordinary Michigander doing some pretty extraordinary things. We'll see you then.
