It started off almost as a novelty: A seasonal spiced wine inspired by Halloween that would sell for a couple months each year and account for maybe 1 percent of Leelanau Cellars’ total annual sales.

Three decades later, the Witches Brew series is Leelanau Cellars’ workhorse – a flagship wine that ships to 41 different states and moves approximately 80,000 cases in a single year. Starting this fall, Witches Brew will be on the shelves of every wine-selling Target and Trader Joes location in the United States.

In the midst of that expansion, which Leelanau Cellars calls its biggest distribution uptick in two decades, the Leelanau Ticker sat down with winery president Bob Jacobson to learn how this holiday specialty wine became one of Leelanau County’s biggest exports.

“Midwest wineries have always made spiced wine – and we have at Leelanau Cellars since the 1970s,” Jacobson says. “But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that I thought doing a Halloween version of it would be a cute way to sell a few more cases of wine. Back then, we were probably approaching about 30,000 cases of wine [per year] in total volume, as a winery.”

Witches Brew, today, is more or less the same as it was back then: a mulled red wine blend spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger. In that first season, though, Jacobson had modest expectations for the wine, only making about 300 cases of it.

It wasn’t enough.

“It was an immediate hit,” Jacobson says of Witches Brew. “We jumped to 1,000 cases in the second year, and the wine just kept growing and growing in popularity every year after that. Halloween is the second largest adult spending holiday after Christmas, which I don't think I fully appreciated at the time.”

Leelanau Cellars came to appreciate the Halloween factor over time, though, as did major retailers that saw the success of Witches Brew and wanted a piece of the action.

“We’ve been able to grow this wine thanks to the strength of what we built here in the Midwest,” Jacobson says. “During the months of September and October, Witches Brew is the top-selling wine in the Great Lakes region. That happened thanks to a lot of Meijer and Kroger support, along with a lot of the independents. We’re in a lot of gas stations and convenience stores, and Spartan stores. We really have a lot of support throughout this region, and we’ve worked to nourish that.”

All that success in the Midwest allowed Leelanau Cellars to bend the ear of Trader Joe’s, which Jacobson says was really the start of Witches Brew evolving from regional wine to national wine.

“A few years ago, Trader Joe’s took us out to Washington and Oregon and a few other states for the first time,” Jacobson tells The Ticker. “By last year, we were in about half of the Trader Joe’s stores in the country. This year, after a few years of effort, we were also able to get Target to put Witches Brew into their 952 stores that have wine licenses. Trader Joe’s is also taking it nationally this fall, and the World Market chain is doing the same. It’s really been a multi-year effort on our part to grow this thing.”

Before this fall, Witches Brew was available on store shelves in 34 states. This year, the number is up to 41.

As distribution has grown, so has production. Jacobson estimates Leelanau Cellars will ship “somewhere north of 80,000 cases” of Witches Brew this year. That number includes the original spiced red wine blend, as well as pair of flavored variants – pumpkin spice and spiced apple – that the winery rolled out in 2021. For perspective, Jacobson says total annual sales for Leelanau Cellars “hover around 300,000 cases per year,” which means the wine once intended to account for 1 percent of the winery’s bottom line now represents more than a quarter of the output.

While Jacobson never expected his Halloween-themed wine to become such a hit, he’s extremely grateful for the stability that Witches Brew has brought to his family’s business.

“The wine marketplace is very tough right now, with a lot of headwinds,” Jacobson says. “We’ve probably suffered a few other losses in total sales [as Witches Brew] has grown. But this wine just keeps growing, and it’s such a good calling card for us. It’s allowed us to break into all these new markets, which then causes more people to look at us and our wines.”

With Leelanau Cellars celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, the question seems obvious: Could Witches Brew eventually make it to all 50 states?

“We want make sure not to overstep our safety zone,” Jacobson says. “The biggest goal for now is to be good partners to both our distributors and our retailers. But we do have some goals for some new chains next year, and we do think we can support more growth. We could double the production of that wine if we needed to. I don’t think we’re going to double it in a year, but we’ve invested very heavily in infrastructure which gives us a lot of capacities that are relatively unique to the area, and that allows us to go forth and target new markets.”