Last week, the Leelanau Ticker kicked off a three-part series called “MAWBY Mondays,” which is exploring the 50-year history of Leelanau County’s longest-running winery. To celebrate the milestone anniversary, we sat own with numerous MAWBY leaders and came away with an expansive oral history of this trailblazing local business.

A week ago, Part 1 of this series explored the origins of MAWBY, the decision of founder and original winemaker Larry Mawby to focus specifically on making sparkling wine, and the inspiration behind MAWBY’s iconic sparkling rosé, Sex. For this week’s entry, we pick up in the early 2000s, when, following the pivot to an all-sparkling approach, MAWBY hit both a business growth spurt and one of the worst wine grape harvests in Leelanau wine history.

Larry Mawby: In 2003, we had an unfortunate winter situation that really decimated the crop in the area. And at that point, I was needing to increase my production of sparkling wine every year to keep up with the demand and build up inventory.

In addition to the grapes Mawby was growing in his own vineyards, the winemaker had also built alliances with other local and Michigan wineries to source the growing amount of fruit he needed to make MAWBY wine.

Mawby: After that winter, it quickly became very clear that some of the other vineyards [in the area] that I was getting grapes from at the time were not going to be able to give me anything close to what I needed. I had to do some soul searching, because my original notion in 1973 was that I was going grow grapes and make wine from a spot here in Leelanau County. By 2003, I was growing grapes here and making wine from here, but I was also buying grapes from around the county and from southwest Michigan as well. And it was clear in 2003 that, If I was going to make the amount of wine I needed, I had to go somewhere further afield to get the grapes. There just wasn't going to be the fruit available in the state.

I talked to some wineries in New York, in Oregon, and in California about the possibility of getting grapes for sparkling wine, and getting them to harvest grapes, press juice, and ferment wine [for us]. But it was also clear that none of the people I was talking to knew how to make sparkling wine.

I do not recall how I got in contact with Roederer Estate in California, but they, in my opinion were the best sparkling wine producer in the country at the time. So, I called them up to see if there was any possibility of them helping me out. And they told me that, every year, they made more wine than they intended to use. After they had made their blends, they always had extra wine that was their base material for sparkling wine, and I would be welcome to buy that wine if I wanted it. That began a many-years-long relationship working with Roederer.

Using base wine from California rather than from Michigan fruit meant that MAWBY’s new wines were going to taste different. Mawby used the inflection point to split his brand in two – and to expand into a new method of winemaking.

Mawby: I realized right away that these were going to be different-enough wines that I really should be making it clear to the consumer that they're not Leelanau County wines. And I also really wanted to do a different production method as well: I wanted to do tank-fermented wine instead of bottle-fermented, and we'd only been doing bottle-fermented wines up to that point. There were always some really good reasons to do tank fermentation, but you needed to get to a certain scale before you could do it, and I wasn’t quite there yet. With the Roederer relationship, I thought I could get there pretty quickly. And so, at the same time that we went out of state to source base wine, we also acquired tank fermentation pressure tanks to start that new program.

Editor’s note: Typically, tank-fermented sparkling wines are faster and easier to make than their bottle-fermented counterparts, and result in a fresher, fruitier, more aromatic end product. Bottle fermentation, the older “champagne-style” method of making sparkling wine, is more laborious and expensive, but has some benefits – namely, the finer and “less aggressive” texture of the bubbles themselves and the unique flavor notes (toastiness, nuttiness, yeastiness, etc.) that, because of how the wine is produced, will always be a bit different from one bottle to the next.

Mike Laing (current MAWBY owner): I started here in 2007, just when that tank-fermented program was starting to build up steam. Since I've been here, we've tripled in production, largely on the back of the tank-fermented program. It’s been really key to our growth as a winery.

Mawby: Because of my fundamental misunderstanding of the of the marketplace, I felt that it was important to have separate brands [for the different methods of winemaking]. So, we created M. Lawrence for tank-fermented sparkling wines, and L. Mawby for bottle-fermented sparkling wines, and we did that for how many years?

Laing: So 2003 is when you’re saying that started? It lasted until 2019, so 16 years.

Mawby: Yes, 16 years before we listened to the consuming public who said: ‘It’s MAWBY!’

The tank-fermented M. Lawrence brand included flagship wines like Sex, Green, and Detroit, while the bottle-fermented L. Mawby brand encompassed other winery favorites like Sandpiper, Grace, and Blanc de Blanc.

Mawby: We made the M. Lawrence brand intentionally a little less serious and a little more fun or playful. It was very much about wines for immediate consumption. It's not the kind of stuff that you want to stick in your cellar and keep for five years and watch it get better and better. It’s more of a ‘You can be enjoying these wines today’ situation.

Claire Lepine (MAWBY marketing manager): An example is Detroit being a sweet wine, which I love, because it’s maybe the opposite of what you’d think of with the name Detroit. It’s this very, floral, juicy, sweet, fun wine.

Humphreys: It was around 2008 when we first did Detroit [the wine], when Detroit [the city] was really struggling.

Mawby: The idea of Detroit was that the city was really hurting, and we wanted them to be able to celebrate something. And to celebrate something, they needed a wine to celebrate with. So we gave them the wine!

From a marketing perspective, having names like ‘Detroit’ which are relatable and easy to say and easy to remember, that’s important. It’s cool from the consumer perspective for them to be able to remember the name, and say the name, and then get what they want.

The M. Lawrence and L. Mawby brands remained separate for years, confusing customers both locally and abroad – especially as winery regulars took to referring to everything under the catchall brand name of 'MAWBY.' Eventually, the winery acquiesced to what customers had been saying for years.

Lepine: It was a situation where you would be at a consumer-facing tasting event, and you’d hold up a bottle of wine and say, ‘This is the L. Mawby Crémant; Are you familiar with L. Mawby?’ And people would say ‘No, I have no idea what that is.’ But then you would start talking to them, and you’d say, ‘Well, we also make a wine called Sex,’ and they’d immediately be like, ‘Oh, well I know what that is!’

And so, we knew for a long time that we did not have cohesive, complete brand recognition. People maybe knew Detroit, or Sex, or Blanc de Noir, but they didn't know that those wines were all coming from this little peninsula in northern Michigan. And then in a retail space, our wines wouldn't always even be next to each other on shelves. We figured that, if we had this portfolio of wines all under the name of MAWBY, we could get a little more real estate on shelves for that. So it was 2019 when that merge happened, and then it was a process of streamlining everything so it all looked comparable.

Laing: We did some consumer research, and we asked our customers how they thought of the brand. And the resounding opinion was that Sex was a MAWBY wine; Blanc de Blanc was a MAWBY wine; it was all just MAWBY, not M. Lawrence or L. Mawby. We ultimately figured that if ‘MAWBY’ was how customers thought of us, we should embrace that.

To be concluded...