This week, the Leelanau Ticker wraps its three-part oral history series on MAWBY, the longest-running winery in Leelanau County. Part 1 of this series explored the origins of the winery and the booming popularity of its flagship wine, Sex. Part 2 looked at the expansion and evolution of MAWBY and its brands throughout the years. Below, the final installment looks at how MAWBY helped usher in a golden age of Leelanau wine, and how founder Larry Mawby eventually handed off the reins of the business to a new generation of owners.

Flournoy Humphreys (longtime MAWBY tasting room employee): I'm not from Michigan. I moved here in 2000. So, the first time I set foot on this property was to apply for a job in the tasting room in 2006. But the evolution of Leelanau wineries is something I watched happen. I think every one of them came through the door of MAWBY at some point, seeking out [Larry] – or at least a lot of them did.

April Stuck (longtime MAWBY tasting room employee): There were definitely a lot of winemakers and wine growers from other wineries that were coming into the tasting room.

Humphreys: They’d come in and say, ‘Do you think Mr. Mawby would talk to me?’ And the response was always, ‘Absolutely.’ So that’s kind of how I viewed the growth of Leelanau wineries: Larry and Bernie Rink [of Boskydel Vineyard] helping to mentor people.

Larry Mawby (MAWBY founder and namesake): it was always very collegial. I can't speak for the current situation [of Leelanau wine], because I haven't really been connected in the last two or three years, to any extent. But grape growers are at heart farmers, and farmers recognize that the farmer down the street is not their competition. The ‘competition’ is the environment, and so they work together very often. Winemakers, by and large are the same way. Winery owners? Not necessarily. But especially at the beginning, when everybody was a grape grower, winemaker, and a winery owner all at once, the collegiality was foremost, and there was a lot of sharing of information.

As the number of wineries on Leelanau Peninsula reached from five to more than 20 now, inevitably, some of that collegiality diminished. Because you just can't really have a bigger group where everybody gets along. We didn't necessarily all get along when there were five of us, but it felt more like a family, where you’d tolerate your siblings’ foibles. Bernie Rink, for instance, didn't like sparkling wine and he thought I was making a horrible mistake and ruining good wine!

Claire Lepine (MAWBY marketing manager): I interned with the Michigan Grape and Wine Council in the early 2000s. Which is no longer around. Now, it's called the Michigan Wine Collaborative. But one of my jobs was to file and keep track of any mentions of Michigan wine in any sort of press. And I will never forget, one day I was looking at the Chicago Sun Times, and there was literally one sentence in the Sun Times about Michigan wine. I cut it out, and I showed it to [my bosses], and I was like, ‘Oh, look at this ink we got!’ The mention was really just an acknowledgement of, ‘Hey, they're making wine in Michigan!’ But we all felt like we’d hit the big time [by getting that coverage]. That was 20 years ago, and the wine industry here was still just so young.

Mawby: In the ‘90s into the early 2000s, research about the consumers of Michigan wines indicated that the average age was 55 or over, they were middle-income folks, and they were regular wine consumers. I think that's not the case today. I can't speak for Michigan, but I think that interest in MAWBY and interest in wines from this region is much broader than that now. And that is incredibly good. I think it’s the reason that this region is becoming more and more talked about outside the region, because as that base of people who experience the wines and enjoy the wines and talk about the wines increases, it just feeds on itself.

Mike Laing (current MAWBY owner): We've seen over 13,000 people already this year [in the tasting room], so it’s definitely grown a lot.

Mawby: We wouldn't have had 13,000 people at a tasting room across two years in the mid-90s…

Stuck: Bachelorette parties [now a significant source of traffic for local wineries] weren’t even a thing when I started in 2005.

Humphreys: When I started off, I worked alone. There was one person working the tasting room all the time, and you were never stressed or pressured. And I was always, generally speaking, the youngest person in the room. And I was already 50 years old at that point!

Lepine: I think the average age now is 35-45.

Mawby: The average age is definitely much lower. And the customer base is much more geographically broad. 25 years ago, the expectation was that if somebody walked into the tasting room, they lived in Michigan or they were up here from Chicago. Maybe they lived in Indianapolis or Columbus. But the idea that there would be somebody from the east coast or the west coast here? No way.

Laing: The airport and Traverse City Tourism has helped. There’s a lot of dollars on billboards [promoting northern Michigan wine].

The growth of northern Michigan wine – and the growth of MAWBY – meant busier workloads for everyone. By the late 2000s, Larry Mawby was feeling the strain of running the business and knew he either needed to sell or find a partner. That search eventually led to the arrival of the Laing family, who now own and steward the winery.

Laing: I came to MAWBY in 2007. I was a math teacher, and my parents moved here, planted grape vines, had a relationship with Larry, and were selling their fruit to Larry starting in ’05. I came back from teaching overseas and got a job here and at Bel Lago Winery. That was in the summer.

Later that summer, Larry wanted me full time here. I came over here for my first harvest. 2007 was a good year, as far as grape growing was concerned, but it was hard for me, in a sense, because I didn't know what I was doing. I had no clue about winemaking. I'd worked with my parents in their vineyards a little bit in the summertime, because I was a teacher and had summers off. But I still really didn't know much at all about wine. I didn't even drink a lot of wine. I was mostly a beer drinker.

Learning how to make wine from Larry was hard work, but it was fun. And then my brother [Peter] came on board, and working with him has been great. We have kind of complementary skill sets. He's a lot more analytical and logical. My side of the coin is that I really understand what Larry has made happen with this brand, and how to continue communicating that and driving it forward.

Larry was doing everything when I started. I don’t know many hours a week he was working then…

Mawby: I can’t count that high.

Laing: …But I would say it was probably not a sustainable level.

Mawby: That’s absolutely true. The Laings bought in back in 2008 or 2009, and at that point, it was pretty clear to me that what was going on here was not sustainable. I saw that the growth potential for the winery was something I couldn't handle by myself.

Mike’s dad, Stu – who is a great grower – had retired from a business that he had operated in southeastern Michigan, and I knew him and thought of him as a financially savvy guy. So I asked him if he would help me evaluate the business, with the idea that maybe I should sell off half the business. I thought that maybe I should sell off the M. Lawrence part of the business, because that's where all this growth was, and let somebody take that and go with it. And then I would take the bottle-fermented piece [the L. Mawby part of the brand] and it'd be a small thing I could manage.

Stu said, ‘Sure, I'd be happy to look at that for you, but I might be interested in buying it.’ He eventually came back to me and said, ‘You shouldn't really split the business, but I will buy half of it.’ So now I had a partner, who brought with him the ability to do some of the things I couldn't do. And then, in Mike and Pete, Stu also had two boys who were interested in the business. So that partnership was also a way to build in a next generation [of ownership].

The Laing brothers also started a new piece of the MAWBY puzzle: bigLITTLE, a smaller winery and tasting room that sits on the same property as the MAWBY tasting room.

Laing: Larry was super generous to let use his old house and winemaking space for our tasting room. We worked on it in the winter of 2012 and opened in ‘13. The brand is our stamp on northern Michigan wines, and on styles that we think are reproducible and do well here. It’s a nostalgic brand. All the wines are named after childhood memories of ours, and it's a big brother and a little brother collaboration. It’s been fun, but it's taken a backseat to MAWBY over the years, truthfully, because MAWBY just takes a lot of work and is 15 times the size. So, I don't know what the future of bigLITTLE is. I don't know if it moves to a different location, and then that tasting room maybe becomes an exclusive wind club space [for MAWBY]. Who knows? But right now, we like poaching MAWBY traffic!

Mawby himself phased out of the day-to-day operations at MAWBY several years ago. Now, with MAWBY spending 2023 celebrating the 50th anniversary in a wide variety of ways, the Laings and their team are looking down the road at what comes next.

Laing: Right now, we're trying to figure out where we go next. Obviously, that’s always a question. But for years, we had Larry, who was really forward-thinking. In my family, I guess I’m the most like that, but I’m still not quite to the level of Larry. So, we need a little bit of help, and we’re going to hire a third-party consultant to figure out where that focus should be and what that direction is.

Lepine: I think there's just this prevailing sense of stewardship. We all recognize what Larry started and what he's created here, and we want to find the best route for that and the best place for all of this to shine. Maybe that means we pursue a situation where MAWBY is distributed in all 50 states. Or maybe it's something smaller. Or maybe it's something in between. I think that’s what we’re trying to figure out now.

Pictured: Mike and Peter Laing, the new generation of MAWBY.