Nathaniel Rose’s embrace of winemaking’s ancient methods isn’t the fastest way to financial wealth, but the 35-year-old — and his steadily growing legion of fans — judge success another way: by the riches biding their time inside his bottles.

There is a paradox that confronts you when you turn into the dirt driveway of Nathaniel Rose Wines, north of Suttons Bay. Rose, who grew up in Leland and three years ago won a double gold at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition for a five-year-old red, has a degree in biochemistry from Western Michigan University. He also has a budding reputation as one of the hottest winemakers on the peninsula, one whose wines can fetch $150 for a single bottle.

Yet as you pull up to the office-like tasting room (now closed due to the pandemic; tastings now occur outside and 20 feet apart because, as Rose says, “the whole loss of sense of smell and taste would be kind of career-ending for me), you’re greeted not with the polish and indications of wealth that characterize most of the wineries on Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas, but with a ramshackle barn, winemaking equipment spilling out into the parking lot, and, at the edge of a tree line, an old motor home and a couple of weathered boats on trailers.

Rose has accomplished a lot, but to do so, he’s also sacrificed a lot. First off: that old motor home … actually, an Airstream, one of the few models with its own engine and sporting square corners rather than elegant, sleek curves. That motor home is where Rose lives. His winemaking story started right after high school, at age 18. He became interested in fermentation, and after he and his mom made a batch of mead, that interest quickly grew into an obsession. He branched into beer and wine and elected to study fermentation in college, thinking one day he’d go into brewing beer professionally.

“At that point, I had made many batches of beer, many batches of mead. You know, these were all five-gallon, home-brew-sized batches,” Rose says. “In 2005, I climbed up the front of the dunes and picked a bunch of wild grapes that were freakishly underripe. But that was actually good for adding the acidity mead needed. And so, I made pyment, which is a blend of honey and grapes, which has kind of been a staple for me ever since.”

While in college, he returned to Leelanau each summer, and got job at a local winery’s tasting room. In 2006, a stroke of luck: While at the Dune Grass Festival, in Empire, Rose met a guy who owned a bio-dynamic vineyard in southwest Michigan. Rose transferred from Central Michigan University to Western Michigan University so that he could work at the guy’s vineyard during the school year. Soon, he added on other gigs at wineries around southwest Michigan. The next year, with the money he’d saved working at other people’s vineyards, Rose bought some grapes of his own. His first commercial test vintage from those grapes, he said, turned out much better than he had expected.

Rose likes to make reds, and in the process of learning how to do that in Leelanau, a region traditionally known for whites, he discovered that the climate is ideal for making European-style red wine, provided it’s allowed to age properly.

“If you let the fruit hang until ripeness, which we can achieve most years up here, if you let the fruit hang long enough, because we’re buffered by the lake and don’t really frost until November, you get ripeness,” Rose says. “I think one of the problems a lot of the times is that people were concerned that they would lose the fruit and were picking it earlier and not achieving that ripeness.”

Aging the wine properly before bringing it to market is another challenge, especially for a fledgling winery operating on a lean budget. To store the wine for five to 10 years means it must be held under certain conditions and tended to regularly. All that time and effort costs money. And that’s reflected in the cost of a bottle of Nathaniel Rose Wines, many of which cost around $30 or $40 or $50 a bottle — and some, like his 2012 Left Bank, a blend of Cab Sauvignon, Merlot and Cab Franc, $150 for a bottle.

Read more on Rose's classical winemaking methods — and the unlikely story of how he became one of the youngest winery owners in the region — in this week’s Northern Express, available to read online, in Northern Express’s digital edition, or at newsstand locations in 14 counties across northern Michigan. The Northern Express is also now available for yearly subscriptions (50 issues) mailed directly to your door.