Logan Square’s Middle Brow Beer is now a winery, naturally

Aug 29, 2023

Middle Brow's Pizza Wine has the dark ruby-red color of a Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, like something you’d want to drink with a thick porterhouse: jammy, tannic, boozy.

With that on your mind, your first sip might come as a surprise. Sure enough, it has a rounded, full body, but it's simultaneously ethereal, with a bit of fizz. At around 11.5 percent alcohol it's not particularly boozy, and there's not a hint of tannic astringency because, despite its color, the juice had practically no skin contact when the grapes were pressed.

It tastes like something you could drink all day. It's fruity and light, and you might need to resist the temptation to gulp it all down before one of those toasty, sourdough Middle Brow pizzas even hits the table.

What it really tastes like is a Lambrusco—a quintessential pizza pairing—but it's made with none of the old-world grapes that make up that northern Italian wine. In fact, it's a fermented blend of juice pressed from three hybrid grape varietals grown right here in the midwest—on farms near Traverse City and Saugatuck, Michigan.

Pizza Wine is one of some nine new wines Middle Brow partners Pete Ternes, Bryan Grohnke, and Polly Nevins will release this year, now that they’re officially licensed to make, sell, and distribute it from Bungalow by Middle Brow Beers. Last September, Ternes and Grohnke appended the word "Wines" to the brewery's name, when they’d hit the point of no return in the midst of a three-year application process that required them to switch their brewpub license to a brewery manufacturing license, and acquire three separate permits from the state Liquor Control Commission to make and sell wine.

Along with brewer Ed Brady, they started experimenting with what the wine world amorphously labels "natural wine" in early 2019, not long after they abandoned their original goal of setting up permanent residence on a self-sustaining farm, instead opening Bungalow in a former camera shop in Logan Square.

Before that they’d spent more than seven years as nomadic contract brewers, making uncommon, experimental, and iconoclastic beers in reaction to the bitter, hoppy hegemony of the IPA-dominated craft beer world.

"We loved wild beer," says Ternes. "We wanted to let yeast do its thing and accidentally make cool beers because we were bored of IPAs and red ales. We were trying to accidentally make a cool tasting beer, and then backtrack and figure out what we did to make it again."

By the time they finally settled down and began building out Bungalow in 2018, their beer didn't seem so weird anymore, particularly after they’d got a taste of the natural wines that were then peaking as an insurgent trend within U.S. viniculture.

"Natural wine" in the modern sense is a poorly defined concept, but it's nothing new. People have been making wine with nothing but indigenous yeast and grape juice for thousands of years. A more illustrative term is low-intervention wine, ideally using grapes farmed with no pesticides and herbicides. Within the cellar it's simply about allowing yeast and juice to ferment into wine, eschewing the myriad manipulative techniques and additives that humans have employed over the centuries to produce consistent, predictable wines.

It's also often a roll of the dice. It can yield spectacularly unpalatable results or extraordinarily delicious, unexpected, and often funky ones—not unlike some of the wild and weirdly fermented beers that Middle Brow brewed.

"When we tasted our first natural wines, we were just blown away," says Ternes. "We were putting our noses into a glass of wine and smelling some of the lacto funk and barny fruit you’d get in a beer. You’d have a really full-bodied wine that was light as hell. You could drink three glasses of it and it didn't feel like anything. These were wines that were super fruit-forward and acidic and alive and fun.

"It made us think, ‘Can we make an accidentally cool wine?’ Can we get chardonnay, and make something that didn't taste like other chardonnays? Something that highlighted some other elements of the chardonnay grape?"

A handful of low-intervention wines from other winemakers have always been on the menu at Bungalow, but Ternes and Grohnke's first foray into making their own resulted in not a wine, but a beer. In 2019, just ahead of the third annual Third Coast Soif, the local festival celebrating low-intervention wine, beer, and cider, the partners got ahold of some rosé from Sonoma County winemaker Evan Lewandowski, which they blended with their own Belgian-farmhouse-style grisette Miner. They sold most of it at the festival but didn't think it was a successful experiment at the time, since they noticed that some of the leftover began to lose its luster over time.

But still, the contacts they forged with other natural winemakers were encouraging. "We said, ‘Let's get involved in a harvest and pick the grapes and try to make some blends,’" says Ternes. "That's when we started learning, and decided to start experimenting with the view to learn how to make wine at some point."

They spent three days picking and pressing grapes with Sebastopol, California, winemaker Martha Stoumen during the 2019 harvest. They brought back about 300 gallons of unfermented Negroamaro grape juice and attempted another beer blend. This time they used a freshly brewed, unfermented pilsen-style wort, and instead of pitching brewer's yeast, allowed the indigenous yeast from the grape juice to kick-start fermentation. It was a fruit bomb at first, but it gradually separated "like oil and water," and eventually developed a dry champagne-like character.

They had more success positioning buckets of the raw juice in different levels of the brewery, allowing them to ferment at different temperatures, just to see what would happen. "We let it get way too hot on purpose," says Grohnke. "We just wanted to let it free rise, not touch it, and see what would happen." Some of the resulting wines were undrinkable, but a few were good enough to bottle and drink on their own.

The next year they’d ordered 300 gallons of cabernet rosé from Richmond, California, winemaker Les Lunes and learned a hard lesson. Because they were using some of their brewing tanks to ferment, they didn't have a tight control over oxygen permeating into the juice, and it developed the mysterious and dreaded mousiness, a flaw common in natural wines that results in a repellent off taste that can't be detected on the nose. Still they held onto some of it, and after time the problem mitigated itself in the bottle, and it eventually became drinkable. "We’ll likely sell it this year, in a shocking twist to us," says Ternes. "You look at all the variables on either side of fermentation. Like what happened with the mousiness? Well, it could have been these five or seven things. So now the next year, let's try and change those five to seven things."

The partners engaged in these experiments quietly, increasing the amount of juice they’d shipped from California with each harvest, scaling up from buckets to tanks, and playing with time and temperature. "The first two years were bad," says Grohnke. "A lot of wine was going down the drain. But it was still valuable to us. It was a learning lesson. We were just having fun while figuring out how to do this. We went into it almost expecting to throw some wine down the drain, or maybe let it turn into vinegar for the kitchen."

"They were just small quantities we’d mess around with," says Ternes. "We tinkered with it and tasted it as it became wine, and the next year we tried a different varietal, and we kept doing that. Lessons in wine are yearlong lessons. You can't just do it again the next week or the next month. You gotta wait a year. So we thought, ‘Let's start tinkering and learn the lessons now. We know this is going to take us half or more of a decade before we’re doing it well. We’ll try it now and learn those hard lessons early.’"

As the pandemic eased they spent a few days of the 2021 harvest in Mendocino, California, with winemakers Shaunt Oungoulian and Diego Roig of Populis and Les Lunes and brought back 600 gallons of juice from zinfandel rosé and chardonnay grapes.

But ever since they made a wine-forward beer with a hybrid white varietal called Frontenac gris, sourced from Illinois Sparkling Company in downstate North Utica, they’d been thinking about what they might do with grapes grown closer to home. "That kind of inspired us to start digging into Michigan a lot more," says Ternes. "Learning about what generally grows well in Michigan, in those soils at that latitude and with that climate. If we were going to become a winery, we wanted to do it with fruit that surrounded us."

It's only in the last half decade or so that midwestern wine has begun to shed its rep as overly sweet swill pressed in service to a captive Lake Michigan tourist economy. "Everything tastes good on vacation," says Andy Pates, cofounder of Chicago distributor Cream Wines & Spirits. "But when you come back home, the wine also has to taste good."

Cream has championed what Pates calls the "Michigan Wine Movement," collecting five wineries in its portfolio making high-quality "wines of place," on the Mitten. "Smaller producers from Michigan are making wines that you can put into a blind tasting or travel to other parts of the country with and say, ‘This is a wine from my region,’ and it certainly stands up," he says. These range from the "grandfather of the movement," James Lester of Pullman's Wyncroft Wine, who makes classical wines from old-world varietals like chardonnay, pinot noir, and Blaufränkisch, to Andrew Backlin of Fennville's Modales, a low-intervention producer who makes a red blend that includes a hybrid red varietal called Marquette, introduced by the University of Minnesota in 2006.

Hybrid varietals like this are distinct from the old-world vitis vinifera grapes that produce the majority of wine drunk around the world. In some ways they’re more suited for farming in the midwest than familiar varietals like Riesling and chardonnay. They’re cold-hardy, and pest and disease resistant, and they thrive in the midwest with fewer inputs. Plus they offer winemakers a whole new palette to explore. "A lot of people are shocked by how different they are," says Ternes. "If you aren't so hung up on your tongue's definition of wine, these are really good wines."

Since the 2019 harvest Middle Brow has made wine with chardonnay, pinot noir, and Gewürztraminer from Michigan, but also with lesser-known hybrids like Vignoles and Chambourcin. Pizza Wine is a blend of Marechal Foch, Frontenac, and Noiret grapes.

When they started hitting their stride, Ternes and Grohnke would occasionally break out an experimental bottle for friends and regulars at Bungalow. "We’d just pour a little into a glass, let them drink it, and watch," says Ternes. "Their eyes would light up, and they would ask for more." Without proper licensing, they couldn't legally sell it or advertise it, but word got around, and people started asking for it.

"That's when we confirmed that we weren't crazy," he says. "‘This is good. Let's get this thing permitted and do it.’"

Bungalow by Middle Brow Beers and Wines2840 W. Armitage773-687-9076middlebrowbeer.com@middle_brow_beers_and_wines

Last week Middle Brow's licensing was finalized, and on Friday they hooked up a keg of a lightly oaked chardonnay to their draft system and started pouring. This week they’ll introduce Pizza Wine and a honeyed Gewürztraminer called Pollen by the glass, can, and bottle. They’ll follow those up with Cook Out, a sparkling California zinfandel rosé, and a sparkling chardonnay called Float in cans.

All told they’re sitting on about 600 cases and some 50 kegs of wine, enough to last the rest of the year. By then they’ll be fermenting juice from the 2023 harvest, for which they’ve contracted with farmers for about 5,000-6,000 gallons, up from 2,000 last year.

Greater volume will allow more control over the juice they’re buying. Ternes says that while most of the farmers they’re buying grapes from are skeptical of organic or biodynamic farming practices, he hopes that as Middle Brow negotiates larger contracts for juice, they can be convinced to stop spraying portions of their vineyards.

Ternes and Grohnke are also looking forward to playing with extended maceration, which increases skin and seed contact with the juice, allowing for greater color, flavor, and tannin structure.

Working with wine has also reawakened an early dream for the partners. They’ve been aggressively seeking out property in Michigan to open another pizzeria and winery, along with a custom crush facility that would allow fledgling producers to juice their own grapes and make their own wine.

Ultimately Ternes and Grohnke will become farmers, and Middle Brow a vineyard. "The learning process is only just beginning," says Ternes. "There's a self-sufficiency in that that feels satisfying to whatever caveman is in my soul. The dream behind the brewery was beer but also a winery and orchard and all the dairy we wanted to utilize for our pizza."

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