June 2, 2024 Lunch - Whitefish and cream cheese shmear on bagel with avocado and lettuce at Vine N Berry Vineyard. Dinner - Walleye Fish and Sweet Potato Chips with Steamed Sugar Snap Peas and Asparagus

June 2, 2024 Lunch - Whitefish and cream cheese shmear on bagel with avocado and lettuce at Vine N Berry Vineyard.  Dinner - Walleye Fish and Sweet Potato Chips with Steamed Sugar Snap Peas and Asparagus 

We discovered last night that out cottage lacked a few basics. Although it had a coffee maker and paper filters, it lacked coffee and sugar. So when we woke up and dressed, we drove north to Port Sanilac to Sanilac Coffee for coffee. Suzette ordered a coffee with steamed milk and I ordered a latte, an espresso with steamed milk and milk foam.

We decided to split a blueberry muffin that the barista warmed for us in a microwave. That was our breakfast.

We read a local tourist magazine that informed us of a Petroglyphs Park nearby and several wineries on the upper thumb. We returned the five miles to the cottage in drizzling weather to put on sturdier shoes and when we returned, heard the pounding of the backhoe, so we knew a road trip was the ideal choice for today.

We drove past Sanilac to Deckerville Rd. and drove inland to Sanilac Petroglyphs State Park and hiked 1/4 mile to a shed covering an outcropping of sandstone with a light covering of green moss into which a large number of petroglyphs had been carved 600 to 1500 years ago. There was an interpreter who described the petroglyphs and showed us that the rock lay only a few feet from the Cass River where many archeological sites had been excavated, some dating back 8,000 years. She stated that the carved rock was a ceremonial site.  

https://www.michigan.gov/mhc/museums/sanilac

We then turned our attention to wine and drove to the Backyard Winery where we met Barb Murray, the Proprietress. Already drinking was a couple from Traverse City.  We bought a flight of five wine tastings and Barb added a taste of their Dry Strawberry-Rhubaeb wine. All the wines were fruit wines made in low quantities of only about a dozen gallons each.

It turned out that Barb was an avid crafter who before she turned to making wine had raised sheep for their wool and still had enough wool to knit mittens and a very interesting cover for a bar of soap. 

Suzette bought mittens, wool covered soaps, and pot holders for Christmas gifts and we bought a bottle of what I considered her best wine, a semi-sweet cherry-pear wine made with cherries and pears grown on the property. 

We then drove to Vine N Berry Vineyard where the grown daughter of the winemaker poured us a flight of wines. As best I can tell the winemaking strategy at Vine N Wine is to add vegetables and fruits in the fermentation phase to flavor the wine. 

We arrived at Vine N Berry Vineyard at 1:00 and the first wine we tasted was Tomato that was a medium dry white wine, probably Riesling, with a mildly infused tomato taste.  We liked it a lot, so I told the daughter who was pouring after we tasted the carrot wine, if we could have another taste of it and have lunch at one of the tables in the tasting room. The protocol is 5 tastes for $5 to $10.

When she said, “Sure.” I fetched the whitefish bagels from the car and Suzette ordered a glass of plum wine for our fourth taste.

Suzette loved the sweet plum wine, especially when the daughter told us it was made with the small white Japanese plums with a red dot. It was the best plum wine I had ever tasted and we immediately decided to buy a bottle of it and a bottle of the earthy tomato wine. The tomato wine complemented the dense chewy bagel.

The two wineries we visited were small production wineries producing in 10 and 20 gallon fermenters, not the huge wineries we are familiar with in California or Europe that ferment over 1,000,000 gallons a year in a hundred 1500 liter steel fermenters.

The difference is similar to the difference between mass produced and hand made.

When you find beautifully hand made wines, such as these, they are very special.

We then drove to the fish market in Bay City and bought a walleye pike filet for dinner and stopped at the local Mejier mega store and bought flour coffee, a squeeze jar of tartar sauce and sweet potatoes to make fish and chips and drove home.

We rested a few minutes and then started dinner; fried fish and sweet potato chips with steamed sugar snap peas and asparagus, another incredibly fresh, healthy dinner.

I cut the walleye filet into four pieces that Suzette then soaked in milk.

I then de-stemmed the sugar snap peas and snapped the ends off the asparagus and cut them in half to reduce each stalk to a length of three inches from 6 inches.

Suzette then battered each filet in flour, egg, and flour again to develop a light crust and then fried the battered fish in olive oil, blanched the vegetables, and sautéed the Eastern White sweet potato wedges which she had cut the two potatoes.

I opened and poured glasses of the tomato wine we had bought at Vine N Berry Vineyard in the afternoon and ate a lovely dinner of finger food.

After dinner we went outside and started a fire in the fire pit and returned to the cabin and went to bed around 9:30. The magic fire starter was a paper towel that had been used to clean the pan that been filled with olive oil to fry the fish. 

The tomato wine went well with the dinner and the walleye was a thin flaked creamy textured fish that reminded us of haddock that is often used for fried fish in Maine.

Bon Appetit