About
Juniper Hill is forty acres on the east side of the Leelanau Peninsula, a mile and a half up a gravel road from Suttons Bay. The Bakker family farmed cherries and apples here for three generations. We've farmed vines and sheep here since 2009. The junipers were here before any of us.
Looking north-east from the top of the lane, early October
The land
The peninsula is a ridge of gravel and clay the last glacier left behind, and Juniper Hill is one of its steeper knobs. The top is a thin layer of loam over fractured shale and gravel, so dry in August that the vines send roots down twenty feet to find water. The slope faces south-east, which means morning sun, afternoon shade and the long, cool ripening season that Riesling and Pinot Blanc need.
Grand Traverse Bay does the rest. It holds its warmth into November, pushing frost back by two or three weeks, and in winter it keeps the hill from the worst of the cold. The 45th parallel runs through the lower pasture; we put a bench on it.
We have 19 acres of vines in four blocks, 16 acres of pasture in rotation, two acres of the original orchard, and the rest is woodlot, the cave bank and the farmstead. No herbicides since 2016, no synthetic fertiliser since 2019, and the sheep graze the vine rows after harvest to clean them up and give something back.
The people
Winemaker & co-owner
Grew up on a dairy outside Decorah, Iowa, studied enology at Geisenheim, and made wine in the Mosel and the Finger Lakes before she and Jonas bought the hill in 2008. She planted the first Riesling by hand in the spring of 2009 and has pruned every vine on the farm at least once. Still does the Blaufränkisch herself.
Vineyard manager, shepherd & co-owner
Runs the vineyard crew, the tractor, the fences, the lambing barn and the wholesale deliveries, usually in that order on a given day. Brought the first twenty ewes home in a horse trailer in 2013 because the lower forty was too wet for vines and too good to leave empty. Builds the dry-stone walls in winter.
Cheesemaker & affineur
Trained at a cave-aging creamery in Vermont and at a sheep dairy in the Basque Pyrenees before joining in 2016 to build the creamery and the cave. Makes every wheel and turns every one of them by hand. Her desert-island cheese is the Juniper Ash, and she will tell you why.
Tasting room & events
Runs the bar, the terrace, the reservations and every private event on the hill. Formerly front-of-house at two restaurants in Traverse City. If you've emailed us, you've probably met Dana.
Vineyard, creamery & flock
Sam, Priya and Luis in the vineyard; Ana in the creamery; Ben with the flock and the morning milking. Harvest brings thirteen more, most of whom have come back every October for years. Everyone here is paid year-round and eats lunch together on Fridays.
Border collies
Move the flock between paddocks twice a day and consider themselves the reason the farm works. Pip is nine and dignified. Wren is two and is not. Neither is allowed in the tasting room, which they regard as an error.
The sheep
The flock is mostly East Friesian, the big, calm, high-yielding Dutch dairy breed, crossed with Lacaune from the Roquefort country for richer milk and tougher feet. Each ewe gives us about a gallon a day at peak, from late March to the end of October, and we milk twice a day in a twelve-stand parlour next to the creamery.
They lamb in March in the old cherry barn, graze a rotation of sixteen paddocks through the summer, follow the harvest crews through the vineyard in October, and spend winter on hay in the barn with the doors open. Lambs stay with their mothers for a month before weaning. The rams, Olav and Bram, live separately and are not on tour.
We sell a small amount of lamb each autumn to club members and to two restaurants, and the wool goes to a mill in Frankenmuth and comes back as blankets you can buy in the tasting room.
How we got here