Glen Arbor Wines — How Did I Dare?!
When I opened Glen Arbor Wines on July 1, 2017, I wrote a blog about how it all came to be. In delicate prose, I described how my childhood — my first-grade year in Paris and every summer spent in Glen Arbor — nurtured in me a love of a lifestyle built around wine, and of the way grapes flourish in fine terroir. Read: France and Glen Arbor.
And that is all true.
But there was much more.
Here goes.
The night before I opened in 2017, I invited 40 friends and family members to a private opening. Their genuine support was matched by their curiosity — with, understandably, a healthy dose of skepticism — about how I was faring with my audacious plan to put a wine bar on the first floor of my house.
None of them knew how close I was to losing my property. Monetizing it was the only way I could think of to save it. As I’d learned the hard way — long story for another time — once you give up Glen Arbor property, you never get it back.
Nevertheless, there was no doubt: if I went down, I was going down in a flame of gossip and tsk-tsk.
The truth was probably worse than most of them imagined. I was swamped in debt, wrung dry from the stress of trying to keep my job as an editor at Traverse Magazine — now Northern Michigan Magazine — while juggling permit applications, inspections, subcontractors, contractors, and local officials, some of whom seemed far more willing to trust a downstate developer than a local divorcee with an audacious idea.
All of this while caring for my aging mother.
And while I had certainly consumed plenty of wine, I had never served it. To top it off, I couldn’t figure out how to work my brand-spanking-new commercial Hobart dishwasher — the one I had paid far more than a pretty penny for.
My three adult children were, shall we say, appalled.
I’m pretty sure my daughter Chase, in Arizona, was squeezing her eyes shut with her fingers in her ears. When my other daughter, Cassidy, walked in just minutes before the guests arrived, I was still in a dirty T-shirt and shorts.
“Mom! Don’t you have something better to wear?” she asked, with a note of panic.
Right. My opening. Wear dress.
I scurried off to my bedroom to dig out something to wear from under the stash of everything I’d had to move to make room for the wine bar downstairs — including a freezer filled with a gazillion deer parts that my son, Keefer the hunter, was storing for what I’m guessing was the famine he foresaw in his future.
So this is how that night ended.
My wonderful friend Amy Velis washed dishes all night because I was afraid of the dishwasher. The next day, a nice repairman came out and said, basically, “You just push this button.”
As I got into the rhythm of pouring wine and chatting — in my not-that-wrinkled dress — I realized that not only, maybe, could I do this. I realized I LOVED it.
And here’s the pièce de résistance for a divorced mother on the edge of horrifying her adult children.
After I’d gone to bed in the room with the frozen deer parts — the ones that still haunt me, because I eventually pitched them in the trash and sold the freezer — Keefer knocked on my bedroom door.
“Come on in?” I said.
Keef stood in the doorway, paused in his quiet way, and said, “Mom, I have to tell you, this is great. I’m sorry I was a dick.”
So now, nine full years later — going on ten — there have been stressful parts. Sometimes scary parts. But mostly, it has been the best thing, besides my children and Rob Martin, who came in like a knight in shining white armor and helped get me over the line, ever to happen to me.
So let’s raise our glasses tonight, July 1, 2026, to the AUDACIOUSNESS TO FOLLOW A DREAM!
