August, 1999
Bottles do grow on trees, along with pears, in NW Michigan
Yep, it’s true, pears grow in bottles on a Leelanau County orchard.
When Lee Lutes, a winemaker for Black Star Farms in Suttons Bay, Mich. heard about an area fruit grower taking out acreage of pears, a light went off. He convinced Mike Mikowski to leave his pear trees in another year and try installing bottles on growing pears to be used for making pear brandy.
“Bottles on trees is a marketing concept to entice
people into trying these products,” said Lutes.
Just before the pears ripen, they will be taken off the tree and the branches
and leaves cut off. The bottles will be flooded with a sanitizing solution
and dried. Then pear spirits from Mikowski’s 1998 pears would then
be poured into the bottles.
In early July, 200 bottles, wrapped in netting and attached by string, hung from many of Mikowsi’s six acres of Bosc and Bartlett pear trees. Fifty of the original 250 bottles attached to young tree branches by Mikowski and other family members in early June were lost to the wind.
“It’s very difficult to have them turn out perfectly,” said Lutes, about the labor-intensive project. “The pears are getting by. They seem to be bigger than other parts of the trees.”
Lutes noted air still reaches into the bottle and there is some humidity. “As of right now we’re in the experiment stage. We’re learning, we didn’t do everything right,” Mikowski said.
Lutes said Black Star Farms will purchase all of Mikowski’s pears, approximately 20,000 pounds, and hopes to pay him 10–15 cents a pound, a considerably higher price than he had been receiving. Black Star will also pay Mikowski $5-$10 per bottle for the pears in a bottle.
“I haven’t made any money on pears for a long time,” said Mikowski, who also grows 74 acres of cherries and some plums on his farm that’s been in his wife’s family for 30 years.
He said pears are hard to grow because of mites. “My market diminished except for fresh pears,” he said, noting that fresh pears require hand pickers, who are hard to find and expensive. Lutes guaranteed Mikowski that he would make money on the pears and Mikowski said that’s “good enough for me.” He said he had even resorted to giving away pears to his friends for deer bait.
To be able to make fruit brandies, Black Star Farms purchased a special copper and stainless steel still from Christian Carl, the oldest German still manufacturer. "The spirits will take on the light, golden/green color of the pear,” he said.
This product will likely be bottled and labeled in time for Christmas for a unique Leelanau County souvenir. The product will sell for approximately $35 - $50 per bottle in Black Star’s tasting room. An article on the bottled pears published in the Traverse City Record-Eagle newspaper already prompted people to call Black Star and reserve a bottle, according to Lutes.
Lutes said he saw firsthand this bottles-on-trees concept while living in Italy, where he made wines. Europeans enjoy a long history of making wines and brandies. In the United States, a relatively young country, people often associate clear liquors with alcohol like gin or vodka. Lutes said he and others in the industry are trying to educate and get people to try these fruit brandies, whether they’re made from pears, cherries, apples, apricots, peaches, plums or raspberries.
Best of all the end product is a fruit-based product, handcrafted in the region. “People like Mike and myself made it happen in order for the product to be created. There’s real people behind it,” said Lutes.
He noted that partnerships and alternative uses of raw
product are key to agricultural survival in this era when farmland is quickly
being devoured for housing developments and strip malls. These types of
partnerships just might help fruit growers to keep their land in orchards,
instead of selling to developers.
