Road Trip 2009, Days Three and Four

I spent an uneventful but very pleasant Sunday in Ann Arbor, catching up with my friends, walking leisurely around downtown and eating a delicious meal of quesadillas with home-made pico de gallo and guacamole that my friends prepared. At 7:00 a.m. Monday morning, G. and I, leaving N. behind to a much-needed couple of days of peace and quiet, set off for Traverse City. Here, I should give props to G., who would win a gold medal if staying up late and sleeping in was an Olympic sport, for being up and out at the crack of dawn, making the travel tyrant in me very happy.

The four-hour drive under the relentless gray of central Michigan skies passed without incident, and we rolled into downtown Traverse City a little after noon. We had lunch at a small place on Front St. that featured local organic ingredients (the name escapes me for some reason), where I had a minimalist but delicious sandwich of local Lake Michigan walleye pan-fried in olive oil, then immediately set off for the wineries.

Two peninsulas jut out into Grand Traverse Bay on either side of Traverse City - Leelanau and the much smaller Old Mission to the East. Over two dozen wineries are spread across the two. As a wine-growing an wine-making region, the area is young: the earliest wineries were established in the late 1970s, but most have sprung up in the 80s and early 90s. Besides the microclimate created by the geography of the peninsulas and the bay, the area lies directly on the 45th parallel, said to create ideal conditions for growing grapes because of the angle at which the sun's rays hit the ground. Willamette Valley in Oregon, among others, is located on the 45th parallel. To the extent that the area is known at all, which isn't much, it is known for Riesling and Gewurztraminer - not surprising, given those grapes' predilection for cool climates. We would soon find out that Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris were also common, and that Cabernet Franc has taken off like gangbusters. Similar to other "secondary" wine-growing areas like Virginia and New York's Finger Lakes, Michigan makes a fair number of sweet, fruit-flavored wines (the primary flavoring being locally grown cherries), but "serious" wines are also plentiful and growing stronger.

There was no way we could visit all the wineries in the two days available to us, and although I had done some research, my choices were somewhat random - I looked for places that emphasized "serious" wines and deemphasized cherry-flavored nonsense or grew unusual varieties and made unusual styles, as well as wineries that focused on wines and did not attempt to cram restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts into their properties. Our first stop was Penninsula Cellars, whose tasting room is located in a former one-room schoolhouse build in 1896. Their portfolio is large and does include some fruit-flavored wines, along with a full spectrum of whites and a few reds, some of them off-dry. We focused on the dry wines, poured by a friendly but excessively languid young blonde, and I was immediately struck by the quality. These were delicious, well-made wines with no obvious defects. Trying to take detailed tasting notes would have been overwhelming, but the few I did jot down tell me that the Gewurztraminer was a standout. There is a bottle still in my fridge, so I'll be able to do a proper review soon enough. I also bought a bottle of their dry Riesling and opened it a couple of weeks after getting home. In addition to the typical Riesling flavors of citrus and that elusive petroleum quality on the back palate, the Peninsula had a pronounced flavor of honeydew melon. It was delicious.

From Peninsula, we headed up the road to Chateau Grand Traverse, the largest and most commercial winery we would visit on our entire tour. We took a tour of the wine-making facilities (G., who is a trained sommelier, was impressed by the winery's methodic approach - we would see its opposite the following day), then tasted a few wines from their long list in the giant and excessively touristy tasting room-cum-gift shop. Despite the scale and the commercial focus, the wines were good, and, probably thanks to the volume, more affordable than elsewhere. Much like in Virginia, Michigan wines tend to be on the expensive side - the economics of winemaking and the need to recoup the enormous investment a winery requires, I suppose. We've all heard the joke: Q: How do you make a small fortune in wine-making? A: Start with a large one.

Our next stop was Brys Estate (pronounced "Brice"). Visibly a high-end operation, with a stylish, oak-paneled tasting room, it had no fruit-flavored wines in its portfolio and was the site of our first paid tasting. It was also the only scam and the only real disappointment of the trip. Our wine was poured by a handsome and gregarious young fellow, friendly but ever so slightly slippery, with something of a faux-intellectual air about him. 2007, evidently, was the best vintage in the history of Michigan winemaking, and Brys had made a series of super-premium wines in that vintage. With only 500 bottles of each wine available, they were selling for a shocking $50/bottle, but for $10, we could taste all of them, and even get some food thrown in. What a deal. The food proved to be downright insulting - a soggy Carr's cracker, a small glop of stale goat cheese and a piece of "salami" that I was convinced was actually Slim-Jim, on a paper plate directly out of the refrigerator, where I am sure it had been sitting since before the 2007 vintage was even picked. Out first wine was a Chardonnay, and I immediately got a whiff of nail polish - ethyl acetate (thanks, G., for the chemistry lesson), a classic flaw in a wine. Our trust was permanently undermined, though I must admit that objectively, the reds - a Pinot Noir, a Merlot and a Cab Franc - were good. Just not $50 good.

Our last stop on Old Mission was 2Lads, the Northern-most winery on the Peninsula. Located in a striking modernist building overlooking the vineyards and Grand Traverse Bay beyond, the place is breathtaking for its location and design, but you might conclude that the attention and investment lavished on the appearance would be concomitantly absent from their products. You would be wrong - the wines were delicious; the best we tasted that day and the best reds of the entire trip. The portfolio is small - these guys are super-focused - but they get back in quality what they sacrifice in variety. Both the Pinot Noir and the Cabernet Franc, though pricey at $25, were knockouts: the Pinot smooth and fruity but with excellent depth and structure, the Cab enormous and packed with flavor, drinkable now with a hearty meal but designed, I suspect, for cellaring. The people at the tasting room were very knowledgeable, and we left with a feeling of having found the holy grail of Michigan wine.

It had started to rain by this time, and after having paid a quick visit to the lighthouse at the tip of the peninsula, we drove back to Traverse City, checked into our motel and, somewhat refreshed, set out in search of dinner and, for a change, a non-grape-based beverage. I knew of two brewpubs in town - Mackinaw and North Peak, and we intended to try them both. The server at Mackinaw, however, informed us of a new place - Right Brain Brewing Company - well hidden in a former warehouse on the edge of downtown and accessed through an entrance shared with a hair salon. Intrigued, we abandoned North Peak in its favor. What we found was a relatively quiet, well-lit room with cafeteria-style tables and a bar that looked more like a diner counter. The place felt like a mixture of a coffeehouse and a public library, not a pub. Right Brain's planning and scheduling still needs to be ironed out, apparently - they were out of many of the beers on their list - but we did have a delicious, crisp ESB and an enormously complex, aromatic barley wine. I wish I had taken detailed notes.

It was late by this time, but one of the cafes downtown was still open, so we stopped in for a detoxifying pot of green tea and a bit of ceremonial reading from Kingsley Amis's On Drink before heading back to the motel to sleep off our first day of tasting.

Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part II

Heading out of Pittsburgh, the road passed through the city's Northwestern suburbs - Avalon, Elmsworth, Sewickley -- generic and somewhat dusty, but not the ghosts of their former selves I was expecting (I would get that soon enough). A pristine brown E-Type, an early, six-cylinder model, passed me, its driver waving back when I gave him a thumbs-up. I crossed the Ohio at Rochester, PA, where the river bends sharply to the West and a few minutes later was driving through Beaver, PA - a gem of a town with a textbook Main Street running through the heart of downtown. This was to be the last bit of prosperity I would see all day.

Continuing downstream along PA-39, I crossed into Ohio a few miles later. The industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley was already in evidence a few miles north of Pittsburgh, but the riverside factories and warehouses there, though I couldn't quite tell what they manufactured, all looked operational. Smoke was billowing from their smokestacks, barges were moored nearby and an occasional eighteen-wheeler would pull out of the gates despite it being Saturday. Once on the Ohio side, however, the level of activity dropped precipitously. The town of East Liverpool, the first I hit in the state, was a dismal place from the first house. Covered with decades' worth of industrial grime, the houses all listed and sagged, many of their windows cracked and hung inside with dirty blankets instead of curtains. Cars - mostly dented Chevies and Pontiacs - sat in driveways or along the curbs, but there were no people on the street, not even sitting idly on the steps of their porches or hanging out aimlessly on street corners. The city was a complete ghost town. As I drove past a block-long single-level warehouse, once blue but now of an indeterminate color, its glassless windows gaping vacantly, a teenage boy rode by in the opposite direction on a BMX bike. Naked from the waist up, his body was completely covered with tattoos. He was my only evidence that the town was not completely abandoned. As we passed each other, he did not even glance in my direction even though mine was the only car on the road.

As I continued South on OH-7, the industry started up again on a vast scale. These were obviously power plants. At least one looked nuclear. The landscape was hilly and not unattractive - I was still in the Western foothills of the Appalachians, after all. I couldn't decide whether the massive smokestacks ruined or enhanced it. I've been in love with industrial landscapes since childhood, but in places where I first experienced them - the no-man's land between Brooklyn and Queens - they were total, stretching as far as the eye could see and consuming not only the entire city but seemingly the whole planet. Here, the iron and concrete coexisted with bucolic green hills and a lazily flowing river. Impressive though the power plants were, the coexistence looked uneasy.


I drove South as far as Steubenville, making a point to cut through downtown (larger, but still dead, with a modicum of car traffic but no more pedestrians than E. Liverpool), then cut West on US-22. Almost immediately, the hills leveled off and I was in the farm country Ohio is known for - flat and monotonous. I turned up the music and settled into a sort of stupor, glancing occasionally to the sides of the road and finding nothing but acres of corn and some other equally plentiful crop I couldn't identify. It was well after 1:00 p.m. when I reached Zanesville, named after Ebenezer Zane, an early settler, and not Zane Grey, the writer of Westerns, although Grey was apparently a descendant of Zane and was born here.

Driving through downtown netted no lunch possibilities - the place was dead. A thrift shop here and there, but otherwise, empty storefronts with equally empty loft spaces above them. If I was looking for the proof that the average Midwestern city was dead, I found it here in spades. I learned later that apparently there is a shopping and restaurant district to the North of downtown, along with an artist colony, but knowing nothing of it at the time (I managed to miss the famous Y-Bridge which Amelia Earhart had used for navigation, too), I stayed on US-22 and stopped at a surprisingly cheerful-looking diner a mile or so outside downtown. It was a retro-fifties job, but small, clean, and well kept-up. There was a number of customers at the tables even though it was well past regular lunch time. Sitting at the counter, I ordered a sandwich from a slim woman somewhere in her forties, friendly, her lively dark eyes and youthfully styled hair hinting at the beauty prematurely extinguished (I wanted to think) by life in a place like this. I asked her what the population of the city was. Not knowing, she called over a co-worked, a much older woman, wiry and stern-looking, who said that it had once been fifty thousand, but was now more like thirty-five. The real figure was about twenty-five, I later learned, but it didn't matter. The question I really wanted to ask was "what do people do here?" and was looking for a polite way to ask it. When I managed something along those lines, she launched into exactly the sort of monologue I would have wanted if I was a journalist writing an article about the decline of the American Steel Belt. "There used to be a lot of work here, but one by one the companies left. The mines were good, too, but they are all gone now. Etc., etc." But thirty-five thousand people, I thought. They must do something. They can't all be on the dole. "So what do people do for work now?" I asked. She never answered, doing some more lamenting about the former employers instead, but perhaps her lack of answer was the answer I was looking for.

US-22 Southwest of Zanesville is designated scenic by the AAA, and indeed it was, to the extent possible in the middle of Ohio. My next stop was Lancaster, the birthplace of General Sherman (of Sherman's March). There was a small monument to him in the middle downtown. Knowing that Lancaster was home to an Ohio University campus, I was hoping to get a cup decent coffee, but to no avail. Downtown Lancaster was every bit as dead as Zanesville despite a small festival going on in a park a couple of blocks from where I parked the car. Strangely, a luxurious boutique hotel shared frontage with vacant stores and a pawn shop.

Having looked up some information on these places after the fact, I discovered that all of them - Zanesville, Lancaster, probably even East Liverpool, have some life - communities, restaurants, festivals, museums, art scenes. But it certainly was not obvious from a casual stroll through these cities' downtowns. To an uninformed traveler, they offer little more than on overpowering sense of having been left behind by time.

From Lancaster, I continued South for a while longer on OH-159, also a designated scenic road, then cut North on US-23, bypassed Columbus to the West on its beltway, and continued Northwest on US-33 to Marysville, OH-31 to Kenton, then US-68 to Findlay where I was briefly forced onto I-75 before taking OH-25 to the Toledo bypass and onto US-23 into Michigan, finally arriving in bustling downtown Ann Arbor a few minutes after 9:30 p.m. I made only one other brief stop, in Mt. Victory, OH, where I spotted a complete vintage Gulf gas station. I hoped it was still operational, but it turned out to be just a façade, the building behind it housing a regular auto repair shop.

Road Trip 2009, Day Two, Part I

The second day of driving would take me across the Ohio River Valley and across the endless farmlands of Ohio. First, however, there was the question of breakfast. I initially wanted to go to the Steel City Diner, a downtown greasy spoon J. and I enjoyed on our visit three years ago, but I walked the six or so blocks only to find that it had closed. Plan B was Pamela's in the Strip, recommended the previous night by the Church's bartender and corroborated by the woman at my hotel's front desk.

The Strip - essentially the area between Liberty Ave. and the bank of the Allegheny River, stretching from downtown roughly to 31st St. -- is, for my money, Pittsburgh's most distinctive, and also useful, neighborhood, especially on Saturday mornings. Originally, and to a great extent still, it was the city's warehouse district. Many of the warehouses have been converted to stores, restaurants and nightclubs, but they happily share real estate with the old machine shops and wholesale glass cutters. In terms of shopping, the twin focus is on home furnishings and food, and while the inexorable march of gentrification hasn't left the Strip untouched, adding a sprinkling of stores selling designer lamps and colorful throw-pillows made from recycled fibers, many of the businesses hark back to the city's days as a working class burg populated by Italian, Polish and Asian immigrants and their descendants. On Saturday mornings, the entire Strip spills out onto the sidewalks and the whole neighborhood turns into an enormous outdoor marketplace. Food vendors of every stripe, especially Italian pastry shops, display their tantalizing wares, many of them baked mere minutes earlier. Espresso machines hiss and foam everywhere. Piles of cheap plastic toys and 99-cent flip-flops block the sidewalks, Chinatown style. It being Pittsburgh, the entire cauldron is generously seasoned with Steelers and Penguins t-shirts.

Pamela's (60 21st St.) is located in the heart of all this. By the time I got there a little after nine and parked the car, both the smallish dining room and the half-dozen outdoor tables were full, and at least a dozen people were waiting, but the counter - the solo traveler's savior -- was empty, so I plopped myself on one of the old-school vinyl-upholstered stools and ordered a much-needed mug of coffee. The place had a retro décor, but it was more sixties than the faux-fifties more common to postmodern diners. Instead of juke boxes and pictures of Elvis, it was advertisements for 1960s American cars - as far as I could tell original flyers and magazine pages shellacked onto one of the walls, covering it entirely. A shelf in the corner held a bakelite rotary phone, an old radio, a couple of kidney-shaped ash trays. The colors around me were relatively bright, but definitely tended towards the turquoise and pale yellow of the sixties, making the room feel inviting and far less contrived than one might expect.

The menu was fairly standard American Diner, though their specialty - giant thin pancakes, somewhere between a flapjack and a crepe -- were featured prominently. They looked appetizing - I kept seeing platefuls of them being brought out every few minutes -- but I was craving protein, and opted for an artery-clogging treat of fried eggs and respectably greasy and spicy chorizo. In Pittsburgh - who would have thought?

While driving around the neighborhood earlier looking for parking, I had spotted a tiny café in one of the side streets, and after breakfast, although I was already over-caffeinated, I stopped in. The place, called The Leaf and Bean (2200 Penn Ave., entrance around the corner), proved to be well worth checking out, not for its large selection of cigars (the "Leaf"), but for the overwhelming amount of junk that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. Interior décor is best when taken to either of the two extremes - sparse and minimalist or so overstuffed that you are constantly finding something new to look at. This was a perfect example of the latter. I ordered an espresso, which turned out to be top-notch, and spent the couple of minutes that it took me to drink it taking in the surroundings. On the counter by the cash register was an old rotary telephone (the theme of the morning, it seemed), the kind with a separate earpiece that hangs on a hook. I asked the barista if it was for sale. It was not.

It was time to hit the road. Now really bouncing from caffeine and sugar and with grease coursing through my veins, I crossed the Allegheny on the 16th Street Bridge and headed West past downtown, then North along the Ohio on PA-65, Gerry Mulligan supplying the soundtrack.