The flat land of Wisconsin opens up into small, gently rolling hills as I approach the Door County peninsula. I’m headed to a conference for women journalists, but I have only one thing on my mind: wine.

Specifically, cherry wine, which Door County is known for, along with cherries, Honeycrisp apples and fish boils.

The area also is known as the Midwest’s answer to Cape Cod, another long peninsula surrounded by two bodies of water. Here, it’s Green Bay instead of Cape Cod Bay and Lake Michigan rather than the Atlantic Ocean, but the effect is the same. The water moderates the fluctuation in temperature, giving the land a more moderate climate than it might otherwise have.

Like Cape Cod, Door County’s big business is tourism. Its towns are dotted with seafood restaurants, art galleries, fudge shops and ice cream parlors. Egg Harbor, population 250, is home to the Cape Cod Motel – its name hammering home the resemblance.

In truth, I am surprised how much the landscape reminds me of Cape Cod as I follow the two-lane highway up the peninsula. The maples and oaks are turning red and gold just as in New England. But here, the trees are used to mark boundaries between farms, and the fields are filled with cows rather than sea grasses and wildflowers.

As I approach the peninsula’s largest town, Sturgeon Bay, the signs become progressively cuter. Planes fly into Cherryland Airport. Cars drive along Tart Cherry Lane. This is the Midwest at its best: well-kept, quaint and (at least the weekend I am here) uncrowded.

I grew up in the Midwest, and I’m tempted to feel nostalgic, but this is nothing like the blue-collar, economically troubled Detroit suburb where I spent my youth. Workers here tend to orchards, not assembly lines.

The orchards provide the fruit that winemakers use to produce cherry and other vintages. This delights me because I am into wine with a passion I reserve for a handful of things. That’s because wine is one of the few things in life that can be perpetually new.

A Pinot Grigio grape and its juice will taste different depending on
where it was grown, the sun and rain that season, and when it was picked. If you give two winemakers juice from grapes grown in the same fields, their wines will still taste different because each will use a slightly different process to produce a vintage that suits his or her taste.

Thus, a Pinot Grigio from one winery will be completely different from that made by another, and a bottle produced by one winery this season may be very different from that made next year. Each time you drink a wine, you know that particular taste, a blend of all those factors, may not have existed before and may never exist again.