Old Mission Clamped Down on Its Wineries, and Now It Owes Them $50 million
The wine-making township could face bankruptcy after a judge awarded damages to 11 wineries
Old Mission Peninsula — Last July, a U.S. District Judge ordered Peninsula Township to pay nearly $50 million in damages to 11 wineries on Old Mission Peninsula. That’s quite the bar tab for a township with a population of about 6,100 and an annual revenue just over $10 million.
Unless you are feverishly tapped into the local politics of Old Mission Peninsula and the world of Northern Michigan wineries, you are probably quite confused as to what is going on, what the lawsuit could even be about, and how the township is ever going to pay the colossal fee.
As is the case with all stories, it’s complicated. To fully explain every single bickering development of the bitter battle of Old Mission Peninsula would, unfortunately, take more time than any of us have. So, for the sake of brevity and attention span, we must simplify things a bit.
TLDR: Peninsula Township wound up with a $50 million bill because they passed extremely convoluted and overly restrictive laws governing what wineries could and couldn’t do and were so inflexible that it put undue strain and pressure on the local wineries, resulting in large losses from 2017-2022. Put even simpler, according to the judge, the local township overstepped the boundaries of what is reasonable and legal by passing zoning ordinances that prohibited the wineries from hosting small or large events and violated the dormant commerce clause by requiring them to use grapes from the peninsula in 85% of their product.
Judge Maloney wrote: “Plaintiffs suffered actual injuries—lost profits—stemming from an impossible-to-understand ordinance and arbitrary enforcement of the same.”
Take 11 wineries and five summers, and you can start to imagine how many weddings, parties, reunions, conferences, and other events were missed, and how much income was lost, and slowly the staggering $50 million bill doesn’t sound so crazy.
The township, however, has not come to fully realize the error of their ways and is less than eager to pay the tidy sum to the wineries. Peninsula Township has appealed the court’s decision and as of March 2, 2026, collection of the $50 million has been paused by way of a stay issued by the same judge.
Since 2022, the township has relaxed some of the previous ordinances that the wineries cited in their suit. However, the wineries allege that the replacement rules still unlawfully restrict their businesses. They might be better, but they are still wrong, they claim. The bickering between the wineries and the township is far from over, and with such bad blood running under the bridge, it’s hard to see how it might get any better.
These kinds of stories can be rather boring if you aren’t directly involved. Tapes of lawyers discussing zoning ordinances and litigation over might be used as good sleep therapy for the majority of the population. But if you zoom out really far it becomes a little more relatable and a bit more representative of a bigger problem beyond grapes on the hills of Grand Traverse Bay.
Anyone who has tried to run a business of any size, whether it be a shop staffed by two guys or a corporation filled with 20,000 employees, knows that one of the biggest stumbling blocks is government overregulation. It’s a pain, it’s annoying, and it makes building a business harder than it needs to be. How many businesses haven’t been built because of it? How many have withered? That’s a good question for our time.
And while I certainly do support local control and zoning that aims to protect the unique culture of an area—just look at what has happened to Traverse City in the past 15 years—it’s obvious the judge was right in his verdict regarding the bans on events and the 85% of locally grown grapes required for each product. As someone sympathetic to concerns about fragile local culture and the rights of localities to legislate, it’s hard for me to see any reasonable logic behind these ordinances or how they could possibly do anything positive at all.
Peninsula Township’s ordinances are just a textbook case of government knee-capping businesses. To make matters somehow even worse, it’s not even businesses that might ever be construed as vulgar or sprawling. The alleged evil villains (according to the township) are local wineries—some of the most wholesome, culture-oriented, traditional, and high-class businesses we have in Northern Michigan. Some villains these are.
You probably don’t own a winery. You probably don’t own a business. But you do suffer under governmental overregulation whether you realize it or not. If you are a living, breathing individual in 2026, your life is often made more annoying and sometimes significantly worse because of regulations that serve no purpose other than pedantic control.
That’s the TLDR on the wineries of Old Mission Peninsula, and that’s why the Peninsula Township has a $50 million bill coming due.
