On Sunday, a Traverse City Record-Eagle editorial proclaimed that "wine is the new cherry" -- likening the economic and land conservation benefits of northern Michigan's burgeoning wine industry to the region's long-reigning King Cherry.

They're partly right. But long-term, wine could be much more -- if we're willing to help it get there.

Unlike most cherry-related agriculture, wineries are value-added producers. That means they take raw agricultural commodities -- grapes worth a buck or two -- and turn them into bottles of wine that people buy for $20. The economic yield per farmed acre is akin to what we'd see if every cherry grower turned into Cherry Republic. 

Along the way, this added value creates jobs in the wineries and related industries. Instead of shipping their crops to a distant processor or distributor, wineries hire local employees to trellis and prune the vines, turn the grapes into wine, and sell it to their visitors.

Those visitors comprise the advance guard of a wine tourism avalanche that already pumps tens of millions of dollars annually into northern Michigan's regional economy and creates opportunities for entrepreneurs and workers in businesses like restaurants, lodging and retail.

Integral to the value-added winery model is a flexible, mixed-use physical plant. Urban boutique wineries like Bryan and Jennifer Ulbrich's Left Foot Charley work less well for their larger colleagues, which function best when vineyards, production facilities and retail tasting / sales rooms lie in close proximity to one another.

But wineries face legal obstacles that cherry growers never dreamed of, which could eventually keep the industry from realizing its full potential. Incredibly, the bulk of these roadblocks emanate from the same government entities that proclaim their desire for new economic engines to replace the automotive dinosaurs of the past. 

These roadblocks can lead to head-knocking impasses with local government, which invariably prefers black-and-white zoning regulations. They want land that's either agricultural or industrial -- not part of each. They like "if you didn't grow it here, you can't sell it here" types of zoning. It can be impossibly difficult to persuade local officials that the virtue of preserving and enhancing the value of 30 acres of prime vineyard land might be worth the cost of allowing construction of a winery and tasting room on the adjoining two.

For the record, I'm no fan of untrammeled winerey expansion and tourism -- see the last blog entry about what's currently happening in Niagara. There's nothing I'd less rather see than 60-passenger motor coaches plying the roadways of Old Mission. But neither is there anything rational about unrestrained NIMBY-ism, or local residents who refuse to acknowledge the inevitability of some change, with or without their assent.

Yet that's the minor league compared to the obstacles wineries face from faraway Lansing, which subjects them to alcoholic beverage oversight by Liquor Control Commission bureaucrats and lawmaking by grandstanding politicians, who rant against underage drinking while padding their campaign coffers with donations from the free-spending wholesale distribution monopoly. Three years ago, Michigan wineries nearly lost the right to deliver their own wines to in-state customers. Time and again, wineries find themselves in Lansing, hat in hand, simply to beg for the right to act like rational businesspeople: to charge for samples if they wish; to sell their wines by the glass for on-site consumption; to operate a restaurant at their winery.

Ironically, things that Lansing could be doing to support our wine industry, they've not. Other states with rapidly-developing wine industries -- like New York -- operate sizable state-funded promotional organizations. Michigan's Grape and Wine Industry Council -- with stagnant funding over the last decade -- just eliminated one of three staff positions that support Michigan's fastest-growing agricultural sector.

Wine may indeed be northern Michigan's new cherry. Or it might become far more. But government has the ability to turn it into just one more of Michigan's many squandered opportunities. Remember "Cool Cities"?