Cold-climate grapes,grown in South Dakota gumbo.

An Italian tradition, on the prairie.

On May 6th of 1913, Antonio Joseph Finco immigrated to the United States from Gallio, Italy. Antonio, like his father and fathers before him, made wine — and through Prohibition the Finco household in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula kept making roughly 1,000 bottles a year and drinking it daily with their meals.

Growing up in Northern Minnesota with an Irish father and an Italian mother, Michael Gould remembers visiting his maternal relatives in Ironwood, where each house served their own wine. In 2006, vacationing in Italy with his wife Marnie and his daughters Kelsye and Aisling, Mike started to think of a vineyard.

Soil tests showed the dirt at his ranch had a 60-inch subsoil of calcareous clay loam — the same general type of soil found in the Bordeaux region of France. Old Folsom Vineyard was established the following year, in 2007.