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Making Good Business Out of Good Food MICHIGAN (Michigan Radio) - Welcome to "The Cocktail Tour" in Traverse City. It starts inside the Grand Traverse Distillery in a warehouse on the edge of town. Distillery employee George Wertman begins with a vodka 101.

Wertman leads the four people on today's tour into the heart of the warehouse. He points out the huge fermentation tanks where they make their mash.

This is all part of a culinary tour. On a culinary tour, people pay to sample the food and drinks of a certain region. Wertman says everything this distillery does comes from Michigan agriculture. After the tour, it's time to taste. Wertman pours sips of cherry vodka into tiny plastic tumblers.

There are three places on today's cocktail tour. After the distillery, it's off to the Right Brain Brewery to taste beers made from things like asparagus, beets, roasted corn or cherries. On the last stop of the tour, a local chef cooks a three-course meal with local ingredients.

Bente Weitekamp is taking the tour. She says she was originally attracted to the tour because of the meal cooked with local ingredients. She also says she's not the kind of person to pass up a good meal.

Ann Dougherty runs the company that's putting on the tour. Her company is called Learn Great Foods. They do food tours in Michigan, Illinois, and Iowa. She thinks that the people who grow food and make food in Michigan are going to be a huge part of the state's future prosperity.

"We have this built-in structure of specialty crops that we are supplying all over the Midwest and world," says Dougherty. "That needs to be built on. So we have an image and a strength and a heritage in tourism that is really going to serve us well in years to come."

Dougherty says is if Michigan can combine agri-tourism or anything that has to do with food and agriculture and entertainment with the fact that we're surrounded by natural beauty well, then the results could be golden.

Bill Sertl is Gourmet Magazine's travel editor. He says that tourism has the potential to resurrect entire economies. Sertl says northern California, famous for its food and wine, is a good example.

"I think you can point to someplace like Napa and Sonoma counties in California as the ultimate place where it's so inter-related. You wouldn't dream of going to Napa without participating in that whole bounty that Napa offers," he says.

Sertl says Michigan has that same potential.

In Royal Oak there's another food tour going on. But instead of sampling alcohol, people here are sampling food.

The entire tour happens downtown, on foot. The tourists follow the guide like a line of school children following their teacher. They wear cute little headsets to hear the guide.

They'll stop at eleven different stores and restaurants. At each stop, a store owner or employee talks to the group, and of course, at each stop, the tourists sample food.

At Superior Fish, they're snacking on mackerel in a teriyaki sauce. David Dean owns Superior Fish. He's says being one of the stops on the food tour has been a smart business decision. Dean says the tour brings new customers his way, and so he's happy to educate them about his products.

Not only are the tourists getting an education, but the businesses on these tours are gaining new customers. At the vodka distillery in Traverse City, people bought bottles of cherry vodka. People on the Royal Oak tour bought stuff at the stores and said they would definitely come back to eat at these places.

Which goes to show there's good business potential in good food.



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