Balanced Rock Winery
When most people hear the words Balanced Rock, at least if you’re from Wisconsin or the Mid-west, Devil’s Lake State Park probably comes to mind. One of the park’s prominent geological features is, the Balanced Rock.
Over the past decade or so, the winery industry in Wisconsin has grown exponentially, not to mention micro-breweries and distilleries as well. I’ll narrow it down a bit to one of the many Driftless area’s magical features, the Baraboo range, specifically Baraboo itself located in Sauk County. It is home to the Balanced Rock Winery, located on the South side of the city.
The story behind Balanced Rock Winery and owners, Matt and Kristin Boegner, is a transplant story that derives from Maryland and Michigan.
Originally from Maryland, Matt had earned himself an Engineering scholarship to Michigan State. After a year though, Matt realized that field of study is not where his heart was. After some “finagling” as he put it, Matt chose to change his major to hospitality. “I'd always worked in restaurants and bars when I was in high school. I would go home from college for the summer and cook,” said Matt. He noted that the hospitality school at Michigan was really good, usually ranking number one or two in the country. Matt also met his wife Kristin while attending Michigan state. She graduated with a business degree and is a healthcare recruiter in addition to owning the winery with Matt.
Seems the hospitality/food/beverage field runs in Matt’s family. His father is a log time liquor representative in Maryland. “He's in and out of bars and restaurants all the time,” Matt pointed out. “He said to me, ‘you know, tough, tough business. It's a tough business to get in on. All nights. You sure you want to do that?’, I replied, ‘yeah, I think I’ll be fine’.”
Matt graduated with his degree and entered into the prestigious Hyatt management training program. After completing the program, he found himself ranked as a top candidate. “They're like, these are our top candidates and then kind of go like, down the line asking, ‘where do you want to go? Name any place you want’. Everybody wants Hawaii, Chicago, New York, like all the cool places go quick. They asked me, ‘Matt where do you want to go?’, I said Baltimore. My family is close. So, I worked at the Hyatt in Baltimore.”
Matt went through the management training program in Baltimore, worked hard in restaurants, moving up the ranks quickly. “Back in those days, Hyatt was still owned by the Pritzker family, it was still privately held. It was a big business but a family business. So, everybody kind of knew everybody. You apply for jobs, but it's very much like, ‘hey, there's an opportunity for you, we already spoke to the person over there. You're good to go’. We moved around a lot in the first 10 years. We lived in six cities in 10 years. We lived in California, Chicago for a while, moved back to the East coast for a bit, Columbus, Ohio for a while, so we went all over the place.”
Matt acknowledged that type of moving around in a career, “is good when you're young, but when you start having kids, it's not fun anymore”.
Kristin and Matt were living in Chicago while he was the beverage director at the Hyatt when they were expecting their first child. They decided they didn’t want to raise a family in a big city. Both of them raised in rural areas, wanted to afford their child the same. So, they moved back to Maryland and Matt worked at the Hyatt in Chesapeake Bay as the Director of banquets. But still, Matt’s career was not easy to juggle having a child. “So, one of my buddies at the time said he was working for Great Wolf Lodge in Kansas City and mentioned that there was an opportunity for a Food and Beverage Director at the Great Wolf Lodge in the Wisconsin Dells.
Piquing his interest and never having been to the Dells before, he checked it out. “So, I fly up, take a look at it, and it was like, the middle of winter, like the best time to come to the Dells, it was February and negative 20 degrees. It's funny, because when you drive up from the airport, I mean, there’s like nothing, right? It's just farm fields.” Driving through the Dells he liked what he saw, including its proximity to the larger city of Madison.
Matt accepted the job, and he and his wife bought a house in Baraboo. Matt worked at the Great Wolf Lodge for six years, but change was coming. The company, originally private, went public like Hyatt had and began opening up Great Wolf Lodges across the country. Knowing Matt’s successful history of opening places for Hyatt, asked if he would be interested in opening new lodges for them. “I talked to my wife about it, and I said, hey, we bought a house, the kids are in school, I don’t want to be moving again.” Matt new if he stayed with Great Wolf they would always be moving. Hospitality was his background, but decided he had to find something else. “It's actually really funny because we went on a manager’s outing to visit local wineries. I like wineries, I didn't know that there were wineries here. My wife's from Michigan, from the Traverse City area. There are tons of wineries over there. So, we went on the winery trolley tour from the Dells. At the time, there were two wineries. There was Fawn Creek and Baraboo Bluff that just opened. So, we go on the tour, we get to the two wineries, and everything's good. Then, we go to Port Huron Brewery in the Dells, and on to lunch at Sprecher's. I said to the driver, I was like; ‘you know you bill this as a winery tour, we only went to two and then a brewery and then a chain restaurant.’ He told me ‘if there were more wineries, the tour would be busier.’ And I was like, ‘what, is this busy now?’. He's said, ‘it’s summer, it's packed. This tour is booked all the time’.”
Matt went home and told his wife about the tour. Opening a winery was something they had always wanted to do when they were older. See, he and Kristin used to visit the wineries around Traverse City and talk with the owners about their businesses. So, an interest was there.
Matt asked Kristin, ‘what if they didn’t wait to open a winery, what if they did it now?’ She said ‘no, you’re crazy, that’s a terrible idea.’
What happened next, well, of course, they went and toured a bunch of wineries. After, Kristin said, ‘You know, you might be onto something, I think we can do something here’. Matt pointed out that even though winemaking was not in neither one of their backgrounds, the hospitality side and the food side is where they are comfortable. “That's our wheelhouse you know, and then obviously bar management.”
The hunt began to find just the right place to open a winery, not just a tasting room or a place to enjoy wine, but a place to also grow grapes for producing wines. They looked at a couple places in the area, including a parcel on the other side of the city from where the winery is today. That parcel was a no-go because there was no utility access. The city said they did have another parcel of land, but it was located in an industrial park. It was not for sale at the time, but could be for the right person. “An industrial park? That sounded weird. It sounds like not really what we wanted for a winery. So, they gave us the address and we came out and there was a big berm in the front, so we drove past it like three or four times and couldn't find the address. We actually had to go to the golf course and walk down from there to find it. When we got up here, we're like ‘wow, this is actually really neat.’”
Thinking about the location within the city, Matt said, to his knowledge, there weren’t any wineries in the state located in a city. “They're all in the rural areas. I mean, you have the ones that are like downtown, but they don't grow grapes there, they just have tasting rooms where they pour product,”.
In their conversations with Baraboo, the city said that growing grapes and producing wine is permitted within the city. In addition, not being located in a rural area, Matt and Kristin would have access to city water and sewer, with electric and gas lines readily available. “So, I understand why a lot of breweries are in industrial parks. For that reason, you know, you have gas, you have sewer, you have water, you have all the things that you need to produce a product in volume, which is nice.”
Matt and Kristin purchased the land in 2018 and started building in 2019. He explained part of the reason the land sat for a bit after the purchase, was due to utility work and grading that needed to be completed to accommodate the winery. “From a grading standpoint, I think they had it slated for housing but even that was a weird fit because there are industrial buildings here. So, it's kind of a weird parcel. But for us, everything worked perfectly,” he said smiling.
The big day finally came, and the couple opened up Balanced Rock Winery the end of June 2019. After operating for six months, you guessed it, they had to close down because of COVID. Matt said the disappointing part of having to shut down, was all the hard work, marketing and logistics it took just to open and get going. “You try to rush to get open. You do all your marketing to get open, right? Then after COVID, you try to get a buzz going again, and everybody's doing the same thing, dumping money into ‘hey, we're reopening’. We wanted to get the attention back. We weren't established prior to closing, so I always felt like we were behind the eight ball. In a way, we got lucky, when you look back at that period, we actually did really well in the sense that we have the high ceilings, a brand-new HVAC system, we have all the outdoor space. So, I feel like we rebounded quickly because it was almost like we were built for a situation like that. Matt noted, that having an outdoor space of 23 acres for people to spread out over was attractive to customers.
Balanced Rock offers much more than just a place to have a glass of wine, relax and enjoy the scenery of the Baraboo bluffs. We’ll start with the vineyard. Matt said they grow two types of grapes that they use in their production, Petite Pearl and Frontenac, both of which he said are Midwest hybrids. “Those grapes are bred to withstand the harsh cold winters in the Midwest.” Although they grow grapes to produce product, they also buy grapes from growers across the region. “You're trying to play this balancing act. There is a very short window from when the grapes grow to when they are harvested. You have to buy enough grapes to carry you through the year. You buy too much, then you have all this excess product and all your money is tied up in bottles in the back. If you don’t buy enough then you run out. You maybe have two months where grapes are available, and that has to carry you for the next 12 months.”
Balanced Rock started out producing five wines. That number has grown to twenty, with their most popular wine being Sunspot. “We're up to 20 wines now, but that'll always ebb and flow, and then we'll find creative ways to use things as we go. Some are a hit like our Sunspot wine. Sunspot is a sweet red that is made with Frontenac grapes, which is also why we started growing them here. It gives us a little bit more control on the quality and the quantity, because we use those grapes a lot,” said Matt. With Frontenac being a commonly grown grape across Wisconsin, it ensures a good supplement to the grapes they grow.
Complimenting their wine list, is a nice selection of food. From chips with different dip combinations, to Flatbread/pizzas, street tacos and Charcuterie. “There are some items that stay on the menu, but for the most part, we add some variety every year. We try to focus more on shareable items. At the end of the day, I think it's important to focus on what you need to be. We're not a restaurant, we don't pretend to be a restaurant, we’re a winery that serves food. We offer a menu where people can come and have lunch, or have a glass of wine and dinner. Most of our menu items are designed to be shareable.” In addition to seating inside, Balanced Rock boasts a spacious patio where guests can enjoy their wine and food while taking in breathtaking views of the Baraboo bluffs.
The winery sits up against the Baraboo Country Club golf course which gave Matt and Kristin an idea on usage of part of their property not conducive to growing grapes. So, they put in a 250 yard driving range. “We have 23 acres total, but it's a very odd parcel. There's a cutout over to the South of the property that actually is owned by Baraboo Tent and Awning that comes down over the driving range. So, we have a three-partner deal with the golf course, Baraboo Tent and Awning and us. The golf course runs it and keeps it maintained. We actually sell tokens here, so you can come buy a token and a drink, go down to the range, and hit balls.”
Entertainment is a must, especially in a heavy tourist area like the Baraboo/Dells area. Friday, Saturday and Sundays, Memorial Day through the end of October, the winery hosts local and area musicians, from solo artists to four- or five-piece bands.
While Balanced Rock Winery seems to have their bases covered in amenities, there is one that stood out to me and led me to write this story, bingo. Before COVID hit, Matt said they started holding bingo for charities. Of course, that quickly halted when the winery, like so many other businesses, had to close. When they opened back up, they realized with so many organizations in dire need of support, they could help organizations vital to the community while helping their business. “After COVID, charities were really hard up for funds. We were both kind of in the same boat, where we're trying to get people in here and they’re trying to raise money. We were all struggling because of COVID,” Matt said.
He pointed out that the winery runs their own bingo games rather than hiring a business out of Madison. “I'd rather give money to a charitable organization, then give it to some guy out of Madison that has a for profit business, that comes up here and calls the numbers. We're out here trying to preach, buy local, right? Buy local wine, or buy local beer. So, it's kind of disingenuous to say, buy our product locally, and then give your money to some organization outside of town. When we started this, we wanted to have charities that were local, that support the Baraboo, Dells, Reedsburg and Portage areas. I think we started with Boys and Girls Club, almost exclusively at first. Then we had other charities reach out because they saw it on Facebook.”
The winery sells each bingo sheet for $2 and hold ten games, with all proceeds going to whatever organization is featured. They feature six different organizations with each receiving two months of bingo proceeds. The games are held every other Thursday.
One of the organizations that benefit from the winery’s bingo is Baraboo Community Heroes. “They actually had their big event that they fundraise all year for yesterday,” said Balanced Rock Operations Manager Charmaine Anderson. “It's called Holiday with a Hero where they take kids within the community shopping for Christmas. Not only do they give gifts, but they usually do clothes, hygiene products, blankets, pillows, anything essentially that these kids need. They have parents fill out forms before they go shopping to know sizes, what the kid needs. My husband actually is a paramedic and he's done these events with them and he has said, ‘you know, some of these kids, all they asked for are shoes for Christmas, they don't ask for toys’. So, it gives them the ability to actually take them and be like, ‘do you see anything you like?’, and give these kids something that they wouldn't get otherwise.”
As for the future? Matt said they have a lot of irons in the fire; new product lines including sparkling wines, potentially cider, port wines, and continue expanding their vineyard, planting a little bit more each year. He acknowledges Balanced Rock Winery would not be as successful, if not for the dedication and hard work of their team members.
Visit Balanced Rock Winery’s web page, or visit them on Facebook.
