When we asked Michael and Yancey-Stanforth Migliore, the founders and owners of Whitecliff Vineyard & Winery in the Hudson Valley, to send us pictures to accompany this column in honor of Valentine’s Day, Michael replied: “Sure. We have some great drone shots of our vineyards.” And Yancey, said, “No. Pictures of us.”
And there in a nutshell is how they appeared to us: People with a shared passion and very different perspectives who have succeeded tremendously well together. For the past few years, we have profiled a couple for Valentine’s Day who work together in some facet of the wine world. We visited Whitecliff anonymously in 2009 when we were wine writers at the Wall Street Journal. We were so impressed by their wines that we later called them and wrote about them. The headline for that column was “Tasting the Winemaker’s Vision” which we explained like this: “Though they were white and red and ranged from dry to sweet, they had a restraint to them, a vision in which everything—including the winemaker—took a back seat to the fruit itself. And the fruit was delightfully pure and real. There was nothing showy about the wines. They just tasted good, offering a kind of relaxed gracefulness and easy balance that would make them good on the dinner table.”
Michael, who in graduate school studied organic chemistry, has lived on the site of their home vineyard in Gardiner, N.Y. since 1975. He was born in the Bronx and his Italian and German grandfathers made wine at home. The German one lived on Michael’s aunt’s farm in the Finger Lakes, and when Michael visited they went to wineries, which helped him gain some knowledge of grape growing and winemaking. As a graduate student at SUNY New Paltz, he grew and sold hay to pay for his education. Then in 1978, after joining IBM as a chemical engineer in semiconductor manufacturing, he bought the first 18 acres of the 70 they now own in Gardiner.
Michael began planting grapes, a row of this and a row of that, to learn what grew best in their cold-climate location with its beautiful view of the Shawangunk Mountains. The first variety was Cabernet Franc. (We had the tasty 2020, $48, at the recent 2026 New York Cab Franc Grand Tasting.) Much of the plant material Michael used was from Cornell, hybrids like Traminette and Vidal Blanc. In 1999, he founded Whitecliff Vineyard & Winery. Its charming, off-dry Awosting White, $19, a blend of Seyval Blanc and Vignoles, is their longtime best seller, but they also make around 20 other whites, reds, rosés, pet nats and other sparklers, and port-style wines, all vegan and from estate-grown fruit and grapes purchased from like-minded grape growers in the state. Along with hybrid grapes they also craft beautiful wines from Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Chardonnay, among others. Their total annual production is 5,000 to 6,000 cases.
The mountains near them and on their label played a central role in their romance. Both were rock climbing enthusiasts. Yancey, born in Manhattan and educated at Barnard College, had a friend with a horse farm in Gardiner. Yancey told us: “I came up to visit her for a weekend and I was a climbing fan and climbing is not an easy thing to do alone. It’s much safer if there’s more than one of you. So I asked my friend Leslie if she knew anyone that I could climb with, and she said, ‘Michael, across the street.’ And so we climbed together and that was the beginning of our relationship. Reflecting on it, I do tend to joke that you have to like to do hard things to have a vineyard and winery. I guess it was a good indicator to Michael that [our relationship] could work.” That was in late 1982.
Michael added: “First off, just to meet somebody and go out climbing and be able to do it at a high level was really just great for me because all of my climbing partners then were my buddies–guys. And it’s a very different dynamic. Women have a very different climbing style than men. Usually, it’s muscles and you power through things. And women, it’s more nuance and balance. It was very interesting to see that up close.”
That probably tells you a lot about a person, right?
“How they can handle rocks, ascending. Danger, and stay cool. I mean, that first meeting, not knowing anything about the person and then you’re entrusting your life to them. That’s trust. But also, you can suss out a lot about somebody’s personality and how they approach life if you are climbing rocks,” Michael said.
So how was it that a City Girl, who grew up near Central Park, became a rock-climbing fan?
“It was instinct for me,” Yancey said. “I terrified my father when I was about two years old by climbing out of my crib in the middle of the night. He was about to go out onto the street to look for me when he realized I had sat down on a little chair by the crib and gone back to sleep, pulling the curtains over my head. Also, I’m sure growing up with plenty of time to climb trees and rocks in Central Park contributed.”
After that first climb, Yancey began helping to plant vines and one day, they went on a climb that changed their lives.
“I chose one of the best climbs in the mountains called Horseman, and there’s a couple of particularly hard pieces of it. You have to climb up into a corner and then come out around the nose and you just have tremendous exposure on the face of the rock,” Michael said. “And I was leading and got to the top. And as she came up to the top, I proposed to her as she was coming up over the cliff.”
It was a whirlwind romance. Yancey told us, “We had not known each other a long time. We met in November. He proposed in April, and we got married in August. And that was surprising to me. I always assumed that I’d probably live with somebody for a while before I’d take the leap, but one of us was going to have to quit our jobs to get married because he was up in the mid-Hudson Valley and I was in the city [working as a fundraiser for Henry Street Settlement House, a Lower East Side organization founded in 1893 that provides social service, health care and arts programs for New Yorkers]. So it was enough of a commitment that we just took the plunge. It was right so it was a decision that could be made fairly quickly…
“We also went climbing on our honeymoon, which I think says a lot. Most people go to spas or something peaceful and relaxing. And there we were trying to climb in Chamonix in the Alps and that was so scary. Fog was coming in. I made us turn back. White cliffs are also on our label because that’s how we met. And it is such a part of anybody’s visiting Whitecliff to see the cliffs.”
After the wedding came the construction of their house, an upgrade from Michael’s living quarters. Construction projects, even small ones, can break even what appears to be a strong relationship. But they worked it out, dividing responsibilities according to each’s strengths. Yancey has impressive organization and communications skills from years of fund-raising, like her father. “So that first year we were married in ’84, we built the house that we’re speaking to you from right now. And Michael had been a union carpenter so he knew how to build things. I didn’t know anything about it, but he supervised me being the laborer and general contractor. And he would go to IBM at night and we would build during the day. And I’d make all the phone calls to line up subcontractors and all, but we swung the hammers and poured the concrete and collected the rocks for the stone walls, and really did it ourselves that first year. And that was certainly a trial by fire for any marriage, not even knowing how to drive a car, let alone how to build a house.”
But build the house they did, situating it in the middle of the sustainably farmed vineyard. While Michael focused on meticulous, science-based winemaking, experimenting with various cold, not cool-climate, grapes, Yancey focused on the hospitality end of the business, acquiring and imparting significant knowledge about winemaking on their site to tasting room visitors (that’s how we met her) and using the skills of her mother, a cookbook writer, to offer sumptuous pairing suggestions.
In time, the family grew and so did the winery. The Migliores have two sons, Tristan, who is now general manager, and Max, who is an anesthesiologist. There’s also now another vineyard and tasting room in Hudson, a trendy cultural hub. All wines are now vegan because that was a condition of Tristan joining the family business, they said. In 2010, Brad Martz joined them as a volunteer and he became such an indispensable contributor that he’s now Whitecliff’s winemaker, working with Michael, who has served as president of the Hudson Valley Wine and Grape Association.
That same year, 2010, 45 judges tasting blind at the San Francisco International Wine Competition awarded Whitecliff’s 2009 Riesling the competition’s highest accolade, Double Gold, and Best White Wine. It had surpassed the 1,300 white wines submitted from 27 countries and 28 states.
Five years later, in 2015, Michael became the first wine grower in the Hudson Valley to be named Grower of the Year by the New York Wine and Grape Foundation. This honor until then had only been bestowed upon wine growers in Long Island or the Finger Lakes, the locations of the vast majority of vineyards in the state. It was a huge validation of Michael’s science-based explorations and experiments with cold-climate grape varieties and bolstered the confidence of others in their region and beyond.
“There’s still so many people, especially in New York City, who are skeptical about New York State being a source of world-class wine,” Yancey said.
She confirmed that she does know how to drive now. But we asked, since she was such a city girl, if in her wildest dreams she would have thought that she’d be living this life.
“Absolutely not. I mean, I was well-known amongst my friends as being a really dedicated New York City girl, and I did not leave it because I didn’t love it. I left it because I love him. And now I do love it up here too. But yeah, this is not what I would’ve ever guessed I’d do. I was swept along by Michael’s enthusiasm.”
Ah, such is love. Happy Valentine’s Day!
Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher conceived and wrote The Wall Street Journal’s wine column, “Tastings,” from 1998 to 2010. Dorothy and John have been tasting and studying wine since 1973. In 2020, the University of California at Davis added their papers to the Warren Winiarski Wine Writers Collection in its library, which also includes the work of Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson. Dottie has had a distinguished career in journalism as a reporter, editor, columnist and editorial writer at The Miami Herald, The New York Times, and at The Journal. John was Page One Editor of The Journal, City Editor of The Miami Herald and a senior editor at Bloomberg News. They are well-known from their books and many television appearances, especially on Martha Stewart’s show, and as the creators of the annual, international “Open That Bottle Night” celebration of wine and friendship. The first bottle they shared was André Cold Duck. They have two daughters.
