In 1968, an 18-year-old Craig Hall used $4,000 as a down payment on a small student rooming house in in his university hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich. — his entire boyhood savings from mowing lawns, doing odd jobs and going door-to-door selling Cutco Knives.

Hall Wines sits amid a class of luxury wineries that have grown like vines in the last 30 years as consumer tastes have shifted toward wines of higher quality and higher prices. About half of the grapes in their wines come from their own vineyards.