Four Top-Five Nominations in Cleveland Magazine’s Best of Cleveland

Cleveland Magazine’s Best of Cleveland is a reader vote. This year the readers put Vincent William in the top five for Best Winery, Best Boutique Hotel, Best Patio and Cleveland Hot Spot. Four categories. We are still a little surprised, and very grateful.

Each of those four is a different part of the house, and each one is somebody’s whole job here. So we want to say what they mean to us.

Best Winery is the acre of Cabernet Franc between the front door and the water. We planted it in 2020 and were told to expect three years before a real crop. Fourteen months later there was fruit, and we did not own everything needed to process it yet, so wineries down the road lent us their equipment. That first wine, the 2022 Estate Cabernet Franc, took Double Gold at the 2025 Ohio Wine Competition. We are proud of that bottle. We are prouder that people are starting to notice what this region can grow.

The kitchen belongs in that category too, since here the two were never separate. Chef Jeff Gable writes the menu around what the farms near us have that week, which sounds simple until a crop comes in early and the menu has to change on a Wednesday. That is what buying local means here. A farmer calls, and the menu changes.

Best Boutique Hotel is the eight rooms upstairs. They are adults-only and no two are alike, and the people who run them will walk you to your door and cook your breakfast to order the next morning. We kept the inn small on purpose. Eight rooms is a number a family can actually take care of.

Best Patio is the easiest one. Come at seven in the evening. The shoreline here faces north, so from the same chair you can watch the sun come up out of Lake Erie in the morning and go back down into it at night. There are very few coastlines in the world where that happens, and we were lucky enough to end up pouring wine on one of them.

Hot Spot, we think, is the whole house, and the house was never a given. It was an unfinished mansion when our family bought it. The original drawings had been lost in a county flood, so parts of it were measured and mapped by hand. The renovation took eight years. During COVID a lot of the construction became the family’s own work, with local tradespeople handling what we could not. The slate on the roof came off a church in Pennsylvania. The stone came from streets and campuses in Ohio and Indiana. Nothing here arrived finished.

Vincent William is a local, family-owned place. A lot of the names on lists like this are backed by investment groups, and we are not. What we have is this one property and everything we could pour into it: the farms we buy from, the vendors down the road, the people we hire from the towns around us. A reader vote is how a place like this holds its ground. So if you voted, thank you. It means more here than you might guess.

Winners are announced in the magazine’s October issue. Until then the patio is open, the kitchen is buying from the farms, and the sunsets are free.