We didn't set out to open a winery. We set out to build a place that felt like home, to us and to everyone who walks through the gate.

Free Run Cellars is our primary residence, the place our kids are growing up, and the place we've chosen to pour our energy into between two demanding careers. When you visit, you're not a customer — you're a guest in our home. Whoever you are, whoever you love, whoever you bring with you, you have a place at our table. There's a Sanskrit phrase for that.

Atithidevo Bhav · the guest is akin to god

Trish walking her two dogs down a row of vines — Trish at Free Run with her dogs

Trish Slevin

LaPorte to Nashville to Berrien Springs

Trish grew up in LaPorte, Indiana — the kind of Midwest upbringing that instills a genuine warmth toward people that no amount of professional polish can manufacture. After Indiana University she earned dual master's degrees at Vanderbilt, then built a career in corporate strategy advising C-suite executives on AI implementation and mergers and acquisitions.

Somewhere in all of that, she developed a gift that has nothing to do with technology: the ability to make a stranger feel like a regular before they've finished their first glass. At Free Run, she's the reason people stay longer than they planned — and leave already thinking about coming back.

At the tasting room, she's just Trish.

Prashanth and Trish raising glasses of red and white wine — Prashanth and Trish at Free Run Cellars

Prashanth Pais

From the coffee hills of Chikmagalur

Prashanth was a city boy who spent his summers in the hills of Mathathota, his grandparents' coffee estate in Chikmagalur, Karnataka, the birthplace of Indian coffee. The gate there was always open, and no guest stayed a stranger for long. Those summers shaped something fundamental in him: an understanding that the land you tend determines what you pour, and that the people who tend it determine how it feels to be there.

A career as a data architect brought him to Chicago, where he met Trish. Today he's deepening his understanding of viticulture through coursework at Lake Michigan College — bringing the same rigor to his vines that his family brought to their coffee trees, half a world away.

They met in Chicago. They landed here.

When Trish and Prashanth found Free Run Cellars — a boutique winery on a quiet road in Berrien Springs with three acres of Pinot Gris vines, a pond, and a tasting room with good bones — they didn't just see a business. They saw a home worth building a life around.

Their kids grow up here the way Prashanth did, with land underfoot, seasons overhead and a community always passing through. With Midwestern warmth and Indian hospitality, they hope this place becomes your third home: somewhere you come back to, where you're never a stranger, always a guest. Free Run is their home. When you're here, it's yours too.

Both still work demanding careers in IT. Free Run is not a side project — it's what the careers exist to support. Every grape tended, every glass poured, every Sunday afternoon on the patio is an expression of the life they've chosen to live here.

Listen · If Vines Could Talk
Episode 108: Trish and Prashanth on Spotify

This is our home
Free Run is where we live, where our kids grow up, and where we've chosen to invest everything we have. That's not a marketing line: it changes how we treat every person who walks in.
Small batch, by choice
We curate wines from Lake Michigan Shore and beyond — small-batch bottles from growers we believe in. Quality over volume, every time.
Everyone is welcome
Family, dogs, designated drivers, first-time wine drinkers. No pretension, no dress code, no attitude. Just good wine and genuine hospitality.
The land matters
Three acres of Pinot Gris vines, a pond, walnut trees lining the drive. We tend this land because we believe what grows here — and how it's tended — ends up in the glass.