BY MIKE WARREN
EDITOR

MILLADORE – When Rocky and Karmin Bolder’s four children were all through graduating from Auburndale High School, their days of sitting on bleachers at sporting events were over. Little did the Milladore couple know their next pastime would also figure in to their retirement plans.

“Once the girls went to college, I needed a life because we sat in a gym, so I finally met my husband again and we started touring wineries,” explained Karmin Bolder, pertaining to how the couple’s wine-making adventure began.

“The people that do wineries are very good at networking,” Karmin told us, during our May 17 visit to The Empty Nest Winery. “We spent a lot of time in peoples’ back rooms. We went to The Lil’ Ole Winemaker in Wausau and we watched a video and he showed us how to make wine and we started to make wine. We did it with another couple for a couple years and then COVID hit and we bought them out,” Bolder added. “We opened this past December. Probably the December prior to that we decided, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do this. We’re going to put a building up and we’re going to look at retiring.’”

The couple learned and practiced how to make wine and toured other wineries for five years before officially opening The Empty Nest on Dec. 1, 2023.   

“She had a book and we would just, as a husband and wife, we’d open it up and say, ‘Okay, let’s go to these three wineries this Saturday,’ so we would do that,” Rocky Bolder recalled. “And by seeing a fair amount of wineries, from the monster down at Wollersheim to someone’s garage and everything in between, she just got the idea that, ‘Hey, we could do this.’ I dug my heels in a little at first until I wrapped my head around, ‘Okay, is it a retirement gig? Okay.’ And after seeing a lot of these different places and seeing them successful, it was basically an ‘If you build it, they will come’ type of a thing, because the other thing we noticed by seeing these places was ages,” Rocky added. “Soup to nuts. Young people to older people and everything in between.”

Once Rocky and Karmin decided to move ahead with their plans, they quickly realized they needed to put up a new building. After the core facility was built, the family finished off the interior themselves, sourcing all of the wood from the woods on their 80-acre property. The wood on the front of the bar was left over from when the couple built their nearby home 24 years ago. They still have some landscaping to do, and would someday like to add an overlook along the pond adjacent to the winery, which currently features some outdoor seating.

Besides eighteen varieties of sweet wines, The Empty Nest also has six dry wines. They also serve pizza, pizza fries, pretzels and cheese and sausage trays.

As for entertainment, free Bingo is offered every Thursday night from 6 to 8 p.m. Sundays feature various craft and paint parties. Live music is featured throughout the summer. The facility – which can hold up to 80 people – is also available for corporate events, bridal showers, Christmas parties and more.

“Tell us what you want and we’ll see what we can do for you,” says Karmin.

The business also has a website and Facebook page. Current hours are Thursdays from 4 to 8 p.m., Fridays from 2 to 8 p.m., Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sundays from 11 to 5. Central Wisconsin’s newest winery is located 12 miles east of Marshfield, 21 miles north of Wisconsin Rapids, 23 miles northwest of Stevens Point and less than 40 miles southwest of Wausau.

And so far, so good, says the couple.

“We always set a goal and we’ve met that goal every weekend,” Karmin told us.    

Meanwhile, the Merrill natives still work their fulltime jobs. Rocky is a 29-year veteran of the Portage County Sheriff’s Department, where he is currently the Superintendent of the Juvenile Detention Center. Karmin is currently a cardiology nurse at the Marshfield Medical Center, where she’s worked for 30 years. Retirement, they say, should come within the next year to two.

Three of the couple’s four children – Kaleb, Hannah and Rachel – work at the winery periodically. Ben, the oldest, lives in Randolph about two hours away. Hannah, a Phy. Ed. teacher in Marshfield, is living at home while she saves for a house of her own. Kaleb and Rachel are nearby.

But even when they are not in the winery helping out with a special event or during a busy weekend, you can always find them watching over Mom and Dad. On the wine label, they’re the four birds perched above the couple under a heart amongst the branches of two trees, high school sweethearts who have once again found each other – not in a noisy high school gymnasium, but in that not-quite-empty nest on Smokey Hill Road in Milladore, as their game plan for retirement begins to play itself out.