The deck behind the John Alexander Wheat Warehouse is new this year. So is the second small building beside it, done up as an 1880s apothecary. Walk up South Janesville Street on a Friday evening in July and you can hear a guitar working through a set list, smell a flatbread coming out of the kitchen, and see a line of people waiting for a table that did not exist twelve months ago. The address is the same one Milton residents have been passing for more than 175 years. Almost everything happening inside it is not.
If you have driven by and wondered whether Rubber Ducky Winery & Country Market is really Northleaf under a new sign, the answer is yes and no. The wines still come from Gail Nordlof's recipes. The building is still the 1850 grout warehouse. The reason it now takes a reservation to sit down on a Friday is a much bigger story, and it is worth knowing if you live here.
What actually changed in May 2025
In May 2025, Joelle and Jason Dalke took the reins as owners of the winery that had operated as Northleaf since February 2009, when NorthLeaf opened its doors as the first winery in Milton. The Dalkes were not out-of-town buyers with a five-year plan. Their business began in 2020 with a farm stand on their lawn in Twin Lakes and grew into a year-round country market, pizzeria, and wine bar before they moved the operation north.
They kept the part that mattered. The Northleaf wines are still made using the same recipes Gail Nordlof used for 16 years, because, as Jason put it, they are not there to change something that is not broken. What they added is a second and third act around the tasting room. The first Rubber Ducky label, a Key Lime Sauvignon Blanc, was ready within about 30 days of the takeover, with a Watermelon White Zinfandel to follow, and the sweeter Rubber Ducky bottles now sit on the same shelves as the classic Northleaf reds.
"For us, it's joy," Jason told the Milton Courier last year. "For the customer, it's about our giving you an amazing experience."
That sentence is doing a lot of work. The old Northleaf was a tasting room with a taproom next door. What the Dalkes are building is closer to a small campus.
Three rooms, one address
The reason a Friday evening at 232 S. Janesville now takes planning is that the property has quietly become three venues that share a parking lot.
- The winery tasting room in the original 1850 warehouse, where the Northleaf flights still anchor the menu. Nearly all of the 36 wines currently available have earned multiple awards at international competitions, and reservations are recommended for wine flights, especially on weekends.
- The Duckery Lounge, which the Dalkes opened inside the winery building itself. Costumed servers behind the bar use unusual ingredients in their drinks, and the drinks are not called cocktails but elixirs, with an actor playing H. M. Haven as the lead character in the stories that unfold.
- Haven House, the small building next door. Haven's Dinner Party is a three-course meal paired with three artisan cocktails inside the historic 1870s Haven House, with costumed actors bringing an apothecary's story to life around the guests, and every show a new story.
The outdoor piece is what changed the traffic pattern this summer. Additional seating is often available on the deck, which opened in June, when the weather is nice. The winery's deck faces the back lot, so on a warm evening the live music carries out toward the produce stands the Dalkes set up behind the parking area, where four stands sell produce from local farmers in Rock and nearby counties.
The Friday night that Milton didn't have a year ago
Line up what happens in Milton on a Friday between six and nine in July and you can see how the town's evening shifted.
At The Gathering Place a few blocks away, the 2026 Summer Concert Series runs with concessions and bar open at 5 p.m. and the concert from 6:30 to 8 p.m. on the Gathering Green, with a 50/50 raffle split between The Gathering Place and the winner, sponsored by the Milton Fund. Families walk over from the Goodrich Square Splash Pad, which the city reopened this summer and runs daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., with bikes not allowed on the pad.
At the same time on the same street, Rubber Ducky, formerly Northleaf, offers live music every Friday with performances by local musicians. Friday hours run from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., the latest hours of the week, which means the concert crowd at The Gathering Place can walk over afterward and still catch the end of a set on the deck. That was not a routine that existed under the old model, when the tasting room closed earlier and the deck did not exist.
If you have not been down since spring, the shape of a summer Friday in Milton has genuinely changed. It is not a matter of a new sign. It is a matter of what is open, and until when.
The building itself is a Milton story
One reason all of this matters more than a normal restaurant opening is the building. The warehouse was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 as part of the country's largest collection of grout buildings, and in 1994 it was donated to the Milton Historical Society to ensure its preservation. The grout construction is the same limestone-and-mortar technique that Joseph Goodrich used across the street at what is now the Milton House Museum, which is why the two buildings feel structurally related when you stand between them.
The Nordlof family acquired the building in 2007 and invested in major structural restoration, with visible steel rods and black bolts that are part of a reinforcement system that now literally suspends the building from a protective steel skeleton. That is the metal you see overhead when you look up from a tasting. The Dalkes inherited a building that was already structurally rescued, which is part of what freed them to spend on the interior and on the Haven House side.
The other piece of local context worth naming: the winery sits on the Ice Age National Scenic Trail and is a supporter of it. If you have hiked the section that comes into Milton from the north, you have effectively walked past the back of the deck.
A few practical notes if you have not been back yet
The summer schedule is different enough that a few specifics are worth knowing before you drive over.
- Weeknight hours are longer than they used to be. Monday through Thursday runs 12 to 7 p.m., with Saturday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Deck seating is first-come during the day, but Friday live music has been filling the room to standing. Reserving a table is free by phone.
- Haven's Dinner Party runs biweekly and is ticketed separately from the winery. It is not a walk-in.
- The country market at the back of the property sells produce and pantry goods and is a reason to stop by even if you are not drinking.
None of this is meant as a review. It is meant as an update, because the last mental picture most Milton residents have of this address is probably the quieter Northleaf of 2019 or 2022, and that picture is out of date.
Why it matters for the block
Milton's downtown has been in a slow rearrangement for a couple of years, with the Merchant Row streetscape project working through its final surface and marking phases this summer under TID No. 7. What Rubber Ducky is doing at 232 S. Janesville is the kind of anchor use that makes the rest of that public investment pencil out. A tasting room that closes at seven does not keep the sidewalks busy after dinner. A three-venue property with music, a lounge, and a dinner theater does. Whether or not you drink wine, if you own a home nearby, the change matters. Foot traffic on a summer Friday is what keeps the small storefronts on Merchant Row full through the winter.
If you have been meaning to see what all the yellow ducks in the windows are about, this is the summer to walk over. The wines you remember are still there. The rest of it is new.
Let's Connect
Ashley grew up watching Milton's downtown reinvent itself one building at a time, and part of the work of representing buyers and sellers here is knowing which corners are quietly getting more interesting. If you are thinking through a move in Milton or anywhere across South Central Wisconsin and want a straight conversation about what your neighborhood is actually doing, Ashley Nelson is glad to sit down. No pressure, no pitch, just local knowledge and a plan that fits how you actually live here.
