Wine Tasting In the Finger Lakes at Lakewood Vineyards

As you can tell, we are finally back to wine blogging and have a lot to catch up. With Covid going through its ebbs and flows, we’ve finally had a chance to get out and visit a few places and we’ve also been doing a lot of behind the scenes work on the site which we will be rolling out in 2022 so stay tuned. Now…back to the actual wine blog…

Several years ago, a friend sent us a few bottles of Riesling from the Finger Lakes area in upstate New York.

We had really begun to appreciate some of the European Rieslings, but our local experience had been limited to the overly sweet ones that most of California makes…all residual sugar (RS), no crisp acidity on the back and very limited in what you could pair with them for a meal. These wines, from Wagner Vineyards on Lake Seneca, were a revelation, reminding us of some of the best we had enjoyed from both Alsace and the Mosel River region of Germany. Since then, the Finger Lakes wine region has been high on our bucket list to visit.

Enter Covid in 2020 which, we can all agree, was a 10 out of 10 on the suckage scale. To date we have had to postpone or cancel two trips to Europe, and we were starting to go a little stir crazy (or at least I was). We wanted to travel but with the Delta variant surging through Europe, there was possible risk of turning an Italian vacation into two-weeks sequestered in an expensive quarantine hotel…again…very high on the suckage scale. We finally decided that travelling in the US was a safer bet. We’ve also wanted to see real Fall color for the better part of 20 years, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to taste some really good wine and see the Autumnal color during the same trip. Canada had also just opened up to tourism and Karen has had Niagara Falls on her bucket list since she was young, so we were able to check a few items off the “Things to Do Before We Die List”.

We decided to start in Maine to see the coastline and then head to Boston and from there, set out due west to the Finger Lakes. Trying to guess when the Fall color will peak is only slightly easier than betting on futures in the crypto market but with 2 ½ weeks in both coastal and inland regions, we were bound to hit some color.

We won’t focus too much on Maine and Boston other than to say, Maine is seriously cool with lots of small towns, stunning coastal views and really good microbrews (hey…man doesn’t live on wine alone, but a woman will…Karen does…she inserted that by the way). I assume the seafood was good because Karen seemed pretty content because every meal had “lobster something”. I, on the other hand, can’t stand seafood. My problem with seafood…it all tastes like it came out of the sea…funny how that works. I despise that flavor, but if she was happy, I was good with it. 28 years of marriage and I’ve got that one figured out at least. It’s about the only thing I’ve figured out though.

We drove to Boston in the middle of a Nor Easter, which made for crappy driving, minimal sightseeing and a number of wet days afterward.  Boston’s great…the weather on that trip…not so much and an additional quick hint for other travelers to the Boston area, avoid Salem anytime around Halloween.  It’s when the crazies come out, but we didn’t know that at the time we booked our trip.  When was our trip? on October 29th of course.  On the trip from Boston to Finger Lakes, it even snowed a little over the Berkshires which we think was their first snow of the year. We decided to make our base in the village of Watkins Glen. Some of you may know it as the home of one of the most famous racetracks in the US but it also sits in the heart of the Finger Lakes wine region and is a cool little town. There are quite a few waterfalls and hiking trails in the area and our plan was to hike in the morning and wine taste in the afternoon. Unfortunately, five days of rain put a damper on the hiking because the trails had turned to bogs and the famous gorge trail was closed for the season. We were able to visit a couple, but most were off limits.  Damn…I guess we would just have to taste more wine.

The first evening, we stumbled onto a local wine bar and restaurant called Graft, a curious name for an exceptional place. They have a broad selection of local wines and a super friendly staff. We got some great ideas of where to taste over the next few days, so it was a real find considering most of the places had closed due to a combination of covid and the slow tourist season. The menu also looked great, so we ate there a couple of days later. We weren’t disappointed so we would highly recommend it.

The next day, after going for our mandatory Covid test to get into Canada (which entailed 3 hours of driving…upstate New York is sparsely populated), we still had time to visit Lakewood Winery, one of the closer ones to Watkins Glen.

We had a great host, Terence, who was a sommelier in New York City in a previous life. We tasted a wide variety of wines, but the Dry Riesling and the Pinot Gris were the highlights. This was also the first time that we stumbled upon a recurring theme for the region. Many of the wineries use very different grapes than those used in warmer climates which makes sense given the harsh winter conditions and shorter growing season. Lakewood produced an interesting blend called “Long Stem White”. It’s made up of the ever-present Riesling and two unusual grape varieties, Cayuga White and Vidal Blanc. Cayuga White was hybridized at Cornell University, which sits in the town of Ithaca at the base of one of the Finger Lakes, and it is a frequent contributor to blends in the area. Vidal Blanc is very infrequently used in its native France but has found a home in the Finger Lakes. They also make a Lemberger, also known as Blaufrankisch, a German red wine that does well in colder climates. I’m still trying to get my head around it, but the real surprise was the Pinot Noir. It was light, well balanced and thoroughly enjoyable. Pinot Noir needs cool evenings to produce good fruit and unlike much of the East Coast that retains nighttime heat, the Finger Lakes area cools down in the evening, often into the low 60s or high 50s which is great for Pinot.

If you are interested in Finger Lakes wines, check out our upcoming series on a number of wineries in addition to an unexpected find in Ontario, Canada.