FLX: Finger Lakes Extravaganza – Part VI

29 05 2016

Well, we made it.  When I started this trip recap I wasn’t thinking it would be a 15,000-word Greek epic, but that’s what happens when an area has so many stories to tell that so many people may not have heard.  To retrace your steps:

Finger Lakes Intro & Conclusions
Part I – Long Island, Hudson River, Dr. Frank
Part II – Keuka Spring, Chateau Lafayette Reneau
Part III – Red Newt, Knapp Winery
Part IV – Hermann J. Wiemer, Lamoreaux Landing
Part V – Boundary Breaks, Anthony Road

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Our last winery visit was probably also our most anticlimactic, but only because it felt for many reasons like Fox Run Vineyards had been with us all along.  In many ways Fox Run was the catalyst for our whole trip, the Finger Lakes producer with the deepest and most established Alberta presence, to the point where its unoaked Doyle Vineyard Chardonnay was recently selected as the official on-venue house white of the 2016 Calgary Stampede.  A key piece of the winery had literally accompanied us on nearly every stop of our grand FLX winery bus tour:  Sales Manager Dan Mitchell had given us the scoop and filled in the blanks about the region and the wineries who hosted us, never once seeking to undermine any one of them in favour of his own employer, delivering honest yet community-minded feedback that gave us a better sense of what the Finger Lakes were all about than any tasting room.  Winemaker Peter Bell was almost a mythical figure, his impact and his protégées spread across the entire region, his reputation eagerly preceding him even though he is certainly not the kind of person who would revel in it. Read the rest of this entry »


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FLX: Finger Lakes Extravaganza – Part V

28 05 2016

Roll call for the previous chapters in this saga:

Finger Lakes Intro & Conclusions
Part I – Long Island, Hudson River, Dr. Frank
Part II – Keuka Spring, Chateau Lafayette Reneau
Part III – Red Newt, Knapp Winery
Part IV – Hermann J. Wiemer, Lamoreaux Landing

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Kees Stapel, Boundary Breaks Vineyard

Ten wineries into our multi-day tasting tour of the Finger Lakes, we continued along the eastern shoreline of Seneca Lake for a different kind of meeting with a different kind of winery.  Rather than gather around a tasting room counter with a winemaker, we were told to head out to the vines at Boundary Breaks Vineyard for a grape-growing lesson with the winery’s conscientious viticulturist, Vineyard Manager Kees Stapel.  He is such an integral part of what Boundary Breaks is all about that he is the very first person listed and pictured in the list of personnel on the winery website; owner and president Bruce Murray doesn’t mention himself at all.  This unusual (but laudable) level of marketing focus on the vineyard team is partly because Boundary Breaks is a winery without a winemaker:  it was founded based on its vineyard, planted in 2008 to four different Riesling clones on an ideal sloped, breezy, sunny, west-facing site arcing gently downward to the lake.  It only makes Riesling and focuses its energies on only five different bottlings, which are presently vinified by Red Newt winemaker and FLX Riesling star Kelby James Russell. Read the rest of this entry »


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FLX: Finger Lakes Extravaganza – Part IV

27 05 2016

To start from the start of this tale of adventure, click in order:

Finger Lakes Intro & Conclusions
Part I – Long Island, Hudson River, Dr. Frank
Part II – Keuka Spring, Chateau Lafayette Reneau
Part III – Red Newt, Knapp Winery

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The morning of Tasting Day 3 started at the home of another FLX pioneer.  If you had heard of two Finger Lakes wineries before this travelogue (travelblogue?), I would be willing to bet they were Dr. Konstantin Frank (which we visited in Part I) and Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard, another winery started by a European immigrant to the FLX with a prescient belief in the potential of vinifera grapes in the region.  In this case, Hermann Wiemer came to New York State from Bernkastel, Germany, about as close to Riesling Mecca as you can get in the world, and he was convinced that both he and his national grape could be successful transplants in the region.  He planted his first Riesling vineyard, the eponymous HJW Vineyard, on the western shores of Seneca Lake in 1976 and established his winery right beside it in 1979.  Thirty-seven years later, there we were. Read the rest of this entry »


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FLX: Finger Lakes Extravaganza – Part III

24 05 2016

In case you missed the prequels, click here:

Finger Lakes Intro & Conclusions
Part I – Long Island, Hudson River, Dr. Frank
Part II – Keuka Spring, Chateau Lafayette Reneau

We remained on eastern Seneca after the morning views of Chateau Lafayette Reneau, taking a quick jaunt north to one of the best-known new-era Finger Lakes wineries, Red Newt Cellars Winery & Bistro.  I first read about the growth of Red Newt’s legend around the same time it experienced its greatest tragedy, in 2011, when co-founder and executive chef Debra Whiting was killed in a car accident.  Her husband, Red Newt founding winemaker David Whiting, forged on, turning the winery into one of the few in the Finger Lakes with an international reputation.  He remains in charge as Red Newt’s president, but has recently turned the winemaking reins over to a cerebral, unassuming twentysomething who might already be one of the best Riesling winemakers in North America:  Kelby James Russell, a homecoming son now squarely on the global Riesling vanguard.

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David Whiting and Kelby James Russell, Red Newt.

Russell was born and raised in and around the Finger Lakes area but found a good reason to leave:  Harvard.  He graduated with a major in Government (poli sci grads unite!) and a minor in Economics but then sought a job in orchestra management to soothe an ongoing passion for music.  A trip to Italy ignited a love of wine, however, and Russell returned home to work a harvest with Fox Run Vineyards in 2009.  After three years there and an equal number of off-season harvests in the Southern Hemisphere (Marlborough, Tasmania and Barossa), he moved to Red Newt to assume the head winemaker mantle at the venerable age of 25 and almost immediately started pushing the boundaries of New World Riesling. Read the rest of this entry »


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FLX: Finger Lakes Extravaganza – Part II

23 05 2016

In case you missed the previous chapters of this tale, check out the Intro & Conclusions from my Finger Lakes trip here and Part I of the tasting journey here.

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August Deimel, Keuka Spring Vineyards

After leaving the western shores of Keuka Lake and the bar-setting wines of Dr. Konstantin Frank, we did a loop around the lake and landed at our only other Keuka stop, the aptly named Keuka Spring Vineyards.  If Dr. Frank was a reverential nod to the Finger Lakes’ past, Keuka Spring was a thrilling glimpse at its future, primarily thanks to its young, supremely talented and boundary-pushing winemaker August Deimel.  We were fortunate enough to have him lead us through a tasting of both current releases in the front of the house and experimental tank samples in the back, throughout which the only sound other than August’s compelling narrative was that of paradigms shifting. Read the rest of this entry »


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FLX: Finger Lakes Extravaganza – Part I

22 05 2016

If you’re a fan of stage-setting or want a little more background info about what the Finger Lakes are all about, start here with this intro post.  Otherwise read on for the first breakdown of what went down over our four days of visiting and tasting in FLX, NY.

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We ironically spent our first actual tasting in the Finger Lakes trying New York State wines from anywhere but.  We disembarked at the beautiful New York Wine and Culinary Center in Canandaigua, on the northern shores of the lake of the same name, which featured a built-in tasting classroom, professional learning kitchen, bistro and wine shop. There we tasted and were educated about a variety of wines from two other major New York AVAs, the Hudson River region due north of NYC and the Long Island AVA on the eastern half of Long Island.  Two winery representatives made a long early-morning trek to guide us through their wares. Read the rest of this entry »


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