Visit the FINGER LAKES NEW YORK WINE REGION | V is for Vino - America's #1 Wine Show (full episode)

Ah, the Finger Lakes. The perfect destination for fishing, boating, hiking. Unless, of course, you come in the dead of winter, at which point your activities may change a bit. But don't panic. The Finger Lakes are just as enjoyable and breathtaking in the winter cold as they are during the hot summer months. More importantly, they're home to one of the most iconic, misunderstood, and versatile grape varieties around. And, much like the Midwesterner in me, it happens not to mind a little cold weather. I'm talking, of course, about Riesling. Welcome to the Finger Lakes, and welcome to V is for Vino. Hey, welcome to New York. Vince, don't do that. Alright. Welcome to the Finger Lakes, and welcome to New York, the empire state that, believe it or not, is third in the country when it comes to wine-producing states. Another fun fact, New York grows a lot of Concord grapes, grapes for grape juice and jelly. They're second in the country for that. But I didn't come here today to talk about PB&J sandwiches. I'm talking about Vitis vinifera, which are grapes for high-quality wines. And the majority of New York's wine grapes are made here in the Finger Lakes. They make wine in other areas in New York, but the Finger Lakes is by far the most influential. The region is about a five-hour drive from New York City, close to Rochester, Syracuse, and Ithaca. It has 11 lakes, which all make up the Finger Lakes AVA, but most of the wineries are in the three main lakes, Cayuga, Cuca, and Seneca. On top of that, Cayuga and Seneca Lake both have their own AVA designations, an added bonus for the two largest lakes. Obviously, the lakes are the big draw here. During summer months, the region is a popular destination for all kinds of outdoor and water activities. Not so obvious is the important role that lakes play in wine growing. They help retain heat and moderate climate for the vines. But the big story here, and I'm talking glacier-size big, is how these lakes even came to be in the first place. A few million years ago, during one of the ice ages, giant glacial ice sheets were slowly moving south, melting, and then receding back north. These glaciers carved out U-shaped troughs through valleys, causing them to deepen, a process known as glacial scouring. This cycle would happen several times due to variations in climate, the most recent occurrence happening about 20,000 years ago, when ice covered most of New York. The weight and pressure from the continuous scouring essentially carved out giant valleys into the earth, and the ice melted for the last time about 10,000 years ago. The valleys filled with water, and just like that, the Finger Lakes were born. And lucky for us, it doesn't look like there's another ice age in the forecast anytime soon. I always like to get my bearings with the local when I travel, so I met my buddy Eric, a western New York native, at Watkins Glen State Park to learn a bit more about what makes the Finger Lakes such a great place to call home. All right, well, we made it to wine country, I guess. This is, that's what's cool about this part of the world, though, this part of the country, is that they found a way to grow grapes here somehow. Yeah, I think the perseverance and hard work and the collaborative spirit has made it all happen. Sure, and you grew up here? I did, I did. I grew up about 20 minutes south of Watkins Glen. The summertime, obviously, I have to imagine the lakes are the big attraction. Sure, sure. Between getting out on a boat or just enjoying the water. Water activities, fishing, all that, but then you come in the winter and you can still see these parks are amazing. I mean, these were formed, essentially, by the glacier that came through here. Yeah, no, absolutely. Talk about perseverance, you know, and just slow-moving ice through the region that carved out all these valleys and created waterfalls and lakes and rivers. Yeah, and that's what's cool, is you get these peppered waterfalls all throughout these 11 lakes. The glen that we have that we're kind of walking through now, and then, obviously, the lakes themselves, which lend themselves to the winemaking. You know, the summertime, obviously, it's lush and green, and there's a lot of activity and a lot of people around, and then you go into the fall and you have these vibrant colors to then, we get into winter, and you have, you know, the ice of the waterfalls. It's just, to me, it's majestic all year round. Yeah. Except for maybe spring. That's mud season. That's, you know, maybe not so much. What do people love so much about this place that, you know, like, you came back here, you chose to live here, and, you know, obviously, winemakers are drawn here. What's so special about this place? It's just laid back, and there is a community spirit here, you know, amongst everybody and, you know, helping out when needed, and it's, you know, that blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth type of people are right here. You know, just to go to a little, you know, brewery or a winery, and there's live music, and you just got an incredible amount of artists in the area, and that, again, that creative spirit, and that also goes into, you know, making the wine. People think of wine country, and, you know, they think of places in California. This makes a completely different style of wine. It's a lot of fun. Yeah, you're getting, you know, a lot of cool climate reds, you know, from, you know, German varietals, whether the Blau-Frankisch-Lemberger, you know, you got Cabernet Francs, and then, obviously, the Riesling is what, I think, put the Finger Lakes on the map. He's right. Riesling is definitely the main story here and the reason for our visit, but to understand how wine grapes found their way to New York, we need to understand a little wine history. Time for a quick wine story. You might not have known this, but in the 1850s, Europe's entire wine scene was almost completely wiped out. And even worse, it was kind of America's fault. In the mid-19th century, a group of botanists decided to experiment. They took American grape vines all the way to Europe, planted them, and watched to see how they'd perform. The American vines that they brought were not Vitis vinifera, which is what makes 99% of all the wines that we know and love to drink. The vines they brought were actually from the species that produce grape juice, jelly, and poor attempts at wine. Little did they know, their American vines had a hitchhiker on them, a microscopic root louse, or bug, called Phylloxera, which would prove to be the archenemy of all things wine. These little bugs suck the sap out of the roots of a vine and simultaneously destroy the entire vine in the process, preventing it from absorbing water and nutrients. And from 1850 to 1870, these little hitchhiking pests spread all over France and Europe, killing 40% of French vines. French winemakers watched helplessly as their vines were devastated and had no idea why. Hold my wine. It gets worse. The problem started spreading all across Europe. Businesses were lost, wages stagnated, and no one had a solution. The French government offered the equivalent of a million dollars to anyone who could find the answer. Turns out, to solve an American-made problem, you need an American-made solution. French and American scientists eventually figured out that American vines were mostly resistant to Phylloxera. But remember, these American vines produce poor grapes that can't really be used for wine. But in that lied the answer. Graft the European vines onto the American rootstock. A graft combines the root of one plant with the upper part of another. A transplant for plants, if you will. This way, you have Phylloxera-resistant roots safely on the bottom and high-quality Vitis vinifera grapes growing on top. Today, almost all of the world's vines are planted on American rootstock. A happy ending to an almost disastrous story of how American vines nearly killed, but ultimately saved, the wine world. The knowledge of grafting vines that was gained during the Phylloxera era has served the wine world well. And one of the best examples of that is right here in New York. While the wine industry is full of amazing people and stories, the tale of Dr. Constantine Frank is one of my favorites. You see, the Finger Lakes is a wine region that almost didn't exist without the persistence of one man who happens to be a bit of a local hero in this part of the world. So I met with Megan Frank, great-granddaughter of Dr. Constantine Frank, to hear more about his incredible story. This place, this is cool. This cellar is amazing. Yeah, we're in a very historic stone cellar where we produce exclusively sparkling wine. So you can see the bottles stacked six rows back. Literally thousands of bottles just resting here waiting for the process to take hold. And they still have many years before release. So, really fun. But yeah, I'd love to share with you the story of my great-grandfather. So, Constantine actually immigrated here from Ukraine. He was a World War II refugee. He earned a Ph.D. in Viticulture from the Polytechnic University of Odessa. And his thesis was on growing vinifera, the European varieties, in cold climates. Something that would perfectly set him up for what he would accomplish in the Finger Lakes. Constantine arrived here, you know, he was 52 years old. He didn't speak a word of English. Oh, he was 52 when he arrived. Yes. I don't know why I thought he was younger. He was 52. He lived a full life. He lived a full life, yeah. So, at the age when many people would think of retiring, he started a whole new venture. Constantine realized, okay, there is a booming wine industry here, but there's no vinifera. There's no Riesling, no Chardonnay, you know, no Pinot Noir. Where are those varieties? Yeah, the ones that were being grown here were what? They were Concord, Catawba, Niagara. Stuff that makes mediocre to poor wine, basically. sure, sure. Yeah, more things we would associate with jams or jellies today. And Constantine was really unsettled by this and he was asking researchers, why is this? And they said, oh, it's too cold. And he said, that's not true because in Russia, he would say, your spit would freeze before it hit the ground. It was so cold in the winter that there's no way that that's the reason why. Because he had seen vinifera grown in Russia. That's right. And he's going, I've seen this done. There's a way to do it. And everybody here is going, no, you can't. Exactly. And he knew it wasn't due to the cold. But the problem that he faced in Russia kind of resurfaced back and he thought, maybe it's phylloxera. So everybody essentially, he took that knowledge that he gained from battling phylloxera in Europe and he comes here and everybody's going, we can't grow vinifera because it's too cold. And he's going, no, that's not the reason. It's phylloxera. I'm going to show you. I'm going to prove it to you. Exactly. And the technique that he used, which was commonplace in Europe, which was grafting American rootstock with European, the European vine, like a puzzle piece, that was successful to avoiding phylloxera. So he purchased a hundred acres of land and began planting every vinifera variety he could think of because he had to prove to everybody that it was possible. And essentially, I mean, this region doesn't exist without him. You know, it's not just because nobody believed that you could do it. That's a very American dream story. Like, you know, flees from World War II, Russia, and I think you said Russian Revolution was part of his life and comes here and starts this and sees it succeed through generations is about the coolest thing that could have happened. Ironically, he was actually born on the 4th of July and he was really patriotic, you know, towards the end of his life. And he, he would say all the time, you Americans deserve only excellence. And he truly believed that. You know, he wanted our region to succeed. He wanted his neighbors to succeed. And he really created this sort of revolution here. You know what you sound like? You sound like a missionary. We haven't talked to Riesling on the show yet, so let's get up to speed before we start tasting. Riesling vines are cool with cold weather, which is a good thing. Clearly. It's an aromatic grape varietal, which means the aromas tend to leap out of the glass, especially floral aromas like white flower, lily, and jasmine. Riesling is also similar to Pinot Noir in the sense that it really takes on the ground that it comes from and often has clean, crisp, slate, or mineral qualities. Depending on the ripeness of the grapes and the amount of residual sugar in the wine, the other flavors range from tart citrus and green apple to stone fruits and pears to tropical fruits like mango and pineapple. But those are all fairly common white wine flavors. Let's talk about what makes Riesling really fun, shall we? I've been saving the Riesling talk with you until you're old enough. And I think you're finally ready. You see, Riesling is one of every sommelier's favorite grapes for three reasons. Versatility, pairability, and ageability. Those are all words, right? Let's start with versatility. If your first thought is that Riesling is a sweet, sticky wine, we're going to turn that notion on its head. Yes, Riesling can be sweet, but it also can be done completely bone dry. Or off dry, which means a little sweet. Or sparkling. Or super sweet, dessert style. You see, sweetness is a winemaker choice. It has nothing to do with the grape. More importantly, if a wine has enough acid, like good Rieslings do, the acid balances out the sugar and keeps the wine fresh instead of cloying and syrupy. This means there's a style of Riesling for everybody. Okay, number two. Pairability. Because Riesling has a crisp, super high acidity, it can pair with salty foods, fatty foods, and acidic foods. When a Riesling has sugar in it, add spicy foods and sweet foods to that list. That's almost all the foods. And number three, ageability. Wines need two out of three elements to age. Acid, sugar, or tannin. Because of the sugar and acid content in Riesling, it's one of the few white wines that can age really, really well. Top wines can age 30 plus years. And with age comes tasting notes of beeswax, honey, ginger, dried fruits, hazelnut, and most importantly, gasoline. You heard me right. Diesel. Petrol. I know it sounds crazy, but trust me, once you try it, you're going to be looking for it in all your Rieslings. Alright, game plan. We've got three lakes to see, three wineries to visit, one on each lake, and a bunch of wine to taste. We're starting on Kuka Lake to taste the legacy of Dr. Konstantin Frank. So Kuka's a really special lake. It's actually the exact middle finger lake. And why was this the lake selected to plant? So Konstantin, when he moved here, you know, he was really enticed with especially the soil types found here in Kuka because you have really rocky acidic soils. Okay. Which is perfect for what he wanted. The story is that he picked up a handful of soil and said, good soil. And that was all he needed. This was before you took it to a lab and get tested. You just had to kind of, yeah, this looks good to me. Exactly. So this is our Celeb. So this is 100% sparkling Riesling made in the traditional method. And what do you mean when you say traditional method? Yes. So same method as if we were in Champagne, France. Okay. But since we're in the Finger Lakes, we call it traditional method. Essentially, every bottle goes through a secondary fermentation in this same bottle. So this same bottle that you purchase and consume, everything happens in here, which is super unique and interesting. Which is where the bubbles happen. Exactly. So basically, the carbon dioxide is trapped after the secondary fermentation and re-dissolves into the wine. And we like to age the wine with the leaves or the dead yeast cells. This wine for two years, but our other styles last up to 10 years. And that's where you get kind of the toasty, nutty kind of flavors. Sure, those characteristics we get with Champagne. Exactly. And then we basically have to get the sediment out of the bottle. So we riddle. The sediment is then in the neck. We freeze the neck, disgorge out the sediment, and top with a little reserved wine. I always tell people it's amazing every bottle that's done in the Champagne method is not like a $300 bottle. Exactly. Because the amount of work and time it takes, two years at least that you're aging for some of your lowers. Right. And then all that process that you have to do, and a lot of it has to be done manually. Right. It's a lot of work. It is, yeah. And I appreciate you saying that because it's certainly a labor of love. And the other thing too is it tends to produce really fine bubbles. I always say like Perrier versus Coca-Cola. Oh wow, so right on the nose I get the soil right away. Nice kind of like Granny Smith apple, but you also get some like baked apple as well. Very citric. And I think you're bringing out a little bit of that baked apple and more ripe character because I think there's a little residual sugar in this. There is. Yeah. So it's 3%, 30 grams per liter, so it really rounds out the acidity. And we're talking very high acidity, like 11 grams per liter, so that's crazy off the charts. So to balance it, that little bit of sweetness really helps. Minimal amount of residual sugar to round out the acidity, but it's not sweet. Exactly. And that's not to say you couldn't make it sweet. There are a lot of sweet wines. As to the versatility of Riesling is one of its like best qualities. I totally agree. And that's what you certainly find in the Finger Lakes. There's a multitude of different styles ranging from, you know, bone dry to dessert sweet, ice wine, you know, botrytis wines, and then everything in the middle. Yeah. Sparkling wine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so next we have Eugenia. So this is my great-grandmother, so wine paying tribute to her, so Constantine's wife. So one of the oldest blacks of Riesling in America. Again, very slaty, rocky soil, so you get a very mineral focus to this wine. That's our driest Riesling that we produce. Okay. Very in line with her personality. She loves her a lot. She, you know, Russian Revolution, Bold War of Wars. Oh, cool nose on this. Yeah, this is poppy. Yeah, lots of like grapefruit, grapefruit peel. Mm-hmm. And you know what I get on the palate is a really nice floral component. Mm-hmm. Like kind of, I don't know if it's like white flowers or violets, but really, really nice. And bone dry, completely bone dry. Electric acidity. Yeah. You know what Riesling does though more than I think a lot of other grapes is the acidity, it is high, but it's not a sour acidity. Sure. It integrates really well into the wine, I think better than other grapes. Agreed, yeah. And that's sort of a real hallmark to the variety and I think that's why, you know, Soms and you know, people in the trade absolutely love Riesling, like people tattoo Riesling on their arm like they love it so much. So it really is like an exciting variety for sure. This has been such a fun intro to the Finger Lakes and learning about your great grandfather's story and how he's helped basically turn this into what it is today. So thank you so much for having me. Thank you, Vince. Cheers. Come back soon. Cheers. Before we left Keuka Lake, a quick pit stop for some unfinished business. If you remember from our Oregon episode, I tried to catch a fish and failed. I've wanted to redeem myself ever since. Maybe it was a classic case of wrong place, wrong time. My friend John seemed to think so. So instead of summer, winter. Instead of a boat, how about a mile out on a frozen lake? Yeah, so last winter, this lake didn't freeze. Yeah. It's going to be consistently for a week in the teens and then wind, wind also helps the formation of the ice. Does snow help? No. Actually, snow insulates the ice. So you want cold and no snow and windy. Yes. And how thick is it about below us? Right now, it's about four or five inches. And obviously, it's fine, but it's a little scary. It's not that much. In the winter, the water is obviously cold. Different fish that you target like colder water. So like right now, we're targeting perch and bluegill. Those are cold water fish. They like cold water. There's a lot of people in New York that hate it here because it gets cold. The changing of seasons is what's really I love around this area. So if we get lucky, sometimes we'll, there's an airport right up here. There's a snow plane that comes up and lands out here. On the ice? Yeah, it's pretty cool. Oh, geez. I cannot, yeah, I cannot believe how many people are out here. Yeah. Yeah, there's usually more. This is cool. Yeah, it's wild. It's wild, dude, to be on the lake like this. Huh? Absolutely wild. Once we were far enough out, John got to work. He told me on clear days you could actually see the fish below the ice. But today, our best bet was just to pick a spot and go for it. We drilled our hole in the ice, set up camp, and dropped in our line, which gave me some time to chat with John. So most areas around here, they're small towns, small villages. No big cities around here, so most people around here grew up in a small town, and that's nice because with all the wineries, all the wineries know each other, and they're always helping each other out. Sure. So all these foreign people come here, they get to experience our wine. Everyone makes bonds and friendships with everybody here. I hear that so much in so many of these wine quote-unquote communities. It's exactly that. It's a community, and they help each other, and they can rely on each other for both resources and knowledge and whatever they might need. It's not so much a competition. It's more of the community coming together, and that's the reason why I think why our wine here is so good. After a few hours, I had to come to grips with the fact that my curse has yet to be lifted, and once again, I was going to leave empty-handed. You can blame me because anytime I try and film a fish on this show, they seem to scare off. They can hear us, I think. Usually when there's fish associated with wine, it's a nice meal. But I appreciate you taking us out either way. I mean, this was a blast, and this is so unique. I've never done anything like this. I've never, I've definitely never been out this far on ice, so this is awesome. Thank you so much. Absolutely, man. Cheers. Absolutely. Time for more tastings at Lake No. 2, Seneca Lake, which has more wineries than any of the other lakes. It's also the deepest and has a lot of the region's hotels and restaurants. Seneca Lake is also distinct enough to warrant its own AVA designation. I'm heading to Fox Run Vineyards to meet with Scott, who's a bit of an expert on the region's lakes and soils. From Rochester, but I came from, I learned the wine business in California, and I came back to visit family in 1984, decided to go wine tasting because I wanted to see what was going on here. Ended up at Wagner, and I tasted their 1982 Chardonnay, and it was like an epiphany. I just went, oh my God. That was it. I didn't know you could make wine like this, and it was refreshing, the crisp, you know, it was so food friendly. What it told me is that I can make wine here, and I can make that style of wine. Seneca Lake is one of the deepest lakes in the continental United States, and the last time it froze was 1912. So it acts, in the wintertime, like a 40 degree heater. Grape vines can withstand fairly extreme temperatures. Riesling can withstand minus 12. Okay. Well, if it wasn't for the lakes, we might see minus 20. Then you wouldn't be able to grow grapes here. Obviously, Riesling, Pinot Noir, both grapes that take on the soil character very well. Tell me about the soil. What is the typical soil here in the Finger Lakes? Well, there's pretty much not a typical soil in the Finger Lakes, because it turned out that 12,000 years ago, we had the shoreline of Lake Dana on our property. So you can see up by those trees is the shoreline of Lake Dana, and that's sandy loam soil, some schist in there, and then you can see those trees right over there. That's an old stream that's been here for 12,000 years. Well, that stream deposited all the sand down here, which they call a hanging delta. That is eight feet of sand with a very cool layer of clay that's pink, and it's fascinating to look at. And then right in here, which you can't see, this is all shale. What is involved is how much water you get. Drainage, sure. Drainage. How much sunlight you get. You know, there's all these different factors that come into this. With my primer on soil complete, we head inside to taste, starting with Fox Run's Sylvan Riesling. French term for in the woods. This is unusual wine because it's barrel fermented. You get the palate feel that we're looking for, so it makes it a little more elegant, but you still retain that incredible fruit character. Very good. Riesling is typically not done barrel. It's almost, I think, always done stainless, so you kind of found a way to get some of that mouth feel without sacrificing the freshness. What are the typical tasting notes you usually tell people when you're talking about this wine? Our philosophy is we want you to talk about it. All right, so I'll go first then. And I love that because you do tend to fall into a, oh yeah, I smell that because you told me to smell that. I taste that because you told me to taste it. And I know this is normally something we get from a little bit of age, and even though it's a young wine, I do get a little bit of the petrol on this nose for sure, which means as it developed, it's going to be even more enhanced, which I love. And that is fairly typical of good Finger Lakes Rieslings. You're going to see that petrol quality as you do in Germany. And nobody really understands where it comes from and why our Rieslings have more of it than California does or, you know, than Alsace. Like a spiced green herb or if it's maybe ginger or something to that effect. And this is where I have a hard time because I'm like, oh, eh, eh. I know, and I'm kind of getting like an orange land too a little bit, maybe like orange blossom. Or orange peel. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Very cool. Beautiful wine. Another one, semi-dry. All right. Now this is a house style. This is something we've been making from day one. It's about 2%, 2.1% residual sugar. This is wonderful with Thai food, Indian curry. Oh my God. Semi-dry Rieslings from the Finger Lakes, from the good producers, age forever. So it should be crisp and refreshing no matter how sweet it is. Yeah. If the balance is right, it'll always be refreshing. So explain to me how you decide when you go into a cellar, how you decide how sweet you're going to make, how much sugar you're going to leave in the wine. Well, we know, you know, in this particular wine, you know, we've been doing it for almost 30 years and so we know approximately when to stop the fermentation. And when you stop the fermentation, you do filtration or how do you stop the yeast? No, you turn the jackets on, chill them down at 30 degrees and that stops fermentation. Oh, so you bring it really cold and the yeast cannot eat. Yeah. Gotcha. And then you filter it. Yeah. Very good. We always talk about ripeness in the grapes when we talk about fruit character and what influences it, but you actually get the perception of riper fruit with sugar too. You know, the residual sugar kind of brings it a little more into the ripe land. Yeah. The tropical, there's a lot of peach and apricot flavors in it. Yeah. Yeah, beautiful stone fruit land. So when I left California, I was told I'll never make a red wine again. This is Cabernet Franc, which we think is a nice, cool climate red. They're much lighter in alcohol. They're not the big, ripe, alcoholic, tannic wines. But to me, they're a lot more food friendly. Cabernet Franc, to an extent, can be warm. I've seen it done warm. I prefer this style. Yeah. A hundred percent. Tasting this right away, Cabernet Franc, a lot of times, I get like a rosiness in the floral component, which is really nice. And I definitely get another quintessential what I look for in Cabernet Franc. I get like a cinnamon on the finish, which is really, really lovely. Sour cherry, red fruit land. And the other thing I like to do with Cabernet Franc a lot of times is chill it down a bit. It's great if you're in like summer and you want to do a red as opposed to a white. You can do kind of a chilled Cabernet Franc and it works really well. This is our first red I think we tasted on this trip and it's absolutely stunning. You know, people come in and say, here, do you want to try one red? I'm like, New York reds suck. And you go, well, no. And then people taste it and go, oh wow. Well, cheers to that. Cheers to new people. Thank you for having us. It was wonderful having you come. Thank you. Hey guys, we're launching a new Vino VIP club that's going to give you behind the scenes access to our shoots, full interviews, virtual tastings, and more. So make sure to head to V's for Vino dot com to sign up. Our last stop is Cayuga Lake, the longest of the lakes and like Seneca Lake, also has its own AVA. Before our last tasting, I met with Chuck to learn more about his winery, Shell Drake Point, and help him with a bit of outdoors work. The property itself has a long history that starts actually with the Cayuga Indians, part of the Algonquin Nation. Hence the name of the lake. Yes, that's right. We continue to find Native American artifacts in the vineyard. In the 1800s, a large hotel was built adjacent to where we are now. This then became an orchard and dairy farm for most of the 20th century. We came on board in 1997, and it was an abandoned piece of acreage. We dug soil pits to try and understand the capacity of the land to be a host to vinifera wine grapes. And this has got some wonderful drainage profiles. These soils are all glacial, as are most of the soils throughout the region. Lots of shales, limestones, lenses of clay and gravel. So we have these two gorges, and we're actually going to follow a little path right here along the way. Oh, look at that. And it's really flowing. We've gotten a lot of waterfalls, but half of them have been... Pretty iced up. Yeah. We're just going to tap some trees right here. Cool. So what we're going to do is set out a few maple buckets. This is the season when maple sugar sap begins to run. In the winter? Well, it's in late winter. Okay. So in late winter, the nighttime temperatures are dropping down below freezing, but the daytime temperatures are starting to rise up into the 40s, even the 50s. We're going to tap these trees on the south side. That's the side at which warmth occurs, and the sap is being pulled up out of the roots. Essentially, it's a two-way flow. As the weather warms up in the day, the sap is pulled up from the roots, and in the evening, as temperatures cool, the sap retreats and heads back down, and we're catching that sap on the way back down. Each year, we have about 100 buckets that we've set up in these two sugar bushes that we have adjacent to the vineyard, and we'll pull off about 1,300 to 1,500 gallons of maple sap. Wow. Divide by 40, and that's the number of gallons of maple syrup we will end up with. It's a 40 to 1 ratio when we evaporate in the sugar house sap down to pure maple syrup. It's amazing. Mother Nature doing it again. Yeah, and people have no idea how much work it takes to get a little bit of syrup for your pancakes. I mean, that's crazy. And they'll fill up how quickly? When the sap is really running, they can fill up, a two-and-a-half-gallon bucket can fill up in 24 hours. With the last of our buckets secure for the time being, we head inside for a bit more warmth and to taste some wines. So what do we have? Well, we have a selection of a couple of semi-dry Rieslings. One, an aged Riesling from 2010, and another from 2017, which was a, we call it archival Riesling. And so this is the model of, you know, this is the younger wine. This is the one that we can have now, no problem. That's right, it's a current release. A lot of citrus on the nose, a little bit of tangerine. Tangerine for sure. Yep. You know, the magic in Riesling is crisp acidity. You know, my mouth is watering, as it should be. Okay, so we have the young version here and now we get to try the granddad. What do you need in a Riesling for it to age well? What we discovered from a broad standpoint is that a little bit extra residual sugar, a hair over 1%, coupled with a strong acidity, really provides the structure for a Riesling to age well. And so you mentioned too, you haven't opened a 2010 for quite some time. So this is going to be fun for both of us. I have not. Oh my goodness, will you look at the color. Whites gain color as they age, and that's to be expected. Oh man. So the fruit characteristics shift to one of, there's an herbaceous quality, there's some cloves, honey in there. I get a lot of, so when you say honey, I mean beeswax. Yeah. For sure. It's a wonderful surprise to open this bottle with you without having practiced. Yeah, it's all genuine. What's interesting to me about this wine 10 years in is that it does not have some of the petrol characteristics that I was frankly expecting. Even without that, like I said, that petrol note, that luscious honey rich kind of, almost like syrupy fruit character. Yep. While still retaining the freshness. I can't, I'm so happy right now. I love old racing more than anything. So next up on our game card and talking with you before your visit, you were interested in our Gamay Noir. Gamay is just one of my favorite grapes just generally, and it's obviously the grape of Beaujolais. But outside of Beaujolais, it's only in these little pockets. Always drinks, if you bring it to a blind tasting, it always is like one of the favorites of the whole tasting. It surprises people. Wonderfully food friendly. The nice thing about Gamay, it's a red that has, to me has wonderfully fruity or jammy kind of qualities to it. But if you look at that, it's a light bodied red. If you want to enjoy wine with food, those red wines of a lighter character are really the ones to enjoy with food. A hundred percent. I can only do so much with a big rich Merlot, big rich Syrah. Unless I'm having a big rich meal, it doesn't work. This, like you said, look at the color. I mean it's almost translucent. You get that bright cherry pop, you know, Jolly Rancher color. I always say it's the bubblegum character. You know, any strawberry bubblegum or cherry bubblegum. But then you put it on the palate and it's still dry and it still has that city. Yep. We hate guys like you that use the phrase bubblegum about our wines. I know. I use all the non-PC terms for wine description. But I guess it's what I get. It's actually true. Oh, this is delicious. Ice wine is, you know, somebody stumbled on it in Germany in the late 1800s because they harvested grapes after a cold, cold night and discovered, to their surprise, that the juice that was being pressed off was quite concentrated. Most years, we will set aside blocks of or rows of Riesling and we won't pick them during the regular harvest. The wine grapes have to be harvested between 12 degrees and 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 12 and 18 degrees, the water in the berry freezes as ice and doesn't end up in the wine. The specific gravity of very sweet, sweet liquid has a lower freezing temperature. Oh. So it doesn't freeze and that is the liquid that we press off. Ice wine harvests are fun. You pick about three tons. That's a word for it. Because you've got to get up at like three in the morning. We do. We arrive here at five. It's dark. Everybody has a headlamp on and we trundle up into the vineyard. There's only one, maybe two drops of this concentrated, very, very sweet Riesling juice per berry. It's not a fortified wine like some other dessert wines. It is enjoyed as a dessert wine. It's very sweet. It's a real delicacy. Yeah, let's do it. And obviously, this is the reason, too, you have it in these small bottles. One, it is sweet. You don't need a lot of it per serving. Number two, I mean, how challenging and expensive it is if you're getting a drop or two of juice per berry, you know, you just can't make full bottle. Oh my goodness. On the nose. It's a flavor bomb. It really is. This is where we're starting to venture into like tropical fruit lands. You know, I start to get some of those papaya notes and those, you know, mango flavors. Pineapple. Coached to the mouth. Really beautiful. Really rich. Really dense. And when people say, you know, Riesling is sweet, or just generally, when they talk about wine and sugar and sweetness and they describe wine as sweet, this is a sweet wine. And to describe the other wines that we're having with the same stroke as sweet, it doesn't leave differentiation, which is why my big thing is to understand that, no, these wines are, you know, semi-dry, off-dry, whereas this is, when you say you want a sweet wine, this is what that means. It's such a treat. You know, you don't get to have these wines often because they are just, they're challenging to make, they're challenging to find. So thank you so much for sharing this with me. Well, enjoy. Cheers. Welcome to the VS For Vino Nerd Lab, where we take complicated wine topics and make them simple. Today, we're talking about sugar. Sugar is one of the five essential components of wine, and it is by far the most misunderstood. I've been in the industry a long time, and we all tend to confuse sugar and sweetness with other things. We'll say, this wine is too sweet, or what wines on your menu are not sweet. Here's the deal. 95% of wines made on the planet, they're not sweet at all, though a lot of us are mistakenly describing them as such. So what is sweetness? Well, it's actually pretty simple. It is literal sugar in your wine, and it can be measured, usually in grams per liter. Wines fall into one of three categories. First, dry, which means little to no sugar, which is almost every wine ever made. Second is off dry, which means a little sugar. Wines made off dry include Lambrusco, Riesling, and Chenin Blanc. Then there are sweet wines, which means a significant amount of sugar. Think Sauternes from Bordeaux, Port and Madeira from Portugal, or Icewine from Germany. Now, before we go any further, know this. Sweetness is a winemaker choice. A winemaker can make any wine with any grape sweet, off dry, or dry. And there's many ways to do this. Most of them involve stopping the yeast from eating and converting all of the grape sugar into alcohol, leaving behind residual sugar, or RS. They aren't adding sugar to the wine. It's leftover wine from the grapes. Wines that typically lend themselves to RS have a high acid content, as sugar balances nicely with acid. Without acid, wines with sugar taste syrupy and thick. Think about if you've ever left out a soda and you get the sugar with no bubbles. It's kind of gross and viscous in your mouth. So which wines are made dry? Well, pretty much all the rest. Rosé, Pinot Noir, Champagne, Chardonnay, Cabernet. You get the picture. Most of the wines that we drink regularly are made dry 99.9% of the time. I know what you're thinking. But Vince, I feel like I've had sweet versions of these wines. Usually people feel this way because sweetness is being mistaken for other wine characteristics. So to clear the air once and for all, let's talk about what sweetness is not. Number one. As we mentioned, sweetness is not a grape characteristic, but a winemaker choice. Yes, all grapes start off sweet, but it's up to the winemaker if the final wine will be. Number two. Sweetness is not the same as fruitiness, oak influence, or ripeness. And this is probably the biggest point of confusion. Because a lot of the flavors and aromas we associate with wines are things we normally associate with sweet foods. We might say, oh, this Pinot Noir tastes like strawberries. Or this Cabernet Sauvignon smells like chocolate. But these are flavor characteristics that come from the winemaking and the fermentation. They don't have anything to do with how much sugar is in the wine. It's kind of similar to how some dark chocolate still tastes like chocolate, but has almost no sugar in it. And number three. Sweetness is not related to tannin. Now, tannins are found in bold red wines, and they dry your mouth out. So I get why you would be tempted to call these wines dry and wines that don't do that sweet. But once again, this effect has nothing to do with the sugar content in the wine. You wouldn't call the opposite of a tannic wine a sweet wine. It's just a wine without tannin. Cabernet Sauvignon tends to be tannin, while Pinot Noir is not. But neither wine is typically made sweet. They're both almost always made dry. No sugar. Which brings me to my last point. How do we apply this knowledge to get the wines we want? Well, instead of describing wines in terms of sweetness, we can use terms like acid-driven, lean, crisp, mineral-driven, and tannic on one side of the spectrum, and fruit-forward, oaked, rich, and ripe on the other side. For instance, I'd like a rich, oaked, fruit-forward Chardonnay, or I'd like a lean, acid-driven Chardonnay. I hope this clarified a bit about sugar, and as always, keep geeking out. One of my favorite parts of the Finger Lakes is how easy it is to tuck away in a small, local joint with a glass of wine and watch the snow fall peacefully outside. Chef Orlando couldn't agree more, which is exactly why he bought Graft Wine & Cider Bar a few years back. He runs the entire kitchen himself, which means one, he works his face off, and two, you know you're always getting the executive chef personally preparing your food. That's hard to beat. Let's, uh, let's pop some bottles. Of course. This place is really cool, and I, you know, when I was talking to you about it, this is all you, right? You're a one-man band in the kitchen. Sort of all me. Yeah, you got some staff, but as far as the kitchen goes, right? Oh, and there we go. The kitchen is definitely, is my little baby. I run it. I'm all by myself back there. Why did you decide to kind of just make this something that was manageable, basically, you know, on your own in the kitchen? So every place I worked at has always been a mass production, and I decided when I opened my own place, I just want to have a little less stress, less employees, something where I can manage it myself and, you know, have fun and switch the menu whenever the heck I wanted, and that's what I do. So if one day I don't have something, I just 86 it and switch it up for the next day. Sure, and it's not a big deal, and like you said, you can kind of, if you have an idea you want to play with that day, like, so be it. So be it. We just switch it up. That's the good thing about being small. And the other thing that's cool is that if you come in here as a guest, you know that the person cooking your food is not a hired gun. It's you. It's just me. Yeah, you're getting the man, the myth, the legend back in the kitchen. Well, cheers, brother. I appreciate you having us out. Thank you for inviting. What are we, so what's the first course here? What are we doing? So we're doing oysters. These are Fisher Island oysters. Obviously, they're grown in the ocean. They're farm raised, but they're still like, they have a sweetness to it and it's not over salty. All right, let me try. What's your oyster philosophy? Do you have them straight? Do you put stuff on them? What do you think? Personally, sometimes I just squeeze a little lemon and have it straight, but most of the time I just have it straight, but I just like the natural flavor. Yeah. I think it's just all in there. And I've heard that from purists. They say, you know, all the Tabasco and all this stuff, I don't know how that got started, but you're supposed to have is you can taste the flavors. Yeah. What do they say? A brave man who first ate a oyster? Or a smart one? And you mentioned kind of briny, this beautiful brininess to it that's just great. It's clean. You leave all the, what is the juice called? Is there a name for it? Just like that juice that you get when you open it, you leave all that in there because that's where a lot of the flavor is. Yeah. Some people will dump that. Honestly, I don't know the name of it. Yeah. I think it does have an official name. I just can't remember what it is. But definitely, there's basically the ocean in there. Yeah. So why take it out? There's a reason sparkling wine and oysters are often served together. The creamy, plump oysters contrast well with our bubbly, high-acid Constantine Frank sparkler. Plus, the acid cleanses the palate so each new oyster tastes just as good as the first one. Very cool. Well, cheers, man. Well, I'm excited. You want to go try some of these dishes? Yeah. All right. All right, so since you have such a comfortable kitchen, I'm going to be out here and I'm going to look in from this window. So what are we cooking? So today, we're going to make mussels. We're going to make, we're going to do a curried mussel today. So what we're going to start off with is a little garlic. All right, so you're throwing the mussels in just raw. So you got the oil, garlic, and the mussels right in. Mussels right in. Then we're going to add a little wine to it. The reason for the wine is kind of just give it a little bit of flavor, but also to help steam it, steam it open. Oh, those opened really quick. Here we go. We're already, they're moving. It smells so good, I can't even tell you. So what did you add? You just added, what is it, cream? So there's cream and then there's already a pre-mix of the cream and the curry in there. Okay, cool. Now if I was making it at home, I could just go get maybe like a curry paste, right, red curry? Yep, just get a red curry paste. That's all it is. I love that you're doing this dish too because we're doing Riesling. You know, Riesling Thai food is one of those classic combinations and so by bringing that curry and you're kind of bringing in that little bit of influence to it, which is so cool. There you go and you're just toasting your ciabatta or baguette or what is that? Baguette. So we're just gonna give it a light little toast on the baguette. Yeah, you gotta have some fresh crusty bread with mussels. Then we're just gonna add a little cilantro, give it that fresh little herbal taste. Alright, here you go. That's it. I'm gonna go in and the whole trick is once you get one mussel out then you have a built-in fork. Oh man. It's perfect. I honestly am just blown away by how simple it is. And I love the addition of the curry. And you're right, it's just a little bit of heat and with this off-dry wine I think it's absolutely great. Our semi-dry Riesling from Fox Run is the way to go with this dish. The acid cuts through the fat of the cream sauce while the sugar balances the little bit of spice from the curry. Plus, Riesling and Thai food is a classic pairing. So next course we're gonna do is duck. Duck breast, right? Duck breast, yeah. Duck is one of my favorite dishes. I love good duck. So this duck, what we did is it has like a little dry rub on it. So it has like fennel, some lime, some orange, some cumin, some coriander, some black peppercorn. Wow. So it's all, you know, ground down. All these kind of warming spices. So what we're doing right now is searing the duck and then we also got polenta. So it's a rosemary polenta. There's cream in there, there's rosemary, salt and pepper. That's pretty much it. So you see we're sucking the nice Ah, look at it getting criss-crossed. Beautiful too. Nice sear off it. At this point, what we'll do is pop it in the oven and finish it in there. Oh, so you're going to leave it skin side down? Skin side down. We'll get crispy on the polenta and the crisp on the duck. While that's in there, we'll start with just a basic we're going to steam broccoli today. That's it. Yeah, this is good to know about the duck and kind of how to cook it. I mean, you're cooking it almost the majority is on the skin. On the skin, yeah. And that's where you get the super crisp skin on it. How do you manage it when it's a busy night and it's just you back here? Honestly, like, it's a little easier by myself. Yeah, you just, you know everything that's happening. Sure, you don't have to explain it to anybody. If there's a mistake, I can only blame one person. So now we're just going to slice it. I like when the chef does the work for me, slicing for me. This is a quince chutney that I made and then over here where we have is a gastrique. So gastrique, it just, this one has red wine, vinegar, and sugar. You just reduce it down. There you go. And there it is. How beautiful. Cool. Let's try it out. I'm going to try the side. Can I get the skin? Wow. The spice blend in general, you get this like really cool warming effect. And then when you combine it with the little bit of sugar that you get from the chutney, that's one of the best polentas I've ever had. This is a dish for our aged Sheldrake Point Riesling. First off, you always want to go from young wine to older wine in your course progression. Second, the sweetness from the gastrique and the chutney pairs with the sugar in the wine. And third, the contrast of the spiced duck with the honeyed Riesling makes each bite more interesting than the last. This is called a what? Russian honey cake. Okay, I've never even heard of what this is. Multiple layers of cake and then it has like a dulce de leche topping on it. So in between each layer there's like dulce de leche and it has burnt honey. You burn the honey to make it. In the dough you're saying? Yeah, well it's in the dough and it's in the frosting. It's in the frosting too. And I like that it's super thin in each layer. Almost like a pancake. I don't know. Sort of, yeah. Alright, cool. Kind of reminds me of like the cake version of a Napoleon. Yeah, it does. Oh man. It is really good. The honey, the burnt honey definitely like makes that dish. Yeah, the burnt honey gives it like, it has like the little tang and the little like smoke almost to the back of it. Your wine always needs to be sweeter than your food. And our Sheldrake Point Ice Wine checks that box. And the honeyed, luscious character of the wine matches the honey in the cake. Chef, thank you so much. This is such a great cap to my Finger Lakes experience, so cheers to you. We finished our wines, threw on our hats and boots, and made the trek to one last destination, Teganek Falls. These falls, like the lakes and gorges that are peppered throughout the area, were formed from the massive glaciers receding all those 10,000 years ago, about the same time humans were figuring out how to cultivate crops. Here in the Finger Lakes, I felt that resilient atmosphere everywhere, surrounded by history, persevering wine grapes, and warm, hardworking people. No matter what I was doing, a fish fry with friends, a day out in the vineyards, or an afternoon at a waterfall, the Finger Lakes reminded me that regardless of what Mother Nature has in store for us, humans adapt, grow, and thrive. I hope you enjoyed the Finger Lakes, and we'll see you next time on V is for Vino. It's like National Geographic. Hey, Vince here. Hope you enjoyed the episode. For more behind-the-scenes content and interact with me, make sure you're following on Instagram at V is for Vino.