After two hundred years of grape jelly the Finger Lakes AVA has turned into a serious wine region known for quality wine. Riesling, in particular.
It is not a surprise that Riesling, which thrives in cooler climates, finds the right conditions on America's East Coast. Ranging in style from bone dry to sweet and unctuous dessert wines made from botrytized grapes, the Finger Lakes region has gained more than just respect beyond the borders of New York.
When immigrants from Europe arrived in the Finger Lakes region in the early 19th century, they must have been pleased to see vines growing on the hills surrounding the lakes.
The abundance of American native grape vines was ample proof that viticulture was possible in this climate, for making wine was one of the reasons why they had come here. They started cultivating both, the wild-growing native Vitis labrusca vines and the European Vitis vinifera, which they had brought with them from their homeland.
But things didn't exactly work out the way the newcomers had hoped they would. Most of their European vines didn't survive the harsh winters of the east coast. Those vines that did survive mysteriously died after a couple of years. They were the first victims of the phylloxera louse, which would start its devastating world tour a few decades later.
Native varieties such as Concord or Catawba were hardy enough to withstand the cold New York winter months, but as robust as they were in the vineyard they soon turned out to be a problem in the winery. The wine made from the Vitis labrusca grapes had a weird 'foxy' taste to it - too weird for the European palate. The idea of exporting wine from the Finger Lakes to Europe had to be abandoned.
For the next hundred years the Finger Lakes focused on the production of grape jelly and grape juice with the main businesses operating from the towns of Hammondsport, Penn Yan and Naples.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast
It was not until the 1950s that a second attempt of making quality wine was under way, this time with French hybrids (crossings of hardy American vine species with European vinifera vines, in the hope of non-foxy wines). They had originally been developed in France for their pest resistance and winter hardiness. Seyval Blanc has been the most promising of these new varieties. Other crossings introduced were the red varieties Chambourcin and Baco Noir.
Most important for the future of the Finger Lakes wine region, however, was the arrival of an immigrant from Ukraine. Konstantin Frank found work at the Geneva Experiment Station of the Cornell University when he arrived in 1951. He spoke six languages fluently, albeit not English, and thus was assigned only minor field work tasks. Nobody knew or seemed to care, that Mr. Frank was actually a Dr. Frank, with a PhD in viticulture who held a professorial chair in plant science in Ukraine.
When Charles Fournier, a winemaker from Champagne in France, who at the time was also the president of Gold Seal Vineyards at Keuka Lake met Frank, they communicated in French. Fournier immediately realized that Dr. Konstantin Frank had a profound understanding of the climate and soils of the Finger Lakes region. He helped promote Frank's seemingly heretical opinion (after more than 200 years of failed attempts!) that European vinifera vines could be grown in this cold climate given that the right rootstocks are being used. In 1961 Frank was able to buy his own vineyard on a hill at Keuka Lake. He planted only vinifera vines and aptly named his farm Vinifera Wine Cellars.
After the first successful plantings of vinifera vines around Keuka others followed Dr. Frank's example. In the 1960s, Hermann J. Wiemer, a German from the Mosel wine region emigrated to the Finger Lakes and established his own estate in 1979 along the Western shore of Seneca Lake. He also founded a nursery on his Seneca Lake property and thus turned the Finger Lakes into an important supplier of vinifera grape vines for all major American wine regions, including California.
It soon became clear that the lakes provide an ideal micro-climate for growing grape varieties such as Riesling, Chardonnay or Cabernet Franc. Tasting Finger Lakes Rieslings today shows that planting this noble grape along the shores of the Finger Lakes was not an act of folly but one of New York's best ideas.