If you are interested in reading about our journey from the start, check out part 1 of our tasting trip in the Finger Lakes.

After dealing with the obligatory covid tests for getting into Canada, we finally had a full day to wine taste and see a few sites.  Unfortunately, the ground was still saturated, and the sky looked threatenting so hiking was a “no go” even though it has stopped raining for a while.

Terence, from Lakewood, our first excursion from the day before, strongly recommended Herman J Weimer Vineyards on the west shore of Seneca Lake and we weren’t disappointed.  Weimer was founded by one the original winemakers in the Finger Lakes region (Herman Wiemer if you hadn’t figured that out from the name).   Herman came from a long line of winemakers dating back over 300 years and the Finger Lakes area closely resembled the Mosel region in Germany where some of the finest Rieslings in the world are made.  The Mosel connection ended up being a recurring theme throughout our trip with a few wineries being founded by German winemakers from the Mosel region.  The climate and soil conditions in many areas around the Finger Lakes are quite similar to the Mosel.

The winery itself has a very cool old farm feel with a large barn serving as a tasting room along with generous outdoor tasting space we would have enjoyed had the weather been warmer.  For the last 20 years, Wiemer has been pursuing a Biodynamic method of making wines which shuns the use of non-natural additives and focuses on letting the vines “do their thing”.  They have 20 sheep that act as weed management and also natural fertilizers.  Biodynamic still means many different things to many people but taken at its best, the practice really allows the wines to express the character of their origins far better than manipulated wines.  Weimer also uses native yeast fermentation, meaning whatever types of yeasts come in on the grape clusters and whatever is in the air at the time do the fermentation.  It often means there is more variation per year because the changes in the yeast add another variable to the wine making but I’m a fan of the practice and enjoy seeing the variations each year to otherwise, more predictable wines.

Weimer, along with a number of other Finger Lake Wineries, has an interesting model where you taste what you want and just pay a reasonable price per taste.  Want to just taste just a couple of wines…no problem.  Want to taste a whole flight…yep, they can work with that as well.  Also, because of Covid, they were doing more of a traditional table service and our server, Heather, was both knowledgeable about the wines and super cool as well.

The Rieslings were our favorite, with both of us liking the 2020 Dry Riesling, the 2019 HJW and the 2020 semi-sweet in that order. I was quite surprised that I enjoyed the semi-sweet one so much because I don’t generally like wines with much sweetness but the acidity in this particular wine was prevalent enough that it really needed that couple of percent of residual sugar to balance it out.  We also both enjoyed the Gruner Veltliner with citrus forward characteristics.  Truth be told, Gruner Veltliner isn’t one of our favorites, but we also haven’t had enough to really understand the nuances of the wine grape, but this was the best we’d had to date.

We had planned for Wagner Vineyards to be our second and final stop of the day.  Wagner was the first of the Finger Lakes wines that we’d ever tried but Heather mentioned that the Weimar folks now own another winery on the opposite side of Seneca Lake called Standing Stone, so she arranged a stop for us there as well.  Conveniently, it was also about a five-minute drive from Wagner so were happy to make an intermediate stop.  Both were on the opposite side of Seneca Lake, the largest of the Finger Lakes.

At this point, it is probably worth throwing out a couple of facts about the Finger Lakes in general and Seneca Lake in particular.  Seneca Lake holds about half of all of the water of the Finger Lakes and it’s quite large with very different growing conditions on the western vs the eastern shores.  The lake is also big enough to create its own microclimate and at almost 67 miles long, it’s no short trip to get around it.  It’s also deep and has enough natural currents that it doesn’t freeze during the winter.  The Wiemer winery is on the west side of the lake whereas Standing Stone and Wagner are on the Eastern slope which, in theory, should expose them to more, warm, afternoon sun and potentially, longer growing time.  Sadly, we arrived at one of the busiest times of the year for winemakers, just after crush and fermentation, so we didn’t get a chance to talk to any of them about the difference in the location, but I suppose that gives us a good reason to go back.

Standing Stone follows the same tasting practice as Weimer where you pay for what you taste so it works out great when we just share a tasting because one of us has to drive.  When we taste at three or four wineries, alcohol management is a necessity.   We’re not big fans of dumping good wine into a “spit bucket” but I have no problem leaving part of a glass that just isn’t doing it for me. We liked all of Standing Stones wines, but the standout was the 2020 Timeline Riesling.  The original plantings go back to 1972 and whether it was the older vines, the soil/other environmental factors or just good winemaking, the terroir of this wine was more pronounced than almost anything we had while we were in the area.  It was excellent.  While doing some final research for this post, I see it received 93 points from Wine Enthusiast and while I don’t always agree with their ratings, in this case, it was spot on.  We also got our first taste of several of the wines that are more unique to the Finger Lakes when we sampled the Teinturier Saperavi,  the wine grape originally comes from Georgian region of the Caucasus Mountains.

It is very cold-tolerant making it a natural for growing in the Finger Lakes.  The “Teinturier” in the name means that it has red skin, red flesh and red juice, which is very unusual for most wine grapes.  It’s got a strong acidic backbone but not oppressively so, making it a natural for aging at least five years and likely even a little longer.  I’m kicking myself for not buying one to bring back home but we had very little additional weight we could accommodate in our suitcases and full wine bottles aren’t light.  Bringing back an empty one is pretty pointless.

Our final stop of the day and the initial reason we wanted to come to the Finger Lakes was Wagner Vineyards.  Wagner’s wines were our first exposure to Finger Lakes Reislings but to call Wagner’s offerings “extensive” is a serious understatement.  As of the end of December, when we finally had a chance to write this series of posts, there were 35 wines listed on their site.  Wagner makes an array of Rieslings and even the dry ones have some residual sugar, a practice that we learned over the course of our trip is quite common in the region.  We both liked the 2020 Dry Riesling and surprisingly, our favorite of the Rieslings was the 2020 semi-dry.   The 2018 sparkling Riesling was really good so we bought a bottle to share with our son and future daughter in law over Christmas because we learned the night before our tasting that they got engaged.  I think Karen experienced a first, preferring an unoaked Chardonnay over the oak aged version.   Will wonders never cease?  Don’t get me wrong, I like Chardonnay on oak as well but so many Californian winemakers absolutely bludgeon the wine with so much new, heavily toasted oak that it’s almost impossible to taste the grape.  I’ve come to appreciate light or no oak.  The two of us don’t particularly like the same style of Chardonnay.  It’s about the only wine on which our preferences really differ.  In addition to the ever-present Cab Franc and Pinot Noirs made by many of the wineries in the region, Wagner makes an Amur, a deep, full bodied red wine grape that comes from southern Siberia.  Amur is one of those rare wine grapes that is actually a different species than almost all western European wine grapes that make up the vast majority of the wines that are enjoyed worldwide.  Amur has surprising depth and balance for such a cold weather wine grape.  It will age nicely for a number of years.  We screwed up by not buying a bottle to tuck away for a few years, strictly for an experiment of course.  Thankfully we were able to remedy that oversite the following day when we tasted Amur at another winery.

If you are looking for a good lunch spot in a day tour, Wagner has a cafe on site (which was closed due low tourism because of covid and the quickly approaching winter).  For those who don’t like wine and brought along a Designated Driver, this is the chance to grab them a beer at Wagner Valley Brewing which is also on the property.

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