Jefford on Monday: Exploring the Finger Lakes

Andrew Jefford canters through America’s ‘Wine Region of the Year’...

Red Cat, it was called. It came in a litre bottle, and was the colour of cherryade. The label showed a red cat reclining in a wooden bath while a white cat looks lovingly on from just over the fence: ‘the original hot tub legend’, read the caption. “Historians note,” teases the website of Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards, the wine’s producer, “that as more Red Cat was consumed, less apparel was worn in the hot tub.” Our touring party didn’t quite have time to put this to the test.

Cat is short for Catawba: the most widely grown grape in the USA in the first half of the nineteenth century. The variety itself is white, but in Red Cat it is blended with 20 per cent red hybrids. Research published in 2016 suggests that Catawba is an American wild vine crossed, perhaps by hazard, with Sémillon. We bought it in order to understand what ‘foxiness’ might mean — a character, enigmatic until encountered, that native American vine species famously possess. Red Cat was dilute, low in alcohol (11%), sweet and mawkish – but there it was, that distinctive sweaty-catty, pork-trotter-like note. Once sniffed, never forgotten.

Almost everything else my fellow-travelers and I tasted during a brief two-day tour through the Finger Lakes was fermented from vinifera grapes alone, but hybrid and native vines still account for 83 per cent of total plantings in New York State. We shouldn’t, therefore, be too dismissive: the origins of viticulture here lie in these varieties, and indeed their genetic resistance to phylloxera makes all our wine drinking possible. A quick peek around the bottle store at Watkins Glen at the southern end of Seneca Lake also revealed that the imagery and casual, good-time appeal of Red Cat remains a living tradition, not a nostalgic throwback. This is wine as first cousin to cordials, juices, jams and jellies, which is what most of those native and hybrid vine grapes get used for.

The vinifera tradition in Finger Lakes is more recent. Ukrainian émigré Dr Konstantin Frank was its pioneer, eventually growing 60 different vinifera varieties on land he first purchased in 1958, but take-up more widely in the region was slow and the old artisan native-vine traditions tenacious. “When I arrived here in 1998,” remembers Morten Hallgren of Ravines Wine Cellars, “there were only two other trained winemakers in the entire region.”

This affable Franco-Danish American grew up on Ch Roubine in Provence and trained at Montpellier (where he says he learned “transparent winemaking”) before crossing the Atlantic, initially to study physics and astrophysics; he now farms 53 ha with his wife Lisa at two sites, the chief one on Seneca Lake and the other close to the winery and beautiful tasting barn at Keuka Lake. (Hallgren was formerly winemaker at the Dr Konstantin Frank Winery.)

We got out of our bus into warm early October sunlight at Ravines’ barn, though the open doors of which mild breezes sent suspended white drapes dancing. The air was moist, sweet and scented. Squeeze it, I felt, and you could wring out all the freighted perfumes of summer: an idyllic scene. A short chat with Morten about the weather soon set us straight. “We have more vintage variation than any other region I am familiar with,” he said. “Sometimes we question whether we have such a thing as a normal season.” “From May to October,” added Mel Goldman of Keuka Lake Vineyards the following day, “the climate here is pretty similar to Burgundy. The problem is that from October to May, it’s 20 degrees cooler.”

That hard winter freeze means that all vines here have to be ‘hilled’ in the autumn, a process involving mounding earth over their trunks to cover the graft union. They spend winter unpruned, as it’s safer; even so, there will be some winter kill every year, so each vine has multiple trunks (between two and five of them) to provide at least some fruitful buds. The first viticultural job every year, says Hallgren, is bud-counting, which means cutting wood and artificially bringing it on in the warmth of the lab to see what has survived and what hasn’t. Under normal circumstances, budburst out in the vineyards won’t happen until around May 1st. “I don’t feel we’re safe from frost,” says Ryan William of the eponymous winery on Seneca Lake’s warmest spot down in the southeast, affectionately called ‘the banana belt’, “until the last full moon in May”.

Even summer isn’t straightforward: it’s usually too cold, too hot or too wet. Rain in the Finger Lakes is often localised and intense. The summer of 2018 has been hot and steamy — until mid-August, when violent rains began. In one single spot on the east side of Seneca Lake, between 228 mm and 381 mm (nine to fifteen inches) of rain fell in a single 24-hour deluge. It remained, however, warm after the rains, so disease pressures have been intense this year. Idyllic it isn’t.

Nor has market creation been easy. Morten and Lisa Hallgren’s aim was to create “dry, minerally Riesling”, but the locals were more used to gulping down sweet Red Cat in their hot tubs; had it not been for a few enlightened local restaurateurs, the Hallgrens might not have made it. Now the message has got through, and often impressive vinifera-based wines are no longer a rarity; indeed Riesling can be head-turning. The Finger Lakes was voted ‘Wine Region of the Year’ for 2018 recently in a poll conducted by 10Best.com, an affiliate of USA Today.

Might viticulture hereabouts be, like wine-growing in England, a beneficiary of global warming? Opinions are divided. Mel Goldman, a self-declared optimist, thinks that “we are on average benefiting from climate change”, though he says it’s not the view of his winemaker Stacy Nugent. Nor is it the view of her former boss when they were both working at Dr Frank’s, Morten Hallgren. “I think it’s too erratic,” he notes. “It’s my biggest fear, to be honest. If we get buds starting to move in March, we’re in real trouble.”

I mentioned a few paragraphs ago that “almost everything else” we tasted apart from Red Cat was based on vinifera grapes. The significant exception was the 2016 Pet Nat of Catawba from Chëpika – and we tasted this, significantly, not in a hot tub by a lake but in New York’s Union Square Café. It’s made by star somm Pascaline Lepeltier with Finger Lakes winemaker Nathan Kendall. In terms of style and symbolism, in other words, we are as far from Red Cat as it is possible to be. Could this return of the native in hip guise suggest a twin-track future, both vinifera and indigenous/hybrid, for the Lakes? I don’t know. It’ll be fascinating to find out.

Tasting Finger Lakes wines

Pet Nat of Catawba, Chëpika, 2016The foxy note in this Catawba style reminded me of pork trotter or pig bristles rather than anything sweaty or catty; it’s identifiable, but just one note among several in this bracing, taut, clean and clear Pet Nat. An exciting, purposeful and strangely gastronomic wine which takes drinkers on a journey through the hinterlands of expectation. You may emerge affronted – but you may emerge wiser, too, with new ideas about what might constitute Finger Lakes beauty in wine. 86 points / 100; 10% abv.Dry Riesling, Margrit, Dr Konstantin Frank, 2016

This delicate but expressive dry Riesling is made from the fruit of vines planted in 2001 grown on loamy soils on the east side of Seneca Lake. It has delicate, sweet-toned apple and other orchard fruits. The flavours are bare, pure and very racy — as you might imagine from a wine with 7.4 g/l acidity and just 0.3 per cent sugar. Look out for pungent apple and lemon fruits with a mineral-salt freshness. It’s bracing and cutting; the kind of dry Riesling which should be on every restaurant list, ready for seafood service. 91; 12%.

Amber Rkatsiteli, Dr Konstantin Frank, 2017

Image a 50/50 blend of Saar Riesling with Sancerre, and you’ll have a rough idea of how this pale gold Finger Lakes Rkatsiteli expresses itself, especially aromatically. On the palate, it’s a little more overt and forthright than the tight, taut aromas suggested; milled crab apples, hops and mango are the hints that come and go inside its very gently textured flavours. As an ‘amber’ wine, it’s a cautious experiment with little palpable tannin; it had 10 days’ skin contact and 9 months in amphora before being bottled. 89; 12%.

Dry Riesling, Falling Man Vineyard, Keuka Lake Vineyards 2017

The best Finger Lakes Rieslings seem to combine fruit profiles of extreme delicacy with dry, sheer almost stony flavours, and that’s what you’ll find in this pure, intense, searching single-vineyard wine grown on the west side of Keuka Lake. We had the chance to compare three vintages of Falling Man Rieslings with three vintages of the Evergreen Lek Rieslings grown a little higher above the Lake; the latter had a greener, more Loire-like style compared to the bare, crystalline fruits of the Falling Man site. 89; 12.3%

Blanc de Blanc, Ravines 2008

It seems to me that sparkling wines from the Finger Lakes could be an exciting quality prospect for the future, as almost every wine here is built on a core of acidity barely covered with fruit flavours: the ideal sparkling-wine scenario for a Champagne-like style in which too much fruit flavour is a distraction. What holds such wines back, paradoxically, is that the region has a long-established tradition of producing modest, well-rounded and accessibly priced sparkling wines, meaning that both customer expectations and ambition fall short of the highest reach. Not so at Ravines, where this impressive, dry Chardonnay from the old-established Argetsinger vineyard on Seneca Lake, has seen out almost a decade on its lees: look out for scents of clean, fresh apples and lemon, with fresh, incisive, striking and searching flavours and some textured richness. 88; 13%

Dry Riesling, Argetsinger Vineyard, Ravines 2015

This fine Riesling from the lime-rich soils of the Argetsinger vineyard is pale gold in colour, with delicate green-apple and lime scents and a taut, tight flavour which just hints at a little breadiness behind its sappy, pure, lunging flavours. This wine reminded me of a hypothetical blend of Eden Valley Riesling with a little Coteaux du Loir or Jasnières Chenin. 91; 12.5%

Grüner Veltliner, Ryan William 2015

Green-gold in colour, this Seneca Lake white exhibits shy though typical GV aromas of plant sap and white pepper. On the palate, it’s greener than most Grüner – but that greenness is ripe and not phenolic, and sappy and vinous, too, rather than being too fruity, which would be alien to the spirit of the variety. It’s an unshowy but satisfying white, and better than many of the region’s lesser Rieslings. 89; 12.5%

Cabernet Franc, Ryan William 2012

This Cabernet Franc was the most successful Finger Lakes red wine I tasted during my short visit; in general, this is a region where whites are superior by some measure to reds. It’s a dark blue-red in colour, with some palpable oak in the aroma but lots of plum and sloe fruit, too. It’s necessarily acid-led and that acidity is testing, but in this instance ample fruit flavour and (especially) impressive tannins help balance the wine and give it authority and drive. 90; 13.6%

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