Region & History

In the spring of 1829, Episcopal clergyman William Bostwick planted a few vines in his parsonage garden on the south shore of Keuka Lake. His father-in-law from Massachusetts had sent him Catawba and Isabella, two American varieties—hardy and unfamiliar in taste. Bostwick gave cuttings to his congregation in Hammondsport. Within thirty years, a handful of cuttings had grown into an entire wine landscape.

In 1860, the Pleasant Valley Wine Company opened on the same spot—the first officially bonded winery in the entire United States. Its sparkling wine made from Catawba grapes earned an honorable mention at the 1867 Paris World's Fair. Six years later, the same operation, by then renamed Great Western, won a gold medal in Vienna. America suddenly had a sparkling wine that could hold its own against Europe's.

European vines, however, remained out of reach. American winters brought frosts that killed off any Vitis vinifera within a few years, and a root-eating insect called phylloxera finished the job. For nearly seventy years, growers around the lakes cultivated only hardy American varieties as a result. Added to these were the hybrid crosses bred from the 1880s onward at the experiment station in Geneva—grapes that withstood frost and fungus better, but rarely made great wine.

It took an immigrant from Ukraine to prove it could still be done. In 1958, Konstantin Frank bought a piece of land on the western shore of Keuka Lake, less than ten kilometers from Hammondsport, and planted Riesling and other European vines there. Experts thought he was crazy. His first vintage appeared in 1962—a honey-sweet, botrytis-affected Riesling in the style of a Trockenbeerenauslese—and the doubts fell silent. Frank became known as the father of vinifera in the eastern United States until his death in 1985; his family still runs the winery today, now in its fourth generation.

The region wasn't officially recognized until 1982, when the Finger Lakes AVA became the twentieth appellation in the United States and the second in New York. Cayuga Lake followed as its own sub-region in 1988, with Seneca Lake not until 2003. Today the area counts around one hundred fifty wineries.