Folks have been making wine commercially in the Finger Lakes for 165 years. Wineries have waxed and waned, come and gone. Some have been small backyard mom-and-pop operations… or “boutique” wineries, if you want to get hoity-toity about it. Others have been huge employers and major tourism magnets.
Emerson Klees has been making wine for 35 years, and writing books about our region for twenty. Blending both varieties, his latest work is Finger Lakes Wineries: A Pictorial History. Here he covers wineries past and present in 110 pages of well-captioned photos, plus more text bringing the total page count to 160.
Much of the book covers Keuka Lake – unsurprising, given the historic nature of the work. But an entire chapter is dedicated to Widmer Winery in Naples, and the last two chapters – covering the time from Repeal of Prohibition to the present day – range all across the region.
I look at a LOT of old photos, and I was excited to find plenty in this book that I’d never seen before. One full-page 1880 image shows men and horses cutting the caves four stories deep at Pleasant Valley… it’s remarkable how sheer they’ve cut the face of the rock. In other photos men strain at a grape press, heaving on a bar that seems to be an undressed tree limb. Men riddle champagne bottles, or cap, wrap, and pack at Gold Seal. A horse-drawn wagon is laden high with filled grape flats for Empire State Wine Company in Penn Yan.
A lot of what I see in the course of my work is nineteenth-century images, so I was intrigued to inspect photos from the mid- to late-twentieth century showing, for instance, machine corking; large apparatus for pasteurizing; conveyor belts; and hydraulic presses. Governor Hugh Carey, Governor George Pataki, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy glide through the pages.
From time to time I guide tour buses through Naples on the way to Canandaigua, and I enjoy telling the passengers the Widmer’s story, which gets its own chapter here. Widmer’s has a beautiful setting, and adds a special sparkle to Naples. Mr. and Mrs. Widmer moved from Switzerland in 1882, and set about planting grapes even as they were building their home. There’s one story Emerson doesn’t mention, but which his pictures still illuminate. Mr. and Mrs. Widmer wanted expansion capital at an early stage, so they went to banker Maxfield for a loan. Since he had his own winery, he turned these new competitors down. The Widmers thrived anyway, and in 1940 their son had the great satisfaction of buying the Maxfield Cellars and folding it into the business his parents had begun and built.
Several of the wineries have their own interesting stories or offerings. Eagle Crest in Conesus was founded by Bishop McQuaid to supply communion wine for Catholic churches. Ray Fedderman in Prattsburgh was the first African American vintner. Earle Estates brews mead (a honey-based alcohol) as well as wine. At Cayuga Ridge, enthusiasts may lease, tend, and harvest ten, twenty, or thirty vines.
Of course there are many familiar faces, for the story of the wineries is, like all the other stories, a story about people. The Taylor family is here, from Walter through Greyton, Fred, and Clarence down to Walter S. So are the Franks, from Dr. Konstantin down through Willy and Fred. So is Paul Garrett, who watched his family name die out and created Garrett Chapel to preserve its memory.
Also valuable, especially for us non-specialists, is a TWENTY-PAGE appendix briefly describing grape species (some with regional names such as Aurora, Steuben, and Cayuga White), plus a ten-page glossary of grape and wine terms. The whole thing makes a very useful and enjoyable introduction to Finger Lakes winemaking. Thank you, Emerson – again!
Tag Archives: winery
The Way We Worked
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Last week we looked at the makeup of Keuka Lake towns back in 1835, and in 1860, thanks to statewide gazetteers published in those years. This week I thought we’d get a handle on how people live and worked in those days.
Farming and herding were overwhelmingly how people supported themselves, AND it’s the main thing that the gazetteers take notice of.
For instance, in 1835 the six towns had 13,194 cattle; 4275 horses; 53,674 sheep; and 13,445 swine. To look at it another way, the total human population (13,418) stood comfortably between the populations of swine and cattle, but was dwarfed by the flock of sheep.
This isn’t surprising, considering that many people, even if employed off the farm, still maintained some livestock as a sideline or for home consumption. It would be interesting to know how those cattle broke out — how many each for beef, draft, and dairy.
In most cases, any of the Yates towns beat each of the Steuben towns for numbers. Milo and Jerusalem usually took the lead, suggesting that local prosperity gravitated to the railroad, the Outlet and the canal.
The 1860 report covers the same categories, but this time distinguishing “working oxen and calves” from “cows.” Town by town breakdowns give us the bushels of grain produced (winter and spring), tons of hay, bushels of potatoes, bushels of apples, pounds of butter, and pounds of cheese. There’s no report on grape or wine production, each of which was just getting started in a big way. The Pleasant Valley Wine Company, for instance, was just incorporating, but for all anybody knew back then, this would prove to be just a flash in the pan. Ohio’s nascent industry had just been wiped out in a blight (which left winemakers available for jobs in the Finger Lakes).
The report DOES tell us about yards of domestic cloth produced, with a high of 846 in Urbana and a low of 230 in Barrington. Cloth production reverses the pattern of livestock and population; any of the Steuben towns tops any of the Yates towns.
While the facts-and-figures reporting is pretty straitjacketed, the 1860 gazetteer permits itself a little more latitude in the descriptive section. Urbana is “noted for the production of a superior quality of fine wool,” and “finely adapted to the culture of the grape.” Jerusalem “is well adapted to both pasturage and tillage.”
Perhaps without recognizing their significance, the gazetteer compilers take haphazard note of other forms of commerce. Milo has two newspapers and a bank. Urbana has “several manufacturing establishments.”
They wake up a little to the significance of transportation, noting a daily line of steamers between Penn Yan (in Jerusalem) and Hammondsport (in Urbana), along with a storehouse at Gulicksville landing in Pulteney. Penn Yan “is an important station on the Elmira, Jefferson & Canandaigua R.R.,” but there’s no mention at all of the Crooked Lake Canal, not even thirty years old and already overshadowed by the train. Hammondsport will not have rail service (the B&H, connecting it to Bath) until 1878.
While the 1860 gazetteer still makes no mention of grapes, an 1868 directory shows 110 vineyards in the Town of Urbana alone! Wayne has 10, and Pulteney 31… in fact, grapes were said to be the first thing Pulteney residents ever found to justify the taxes on their land. Oddly, the Pulteney folks are almost always described as “grape growers,” rather than vineyardists.
Many of these vineyards are small, and many owners were also farmers, lawyers, or ministers. But the wineries wrought radical change in Keuka’s economy and environment — in less than a decade.