Seneca Lake Wine Country

The hillsides sloping down to Seneca Lake, on both the eastern and western shores, have been producing grapes since the mid-nineteenth century. The modern wine industry here is largely a creation of the last fifty years, built on a combination of agricultural science, state policy, and the particular geology and climate that make these hillside corridors unlike almost anywhere else in the eastern United States.

The key to the Finger Lakes wine country is the thermal mass of the deep lakes. Seneca Lake, at more than six hundred feet deep, stores solar heat through the growing season and releases it slowly through fall and into winter, moderating the temperature of the air in the corridors immediately above the water. Vines growing on these slopes ripen longer and freeze later than vines on flat ground a mile away from the lake. The effect is most pronounced on the steeper slopes above the deepest lakes, and it is what makes wine grape cultivation viable in a region where continental winters would otherwise be fatal to most varieties.

The New York State Farm Winery Act of nineteen seventy-six allowed farmers to open small wineries and sell wine directly to consumers, removing a regulatory barrier that had kept the industry tiny for decades. Within a few years, the number of Finger Lakes wineries began to grow rapidly. Riesling, a German grape variety that thrives in cool climates and mineral soils, proved especially suited to the Seneca Lake hillsides. The region's Rieslings now draw comparison to German benchmarks from international wine critics. Today the Seneca Lake Wine Trail encompasses dozens of wineries on both shores, one of the most popular wine tourism routes in the northeastern United States.