It’s deeper into the mountains than I’ve ever gone before; a 90-minute drive from my home in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley to the far western side of the Catskill ranges, where quilt squares of rolling green punctuate the dense maple and pine forests of the mountains’ foothills. This is not traditional wine country. There are no commercial vineyards in any direction for many miles. And yet, I’m on my way to visit one. I’d heard talk of a young couple determined to revive the heritage wine varieties of New York once hugely popular in the 1800s. I shake my head in amazement at the thought of it, this full-circle moment. Throughout my early days as a wine professional in the early 2000s, I’d been taught that non-Vitis vinifera wines couldn’t make good wine. They were “foxy,” “musky” and overly sweet (indeed many examples of that time were just that). Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s near the Finger Lakes, a wine region that had reinvented itself only a few decades earlier by ripping out or abandoning much of its native and hybrid varieties and planting the European species in their place, this narrative was deeply ingrained. And now here I was in 2023, traversing a mountain range 120 miles southeast to spend a day with a pair of young winemakers passionate about changing the storyline of New York’s heritage grapes.
And they’re not alone. A growing number of small-scale producers are rewriting the non-vinifera narrative into one that
This Article was originally published on Wine Enthusiast
