Finger Lakes: History of New York’s Great Riesling Region

The Finger Lakes of upstate New York are America’s great cool-climate wine region — a chain of deep glacial lakes whose waters make it possible to grow world-class Riesling in a place where winters would otherwise kill the vine. It is one of the oldest wine regions in the country, the birthplace of an American sparkling-wine industry, and the stage for one of wine’s great triumphs of stubbornness: the immigrant scientist who proved that noble European grapes could survive the brutal Eastern cold. This is the history of Finger Lakes wine.

The lakes that make it possible

The Finger Lakes exist because of ice. Carved by the glaciers of the last Ice Age, these long, narrow, extraordinarily deep lakes hold vast volumes of water that warm slowly in summer and release their heat slowly in winter — a “lake effect” that tempers the region’s savage continental climate.¹ On the slopes rising steeply from the lakeshores, that moderating influence is just enough to keep vines alive through winters that would otherwise be fatal.

The result is a genuinely cool-climate wine region, closer in spirit to Germany or Alsace than to California — with a long, gentle growing season that preserves the bright acidity and delicate aromatics that define its finest wines.¹ Without the lakes there would be no fine wine here at all; with them, the Finger Lakes can do things no warmer American region can.

An old wine country

Wine in the Finger Lakes is far older than most people realise. The first vines were planted in 1829 by a clergyman, the Reverend William Bostwick, in his rectory garden at Hammondsport, and a commercial industry soon grew around the southern lakes.² In 1860 the Pleasant Valley Wine Company became the region’s first bonded winery, and its sparkling wine won such acclaim abroad that at the Vienna world’s fair it was hailed as a “great champagne of the Western world.”

That early industry was built on hardy American native and hybrid grapes — Concord, Catawba, Delaware — which could withstand the cold but made wine with the distinctive “foxy” flavour of native vines.² For a century the Finger Lakes was known for these grapes and for sweet and sparkling wines. Making the region’s name with the noble grapes of Europe would require a revolution — and an extraordinary individual to lead it.

Konstantin Frank and the vinifera revolution

That individual was Dr. Konstantin Frank, a Ukrainian-born plant scientist who arrived in America in the 1950s convinced that European Vitis vinifera could survive the Eastern winters if grafted onto sufficiently hardy rootstock.³ The prevailing wisdom said it was impossible; Frank had grown vinifera in the bitter cold of the former Soviet Union and knew better. He found a crucial ally in Charles Fournier, the French-born winemaker of the Gold Seal winery, who gave him the chance to prove it.

Prove it he did. In 1962, Frank founded his own Vinifera Wine Cellars, and his Rieslings and Chardonnays — grown where experts had sworn they could not — astonished the wine world.³ His breakthrough transformed not only the Finger Lakes but cool-climate winegrowing across eastern North America, and he is remembered as one of the towering pioneers of American wine.

The rise of Riesling

Frank’s legacy is written most clearly in one grape: Riesling, now the undisputed flagship of the Finger Lakes and, by wide agreement, among the very best made anywhere in the Americas.⁴ The region’s cool climate and long season suit the grape perfectly, producing Rieslings that range from bone-dry and racy to lusciously sweet, all marked by vivid acidity, delicate stone-fruit and citrus aromatics, and a distinctive lakeside minerality.

Riesling is not the whole story. The Finger Lakes also makes fine Chardonnay and increasingly serious Cabernet Franc, along with traditional-method sparkling wine that carries on the region’s oldest tradition.⁴ But it is Riesling that has carried the region’s name to the world, and Riesling that draws comparisons to Germany’s Mosel and France’s Alsace — company few American regions can claim to keep.

The appellations and the modern era

The Finger Lakes won federal recognition as an AVA in 1982, and two of its lakes later gained their own appellations — Cayuga Lake in 1988 and Seneca Lake in 2003 — reflecting the subtle differences between the lakes and their shores.⁵ Seneca, the deepest of the lakes, offers the most winter protection and has become especially prized for Riesling.

The modern boom was helped along by law as much as by climate. New York’s Farm Winery Act of 1976 made it far easier to open a small winery, and the number of wineries multiplied — from a mere handful in the mid-1970s to well over a hundred within twenty years, and to some two hundred today.⁵ A new generation of ambitious, quality-focused producers, many of them drawn specifically by Riesling, has since lifted the region’s reputation higher than ever.

Character, challenge, and the table

Finger Lakes wine is defined by a knife-edge balance between ripeness and cold. In the finest years the results are thrilling — Rieslings of piercing purity and nervy acidity, sparkling wines of real finesse — but the region lives with genuine risk, and periodic deep freezes and polar-vortex winters can devastate a crop and test the hardiest vines.¹ That precariousness is part of the region’s identity: these are wines wrung from a marginal, demanding place, and they carry its tension in the glass.

They are also superb at the table. Dry Finger Lakes Riesling is a natural with the lake region’s trout and freshwater fish, while an off-dry bottle is one of the great foils for spicy Asian food; the sparkling wines make fine aperitifs.⁴ Paired with a thriving farm-to-table food scene along the lakeshores, the wines have made the Finger Lakes not just a serious winegrowing region but one of the most rewarding wine-country destinations in the eastern United States.

Jefferson’s dream, fulfilled

There is a satisfying symmetry to the Finger Lakes story. Two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson and countless other East Coast dreamers tried and failed to grow Europe’s noble grapes on American soil, defeated by cold and disease.⁶ It was here, in the cold heart of New York, that their dream was finally realised — not by ignoring the obstacles, but by out-thinking them.

Today the Finger Lakes stands as proof that great wine can be made far from the sunny valleys of the West, and as the flag-bearer for a wider renaissance of wine across the eastern United States. From a rectory garden in 1829 to world-class Riesling today, it is one of the most quietly remarkable wine stories in America.

Keep exploring American wine

• Washington — America’s other great cool-climate Riesling region.
• Oregon & the Willamette Valley — the Pinot Noir country of the Pacific Northwest.
• American Wine: The Complete History — the national story the Finger Lakes belongs to.

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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American Wine

Jancis Robinson & Linda Murphy

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References & further reading

1. Hudson Cattell, Wines of Eastern North America: From Prohibition to the Present (Cornell University Press, 2014), on the Finger Lakes climate and the lake effect. ↩
2. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America (University of California Press, 1989–2005), on the nineteenth-century New York grape and sparkling-wine industry and the Pleasant Valley Wine Company (1860). ↩
3. Cornell University Library, Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery records; Hudson Cattell, Wines of Eastern North America (Cornell University Press, 2014), on Frank, Charles Fournier, and the founding of Vinifera Wine Cellars (1962). ↩
4. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Finger Lakes,” “New York,” and “Riesling.” ↩
5. U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), AVA regulations, including the Finger Lakes (1982), Cayuga Lake (1988), and Seneca Lake (2003) AVAs; New York Farm Winery Act (1976). ↩
6. Thomas Pinney, A History of Wine in America, Volume 1 (UC Press, 1989), on colonial and Jeffersonian attempts to grow vinifera in the East. ↩