As we prepare your next wine club shipment and start to think about Harvest 2025, wine
tariffs are approaching. While these tariffs could, at first glance, seem to be beneficial to
us, we do not favor any tariffs on wine in the US markets. I don’t intend here to discuss the
politics of these tariffs and how they wil affect our business partners and coleagues.
Rather, I want to point out how, for the consumers, the consequences may not be as dire
as they would have been in the past.
A generation ago, you could have argued that there were no possible “replacements” for
the wines imported from the European classic cool climate regions. Indeed, viticulture and
winemaking were only beginning to emerge in American wine regions that could
convincingly be described as cool-climate regions. This meant that you truly could not find
sparkling wines, Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet blends
that could stylistica ly and qualitatively compare with their counterparts in Champagne,
Burgundy, Loire valey and the Bordeaux region, respectively.
That is no longer the case. Our wines represent legitimate alternatives to their European
counterparts. This has already been confirmed not only by wine critics from around the
World and, more importantly, by you.
I’m sure that many of you reading our newsletter have tried the simple exercise of tasting
our wines blind in a flight with European counterparts. We certainly have, both here at the
winery with friends and colleagues, as well as with some of our distribution partners and
the results have been consistently favorable.
While you could always point out a list of wines in any of these “reference regions” that
could not be “matched” in the Finger Lakes, reality is that our wines will compare equally
or favorably with the vast majority of these wines.
I’m not going to say that they compare to the wines from the Mosel with their very specific
balance and composition, but they can be compared to the wines from Rheingau, Nahe,
Baden and Rheinpfalz or Kamptal and Kremstal in Austria.
While I would have no hesitation to place our Chardonnay in a flight of white Burgundy
wines, I will not say that our Pinot Noir would always pass for a Côte d’Or red wine, but it
would compare with Pinot Noir wines from other regions such as Côte Chalonaise, Alsace
or Austria. Similarly, I wouldn’t hesitate to propose our Cabernet Franc as an alternative to
almost any Loire valley Cabernet Franc or our Maximilien as a viable Bordeaux blend.