It has now been 25 years since Lisa and I started the Ravines project with our vineyard site and tasting room on Keuka Lake. As a Finger Lakes winery, we have experienced highly variable growing conditions, ranging from cool to warm and from damp to dry. In many ways, our bottles of wine encapsulate these Finger Lakes growing seasons; in a most enjoyable way. Having diligently put bottles aside from each vintage, going back to the very beginning, we were able to organize retrospective tastings over the last few months. For those of you able to attend, we organized two tastings, each with 40 wines served for 60 people. A walk-around tasting for the trade and press was also organized, featuring 115 different Ravines wines spanning the vintages from 2003 to 2020.
The purpose of these tastings was threefold:
- Provide a joyous and memorable occasion for those of you able to attend.
- Revisit the vintages to see how the wines have evolved and evaluate them.
- Show the consistent quality across the very different vintages.
The conclusions were quite clear: when carefully made, using a traditional approach to winemaking with grapes from excellent vineyard sites, these wines show an undeniable potential for improving in the bottle. One aspect of the tastings that I particularly enjoyed was the fact that every single vintage of the wines was someone’s favorite.
The tastings included all of the wines intended for longer-term cellaring: Riesling, Chardonnay, sparkling wines, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, and the Cabernet blends. Gewurztraminer was left out, not because it doesn’t age well (it does), but because the number of wines shown was already overwhelming. I’m not aware of any other winery east of the Rockies that has been able to show all vintages of all of the age-worthy wines over a span of 20 vintages.
While we all know that the vast majority of wines are consumed shortly after their release, the ability of wines to not only hold but also improve in the bottle has always been the benchmark for the finest wines. Not only do the Finger Lakes, as a cool climate wine region, have the attributes required for making balanced age-worthy wines. These tastings have shown that, with careful grape growing and wine making, we can make the case for inclusion among the finest wine regions of the World.