A Low Intervention & Hands-on Approach to Winemaking
For us, winemaking begins well before the fruit reaches the cellar. It begins with the vineyard, the growing season, and the decisions made throughout the year. By harvest, much of the story has already been written. Our job in the cellar is not to rewrite it.
Learning to Listen
Starting in 2003, in some carboys that would eventually be the Select Late Harvest Riesling, we began our first trials with indigenous yeast fermentation. The idea behind those experiments has persisted through more than 20 vintages: if we wanted the wines to speak more clearly about where they came from, we needed to question how much we were prescribing what happened once the grapes entered the cellar. Indigenous fermentation became one way of allowing more of the biological complexity arriving with the fruit to participate in the wine.
It was also part of a broader change in thinking. Rather than asking, “How do we make this wine?” we increasingly began asking, “What does this fruit want to become?”
The complexity of a vineyard site has many outlets.
The varieties we plant, the timing of harvest, and ultimately the wines we choose to make depend on what each site can give us. A cooler parcel may contribute acidity and length. Another may provide generosity or texture. Even within the same vineyard, fruit harvested several days apart can offer remarkably different possibilities.
This is why harvest is not simply the moment when grapes become ripe. It is a series of decisions about balance. Sugar matters, but so do acidity, flavor, texture, condition and the character of the fruit. We taste, measure, walk, wait and occasionally change our minds. Farming has a useful habit of discouraging certainty.
Our move toward indigenous fermentation grew naturally from this site-specific thinking. Rather than introducing a selected yeast to steer fermentation toward a predetermined result, we wanted to give the fruit more room to establish the direction.
Healthy Fruit Changes What Is Possible
Our early tests were successful, but whether native yeasts could carry all of the many fermentations we run was still an open question. These fermentations can be slower and longer, often extending lees contact and contributing texture and complexity. But slower fermentation is not automatically better fermentation. It requires healthy fruit, careful observation, and a cellar team willing to respond rather than simply follow a schedule.
That realization led us back to the vineyard. If the cellar is going to do less, the vineyard has to do more. Healthy indigenous fermentations require a healthy vineyard ecosystem. To create the conditions for healthy fruit and dependable spontaneous fermentations, we focused increasingly on the biological health and diversity of our vineyards. We built up natural defenses, researching and attracting beneficial species and planting site-specific cover crops. We simultaneously began eliminating inputs, like synthetic herbicides and insecticides, that we believed were inconsistent with the resilient, biologically active vineyard ecosystem we were trying to build.
These efforts in the vineyards, combined with diligent hand selection at harvest, ensured the health of our fruit, giving us greater confidence to allow fermentations to proceed at their own pace. This relationship between farming and winemaking remains central to how we work today. Minimal intervention in the cellar is not simply a decision to do less. It is made possible by doing more elsewhere: observing the vineyard, improving soils, encouraging biodiversity, harvesting carefully and selecting fruit rigorously. The better and more complete the fruit arriving at the winery, the less we need to ask the cellar to correct it.
Winemaking Team: Head Winemaker & Co-owner Fred Merwarth, Winemaker Dillon Buckley, & Associate Winemaker Bryanna Cramer
By 2008, all of the fermentations for our estate Rieslings relied exclusively on indigenous yeasts. Our Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, red varietals, and the primary fermentations for our sparkling wines followed in subsequent years.
These transitions highlighted the deep links between our vineyard sites, our harvests, and our finished wines. As we realized in those early trials, the additional structure and depth we taste in the tanks each winter are welcome results, but they are not the only purpose of the approach. The purpose is also transparency. We want to taste the fruit. We want to recognize the vineyard. And we want one vintage to be allowed to taste different from the next.
How to Approach a Vintage
One consequence of working this way is accepting variation.
The Finger Lakes does not give us the same growing season twice. Temperature, rainfall, disease pressure, sunshine, harvest conditions, and the rhythm of ripening change from year to year. We do not see those differences as something that winemaking should erase. They are part of what makes wine interesting.
Our cellar decisions therefore change with the vintage. Picking dates move. Fermentation lengths vary. Individual lots develop differently. Vessels are chosen for what they can contribute, or importantly, for what they do not contribute. The objective is not minimal intervention for its own sake. Sometimes intervention is necessary. The objective is to understand why we are intervening and whether that decision helps the fruit become more clearly itself.
A cellar still requires decisions every day. The difference is that we try to make those decisions in response to the wine rather than asking the wine to conform to a predetermined style.
The Art of Blending: The Human Component of Terroir
Our Dry Riesling demonstrates this particularly well. It draws from our widest range of vineyard sites and picking dates and therefore provides one of the broadest portraits of our estate in any given vintage. Early selections, especially those from the cooler, shale-dominated HJW Vineyard site, lay a foundation of structure and acidity in the wine. Additional components from different pick dates and vineyard sites are combined in a series of blending trials where aromatics, texture, and richness are evaluated. The most important question is whether the pieces make one another clearer. One component may bring acidity, another breadth, another length or aromatic lift. The final blend should feel less like a collection of parts and more like a complete thought. In the end, we create a wine that is both a reflection of vintage and of our estate.
Once the Dry Riesling blend is established as a broad expression of the estate and vintage, the distinctions among individual vineyards become even more apparent. Our vineyard-designated and reserve wines can then offer narrower views: not better or lesser versions of the same idea, but more specific ones. If Dry Riesling is the landscape, the single-vineyard wines are places within it.It is here, after the urgency of harvest has passed and the fermentations have begun to settle, that a year’s worth of work comes slowly into focus. The vineyards begin to distinguish themselves. The choices made at harvest become clearer. Unexpected lots emerge. Assumptions are occasionally proven wrong. And gradually, the vintage tells us what it was.
