Hello. I am the person behind New York Winery Tours.
I grew up in upstate New York, two hours from the closest Finger Lakes winery and an hour from the closest Lake Erie one, and I never set foot in either until I was twenty-three. That is a long-running joke in my family. The wineries were always there. We just never went, because nobody we knew talked about them and the visible wine culture in the country in the 1990s was all California, Italy, France.
I started visiting wineries the year I moved to New York City, paradoxically. A friend dragged me to the North Fork on the LIRR, we drank a Wölffer rosé that I am still chasing the memory of, and I was in. Within a year I had been to most of the Seneca Lake trail and was starting to figure out the difference between a Hermann J. Wiemer Riesling and one from Dr. Konstantin Frank. I have been writing notes on it ever since.
This site is the long version of those notes. It is for the person who is curious about NY wine country and tired of the same six articles that come up on a Google search, half of which were written by people who clearly haven’t been to the region in five years.
What I Cover
Five regions: the Finger Lakes, Long Island (mostly the North Fork), the Hudson Valley, the Niagara Escarpment, and Lake Erie / Chautauqua. Tour planning, winery picks, lodging, food, transport, seasonal advice. The aim is to be useful, specific, and honest, in that order.
I do not take payment from wineries to feature them. I do not get free tastings. The pours I write about are the pours I have paid for, alongside everyone else in the room.
I do use affiliate links for hotel and tour bookings on third-party sites (Booking.com, Viator, GetYourGuide). If you book through one of those links, I earn a small commission and you pay the same price as you would have anyway. That is what keeps the lights on around here.
What I Don’t Do
I am not a wine critic. If you want a 100-point scoring system, you want Wine Spectator, not me. I describe what wines taste like in plain language, I tell you which ones I think are worth your money, and I trust you to make up your own mind from there.
I also do not do “best of” lists with no actual ranking. If a piece on this site says “best wineries on the Cayuga Lake Wine Trail”, it means I think those are the best, in roughly that order, and I will tell you why.
Get In Touch
Suggestions, corrections, a winery I am missing, a question about planning a trip: the contact page is the place. I read everything that comes through, and I reply to most of it.
Cheers, and welcome.