My recent reports on travel in New York State’s Finger Lakes—eleven glacial lakes and one Great Lake spread over 9,000 square miles—focused on winter and springtime, but now summer is in full flourish, and the hills and farms are bursting with fruit and wine grapes, and herbs and vegetables are fanning out in profusion. Wildflowers carpet the valleys—bee balm, red colombine, ragged robin, black knapweed, sweet William, fireweed and sand surrey.
    Wooden farm stands pop up along every route, and, with more than 100 wineries in the region, this is a great season to visit so many open to the public and taste their bottlings; indeed there are four established wine trails—Cayuga Lake Wine Trail, Seneca Lake Wine Trail, Keuka Lake Wine Trail and Canandaigua Wine Trail.
    Central to such activity is the New York Wine and Culinary Center in Canandaigua, which holds classes, catered affairs, and cooking demos in its state-of-the-art kitchen (below). At its Upstairs Bistro at least 90% of the ingredients featured are from New York, so I thoroughly enjoyed a lunch that began with a pizza made with Speck bacon, snow peas, mint pesto and an egg fresh from the local farm ($12). The artisan cheeses and meats are the best produced in the area, from Black Mule Blue and McCadam Cheddar to salami, pork rillettes, and capicola. The producers are proudly listed on the menu—Bedient Farms beef, Bostrom Farms pork, Maplestone Farms chicken, and the glistening milk white scallops come straight from the waters off Montauk. Don’t miss the blue cheese potato croquettes with pickled onions and curried yogurt ($7). 

    Also in Canandaigua is Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park (below), once the summer home of financier Frederick Ferris Thompson. Set on 52 acres, the 40-room Queen Anne Mansion was built in 1887 and now encompasses a rose garden, rock garden, Japanese garden and a greenhouse designed by Lord and Burnham, all now teeming with carefully cultivated flowers, trees and shrubs. There is also a Finger Lakes Wine Center where you can sample bottlings from 40 wineries.
  The mansion’s interior is a somber place, heavy with dark timbers and stags’ heads, but a tour gives you a real sense of the kind of entrepreneurial wealth that was so much apart of the Gilded Age in America, when such people spent a relatively short time in such grand homes.
    Along Route 21 in the Bristol Hills near Naples is the beloved local shop Monica’s Pies, just as small as it should be, still a family operation.  Originally an honor system sign outside read, “Try before you buy,” and enough people obviously loved them to make the Concord grape pies famous, now with 25 other varieties available, along with jams, jellies and conserves, all made with local fruit. 

    Take the wares at Monica’s Pies and expand them exponentially to include all manner of fresh food from local sources and you have the Rochester-based, Wegmans Food Markets, now with more than 70 stores across the mid-Atlantic region. But the gargantuan flagship is a tourist attraction all on its own, with aisles and aisles of baked goods, cheeses, seafood, sushi and anything else you could crave. Name it and Wegmans sells it—and it is always of guaranteed top quality and sold at good prices. It also has one of the best restaurants in the area, Next Door, which is always packed at lunch and dinner. Many people come for the amazingly diverse sushi bar offerings, along with sandwiches at lunch and Wegmans organic lamb and chicken at dinner. 

    The last time I had been to Rochester was decades ago, when it was pretty much owned and ruled over by Eastman Kodak, whose fortunes soured with the arrival of digital cameras. Still, the corporation has a large footprint in town.  You’ll get a good idea of how well the company’s top officers lived by driving slowly down East Avenue, one of the loveliest leafy streets in America, lined on each side with impressive but unostentatious mansions in an array of architectural styles. 

    Elsewhere, Rochester is a city of neighborhoods (right) and the economy has started to come back via high tech entities like Kodak, Xerox and Bausch and Lomb along with the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Still, incomes and property values stay low while property taxes stay high.  There is a Rochester Philharmonic and a Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival, while the annual Lilac Festival commemorates the town’s early history as the Flower City.

    In Geneva, on Seneca Lake, the main attraction is Belhurst Castle, where you may stay in any of the eleven period rooms and two cottages of the Chambers Hotel, itself adjacent to the Vinifera Inn, which is more contemporary in style and décor; its Turret Rooms are the most desirable. Two miles west, White Springs Manor is done in more of a Georgian Revival mansion pillared style. 

    One of the best restaurants in the area is Kindred Fare (left), “a spirited cookery,” which stocks a very good selection of the best Finger Lakes wines to go with the artisanal provender that makes up a menu of hearty dishes like grilled zucchini and summer squash with ricotta, duck, corn, broccoli and herb butter ($14), grilled flatbreads ($14), a very good Moroccan spiced meatball stew with chickpeas and yogurt served with warm pita bread ($24), and an Asian-style braised duck with stir-fried vegetables and soy sauce ginger glaze ($28). The summer’s fruit crumble for dessert shouldn’t be missed.
    In the three articles I have done about the Finger Lakes over the past few months, I have barely scratched the surface of a region so varied in its enchantments, from the broad blue lakes themselves with their evocative Indian names to the waterfalls that gush at full force in summer. History riddles the region, from the Harriet Tubman Home (right) and Willard Memorial Chapel designed by Louis C. Tiffany in Auburn to the Rural Life Museum in King Ferry and the New Hope gristmill, built in 1823.
    The myriad nature trails in the area include the Erie Canal Recreational Trail along the tow boat route and the highly esteemed 157-acre Dorothy McIlroy Bird Sanctuary in Summerhill. 

    The Finger Lakes are also home to traditional diners with people’s first names. Along the numbered routes farmers’ markets offer a bounty of local foods straight through to October. Soon the apples will be

picked—baskets of them by tourists—and pressed into cider. The grape harvest will begin to produce Rieslings that are among the finest in the world. 

 
In summer the aromas of rich soil and grasses and wildflowers are always there—wild basil and bergamot—intensified during the warm rain showers and rising mists at morning. And at breakfast there will be fresh bread, cured bacon, eggs plucked from the nest just hours earlier, and preserves of grapes and berries of every color.
    And if you’re just a little lucky, a rainbow may appear above the lake like a sweeping greeting, seeming to beckon you to the next place you’ll go to that day.

    At a time when the United States is pulling out of the Paris Accords on climate change, the world’s vintners are already working hard both to counteract its effects already evident in the vineyards and to experiment with ways to cut their energy footprint and to  restore balance to their terroirs.

    This was brought into riveting focus at VINEXPO 2017, the bi-annual exposition in Bordeaux, France, that gathers thousands of industry professionals, from vintners to buyers.  There, last month, the seminar with the provocative title “Fire & Rain: Climate Change and the Wine Industry” was delivered to a packed room, including many journalists, who came to hear the warnings about, and the countermeasures to, global warming that may have a radical effect on how grapes are grown and how wines are made in the future.

    Hosted by Dana Nigro, senior editor of Wine Spectator, the panel consisted of John P. Holdren, Harvard University professor of environmental science and policy, who served as President Barack Obama’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Miguel A. Torres (left), President of Bodegas Torres, an internationally recognized leader in efforts to reduce winery carbon emissions and educate the wine industry about climate change; Gaia Gaja, a member of the fifth generation of her family to own and manage Barbaresco's renowned Gaja winery and the second generation to run Gaja Family Wine Estates, with Ca' Marcanda in Bolgheri and Pieve Santa Restituta in Montalcino; and Kathryn Hall, proprietor of Napa Valley’s HALL Wines, a leader in energy efficiency with one of the world’s only LEED Gold-certified wineries and Gold-certified tasting rooms.

    Holdren presented the most up-to-date scientific data on how global warming has begun to affect vineyards around the world, in many cases as something of a boon to regions like Bordeaux and Burgundy that always crave more heat and sunshine.  Indeed, on the day of the seminar the temperature in Bordeaux had soared close to 100 degrees and stayed there for the entire length of VINEXPO events.

    Holdren’s contentions were backed up by a June article in Forbes in which Denis Dubourdieu, winemaker and professor of oenology at the University of Bordeaux, reported that the French climate definitely warmed between 2000 and 2010 and, despite variations from year to year, France had produced a number of great vintages within that decade. He also said that even slight movements in temperature and rainfall have an effect on good vintages in such terroirs.  By the same token,  too dramatic effects of climate can be “unfriendly,” including increased sugar levels, cooked wines, toughened tannins and poor aging of wines already tired when bottled.

    In the same article  David Adelsheim of Oregon’s Adelsheim Vineyard was unequivocal in having deep concerns over extreme weather patterns, as does Frederick Frank of New York State’s Dr. Konstantin Frank Wine Cellars, who said the Finger Lakes growing season has been extended, harvest dates are earlier, grape maturity has been altered and, more important, winters have become quite volatile.

    At the VINEXPO seminar, Miguel Torres said that in Chile “we have had fires of historic dimensions and frequency.  This is weather we have not seen in the last fifty years.” At the Torres wineries they are trying a myriad  of techniques to blunt the effects of CO2 emissions, including experiments to capture CO2 with algae and in greenhouses.

       “We are recovering CO2 from fermentation,” he said, “and in the building materials we use and the weight of the bottles for our wines.  Planting density has been cut back and we are experimenting with ancient varietals that can take the heat better, and, of course, we want to plant in higher altitudes when we can.”  He also noted that someday he hopes to own a Tesla electric car.

    Gaia Gaja (left with her father Angelo)said that her family has always been very sensitive to the long-term effects of what they do within their terroir. “Viticulture requires a long relationship with the land to know it, to modify, and when to leave it alone.  The challenge is in the vineyards, where you pay a high price for extreme temperatures.  For one thing, you get very ripe grapes and high alcohol. Warm weather attracts moths and insects. You can’t manipulate the grapes when they get to the winery.  It is why we only hire full-time workers who know our vineyards and how to work within them. Part-time amateurs take a long time to learn that.”

    Gaja is throwing everything into the battle against global warming: Growing grass higher so it doesn’t drink so much water; cutting the grass to make a blanket for the ground in cold months; planting many species of flowers and trees like cypress to attract beneficial birds and  insects.  “If you have abundant life in a vineyard,” she says, “you will have a thriving ecosystem.”

    One new frontier in the battle is to create “sexual confusion” within the insect community, whereby pheromones are used to disturb the males’ responses to females, preventing the next generation.  “The problem,” said Gaja, “is that if we do such experiments in our 700 hectares of vineyards, we have to convince our neighbors to do it too or else it doesn’t work.”

    Kathryn Hall (right), who does own a Tesla as well as a Prius, once served as U.S.  ambassador in agriculture, and admitted that in her vineyards in Napa Valley, “We do make wine from very ripe fruit and more structure, because, quite frankly, that’s what people like to drink.” 

Nevertheless, she has been working assiduously to reduce energy consumption as much as possible throughout the LEEDS-certified facilities, including using solar power, which now provides 50% of the winery’s energy, soon to be 65%.  “It is expensive to pour so many resources into fighting climate change,” she said, “but it is our personal commitment to do so.  This is our land and change is already here, so we have to protect the future of our wines and of Napa Valley.”