Tastecamp Day 3: Leading the Way with Pinot

If you want to know if a wine region has potential, look to the best. There can always be stragglers and careless winemakers, but looking at what the top vignerons can do will really let you know the possibilities.

Looking at the top wines we tasted over the weekend at Tastecamp, it’s clear that the Finger Lakes has the potential to be a great wine region. The quality of the best rieslings we tasted was truly solid, and the aging potential is there.

But on our last day, it was a producer of pinot noir (and a little riesling) that really got the point across. Hearts and Hands Wine Company, our final stop along the way, stunned us with some truly remarkable pinots (including a blanc de noirs sparkling that would have more claim to the name champagne than any Finger Lakes bubbly that – wrongly – claim the name). I’ll come back to that in more details, but it was clear, as we tasted those luscious, precise, complex cuvées that consumers – and winegrowers and winemakers – in the Finger Lakes can look to producers like this one to see just how good they could make their wine.

Tom Higgins, winemaker at Hearts and Hands Wine Company, a maker of remarkable pinot noir