May 4, 2021 Lunch - Ham and cheese sandwich on New York Throughway. Dinner - grilled salami and cheese bruschetta

May 4, 2021 Lunch - Ham and cheese sandwich on New York Throughway. Dinner - grilled salami and cheese bruschetta 

Today was a travel day that started with a good breakfast at the wonderful Inn at Saratoga and ended with tasting some terrific wines and dinner al fresco on the porch of the small cabin perched on the side of a hill looking out across Lake Seneca.

We ate breakfast at 8:00 in the sitting room of the hotel.  There breakfast was a wide range of items including pastries, granola, and three types of warm sandwiches made with English Muffins.

I chose a packet of granola made with maple syrup, a bowl of fresh diced pineapple, a dash of milk, and a vanilla yogurt to sort of honor my favorite breakfast.  I then ate the egg, bacon, and cheese from one of the sandwiches with a small apple Danish with a nice flake pastry that reminded me for just a second of Danish vinebrod. 

We then three and one-half hours to Lake Cayuga with one stop to go to the bathroom and fix a ham and cheese sandwich with potato chips.  Suzette drank a Starbucks coffee and I drank a Rolling Rock beer as we ate while she drovve.

Suzette had found a review of the best wines in the Finger Lakes Region. Our first stop was Buttonwood winery overlooking Lake Cayuga. We liked their wines and bought two medium dry rieslings, a Gruner Vitliner, and an odd duck of self fermenting effervescent white Doux with a Cayuga

At each of the four vineyards we visited we were the only guest or one of only two or three small groups.  We noticed immediately that there was a big difference between our interest and enjoyment of the wines at vineyards where the employees were knowledgeable about the workings of the winery and the production of the wines and those where they were just young people doing their first job.  Of the four vineyards we visited, Buttonwood and Red Newt fell into the first category, Wagner was in the latter category and Lamoreaux was in the middle with great wines and a not terribly knowledgeable pourer.

After relaxing on the deck of Buttonwood drinking their interesting wines we began relax and shift from travel mode to drinking mode.  We then drove the approximately 15 miles to the south end of Lake Seneca, the next lake to the west and visited three vineyards we had visited in our prior visit five years ago.

Suzette did not remember the three wineries we visited on Lake Seneca that we stopped at today but I did and my impressions today were remarkably similar to those from five years ago, for both good and bad.

The first Lake Seneca winery was Lamoreaux, which I recalled had a breathtakingly dry Riesling five years ago.  Today, we again were impressed by their dry rieslings and bought four bottles, including several 90+ point rated single vineyard rieslings.

We then went to Wagner’s and had our most negative experience with ill informed young people who clearly did can know or care anything about the wines, perhaps because the wines were essentially undrinkable.

Wagner‘s seemed to be the closest thing to a tourist trap.  It had a large beautifully sited dining room and tasting facility overlooking the vineyard and the lake and a large parking lot more suited to bus loads of people than any other facility.  We found its Riesling wines to be mostly undrinkable, but enjoyed its rose and Cabernet Franc.  Here is a picture of its Rose.

After a few minutes, around 4:00, we drove to the the winery I recalled liking five years ago named Red Newt located higher up the hill from the road instead of lower by the lake, which provided a more monumental view of the surrounding country. 

We soon discovered that Red Newt had produced the most highly rated wine ever produced in New York State, a breathtakingly luscious Riesling with intense fruit and strong acidity that explodes in your mouth, the 2016 Knoll Lahoma Vineyard Finger Lake Riesling that garnered a 95 rating from Parker. 

Red Newt specializes in single vineyard wines adapted to the unique soil types of each of the vineyards in which its grapes are produced.  For example, the Knoll is produced on a hillside where a pocket of gravel slid down the hillside to the lake during the last glacial event, the wine person told us. 

Many of the unique areas of soil are quite small, some only twelve feet wide.

We loved the rieslings at Red Newt and tried several 91 and 92 point rated wines, including the lovely Big H.  We bought a tasting and then 2 tadpoles or .1875 liter bottles of the prize winners.

We liked the Cabernet Franc, so bought a bottle of it for $22.00 for dinner and two of the prize winning rieslings including the 2016 Knoll Lahoma for $43.00.

We stopped at Hectors on the road where there was a small artisanal grocery selection and bought a thin edge of Leyden cheese, a can of Greek Dolmas, and a lb. of artisanal local butter.

We then drove to the spur on the lake where we had rented a cabin for the night.  It was a lovely sited lot on a hill with lake access.  We sat on the patio for a while bird watching.  We saw a big crane and an eagle fly by and lots of smaller birds in the trees that lined the hillside.

It was a cloudy day and we returned to our small cabin after we decided there would be no sunset at around 7:00 to fix dinner.

We only had sandwich fixings, so I sliced the remaking French baguette in half and butterflied each half and buttered the inside and then Suzette grilled the bread and two slices of salami and a slice of Swiss cheese on the charcoal grill using the large spatula as a griddle.  She the but the heated salami and cheese on the fire toasted bread for a warm salami and cheese bruschetta that we washed down with sips of Red Newt Cabernet Franc and water.

We then worked a bit and went to bed to the pitter patter of rain on our roof.

Bon Appetit