This month we are delighted to feature the wines of Forge Cellars, located on the East side of Seneca Lake about 35 west of Ithaca.

About the winery, in their words:

Our goal is for our wines to reflect the place that they come from, because this is where the pleasure is. When you smell a wine, you should be transported to its origins and see the landscape. It should relate to good memories, and provide a strong feeling of identity. This is why we try to listen, be soft and transparent in our winemaking.

Our choices in the cellar guard the purity of our vineyards. Simply put, we make wine in the traditional, handcrafted manner. We harvest by hand. We sort by hand. We load the grapes into the press by hand. We shovel the vats out by hand. We employ spontaneous fermentation and ferment in very tiny lots, so that we truly understand the expression of the vineyard each year. We use very low levels of sulphur, ferment our Rieslings bone dry, and do not fine or filter our red wines.

Our indigenous yeast fermentations proceed very slowly. It is not in spring, but in the summer after the vintage that we are finally able to move toward bottling the wines. Once fermentations are complete, our team begins diligently tasting through our barrels and tanks, giving each a detailed rating and review, and writing personal tasting notes. When we talk about small batch and individualized fermentations, we really mean it — hundreds of separate, small French barriques from 16 different vineyards, each with its own story and personality.