100% Riesling

Food pairings: Grilled striped bass with lemon and capers, halibut or cod, crab cakes, shellfish, chicken piccata, spicy Asian dishes, grilled pork chops and ham.

Winemaking: The hand-harvested grapes from both estate vineyards were whole-cluster pressed, while a smaller machine-harvested portion from the home farm's vineyard was given some skin contact in the tank press before pressing. All the components were fermented at low temperatures in temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks, then racked and aged on their lighter lees until May, and the wine was bottled in August 2023. In 2022 a cold spell in mid-February drastically reduced the crop; a warm, sunny summer with very modest rainfall made it one of the ripest vintages ever in degree days, and the grapes were picked from October 12 to 26.

Vineyards and terroir: Estate grown, with one vineyard on each side of Seneca Lake. The Limestone Springs Vineyard (formerly White Springs) at the winery near Geneva provides most of the blend: an east-facing site of Honeoye loam over limestone, one of the few limestone sites in the Finger Lakes. The rest comes from the west-facing 16 Falls Vineyard on the eastern shore, with clay and loam over shalestone and a lyre trellis. Steep slopes and these limestone and shalestone soils give the wine its delicate aromatics, distinct minerality and bright acidity.

Family and history: Ravines is the family winery of Morten and Lisa Hallgren. Danish by birth, Morten grew up on his family's estate, Domaine de Castel Roubine in the Côtes de Provence, studied enology and viticulture in Montpellier and worked at Château Cos d'Estournel in Bordeaux before becoming chief winemaker at Dr. Konstantin Frank in the Finger Lakes in 1998. Convinced that the region's Riesling was best expressed in a dry, focused, mineral-driven style, he and Lisa, a chef, founded Ravines on a parcel between two deep ravines on the slopes of Keuka Lake, and their first vintage in 2002 was made exclusively of dry vinifera wines. That first Dry Riesling helped pioneer the bone-dry, mineral-tinged style the Finger Lakes are now famous for. The Hallgrens later purchased the historic White Springs Farm near Geneva, today home to their winery and tasting room.

In the pictures: Owners Morten and Lisa Hallgren (photo courtesy of Ravines Wine Cellars via Skurnik Wines); and the 16 Falls Vineyard on the eastern side of Seneca Lake from the air (photo courtesy of Ravines Wine Cellars).