Specializing in Bone-Dry Riesling,
Cool Climate Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Cabernet Franc from Seneca Lake
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 more than a dozen different vineyards, each with its own story and personality.
““…the wines are illuminated, full of vibrancy and vigor. They remind us that beauty is boundless, and even in the dimmest moments, it can be found in the simplest forms.””
Each year, we publish our “offering” of the wines available for the current vintage. Details about the growing season, notes from the cellar, technical information, as well as the stories of the vineyards, people, and history of individual lieux-dits are compiled.
Our Classique bottlings are our most important wines, as they aim to reveal the true nature of each vintage and to explore the terroir of east Seneca Lake. These wines are the foundation of Forge, and each year we aim to craft a wine that consistently speaks of the style of Forge and a pure expression of the vintage.
Each of the 16 vineyards that we work with contribute to the blend that make up our Classique wines. These wines showcase the beauty of Seneca Lake: to be able to consolidate the various elements of each site into a perfectly balanced wine. Very few regions in the world provide in a natural way this perfect combination.
Experience the Dry Riesling and Pinot Noir Classique
Due to the limited nature of these wines, we highly suggest subscribing to our email list (sign-up form located below) to receive notice of their release and availability. Members of The Foundry have first access to new releases and receive an allocation of these special wines throughout the year even when they are sold out to the public.
Our lieux-dits or single vineyard bottlings allow us to explore the impacts of soil and terroir on our different vineyard sites. The eight-mile stretch that we work with along southeast Seneca Lake offers an unrivaled diversity of soil types. We consider that our task is to explore them, understand them, and offer you the finest possible rendition of them through these wines.
If there was such a thing as a formal ‘Grand Cru’-style classification of the finest soils in our region, our single vineyards would undoubtedly be a part of it.
“We never stop learning; we learn every single day until the day we die.”
— Henri Barruol
