It’s a very personal endeavor to watch the development of a vineyard from first vine to fourth vintage, comparable to witnessing your children grow before your eyes at a rapid pace. Seeing their unique personalities develop, doing your best to guard them from hardships, learning how they cope and reflect their environment, and then sending them out into the world on their own with the best of hopes. In many ways, for us, this is Bellows.

In the early days (we like to call them the “teenage years”), Bellows was fast-growing, eager to push shoots and leaves with a vengeance. Teaching restraint to such a tenacious site required a bit of trial and error as well as repeated consultations on nature versus nurture. Our approach to farming this site is regenerative, a method that allows it to grow organically (for the most part) with some gentle guidance from its elders (us). In some ways, it’s difficult to “bottle up” Bellows, kind of like capturing a lightning bug in a jar. So much energy and electricity in a tiny space, it hardly seems fair to confine it. You must brace yourself for both Bellows Dry Riesling and Pinot Noir, widen your palate, give a pep talk to your taste buds…it will envelop you completely.

vineyard details

East side Seneca Lake - Burdett
Soils: Conesus and Lansing silt loam on shale
Elevation: 1000 ft.
Year Planted: 2017
Harvest Date: Sept. 13
Hand-harvested and sorted
Indigenous ferment in wooden vat for 15 days. 33% whole clusters. Ageing for 12 months in 9% new, 20% 1 year old, 9% 2 years old and 62% neutral oak then 2 months in stainless steel tank
Alcohol: 12.5% by vol.
Production: 279 cases