Welcome to the Lake!
Hello! Welcome to Lake Onondaga Vineyards’ new online site. This will be our base on the web, and we hope it’s a place you’ll visit for information and news on Upstate New York’s newest name in wine. We also hope it will give us a chance to know you better. We imagine that, like a bottle of Finger Lakes Red, our presence on the web will be the occasion for a real exchange of ideas, opinions, and maybe some laughs.
More after the jump…
What We Do:
Well, we make red wine. That’s it. Some other companies try to offer a range of multiple varieties and other products, from wine to jelly to baskets and butter and pastries, but we just make a small number of excellent red wines that vary in name and characteristics according to the growing seasons and the local climate.
Who Are We?
Finally, some introductions. [Assume these silhouettes are actual people.]
My name is Sam Roberts, and I’ll be maintaining the site and offering my thoughts on the craft and business of making wine in New York. I’m new to blogging, but not to wine. Lake Onondaga was started last year by my dad and his sister, but the whole family has been making wine for almost 100 years. My great-grandfather Hollis Roberts was making wine in New York and Connecticut as early as 1915, and he passed down the love of the art to every generation since. (What Hollis was doing in 1920’s is a bit of mystery, but we know he never lost his knack for wine-making.)
I graduated from Syracuse U. in 1995 with a degree in English, but I never left working with Dad and Nan in various family businesses. I’m as pleased as can be to be involved in this new venture!
This handsome gent is George Roberts, founder and president of Lake Onondaga Vineyards. He’s also my dad. Like his father and his grandfather before him, George has been involved with wine most of his life. He did take time off for the Navy and for work with a shipping company in the Netherlands, but he returned to New York state and his roots in wine-making in the 1980’s, and he hasn’t looked back. If you visit the vineyards, you’ll probably find George personally supervising the grapes or working in the casking rooms. He likes to be a part of the whole process from growing to bottling (not to mention tasting!).
And here’s my aunt Nancy Callahan, whose hard work and skill with planning really brought Lake Onondaga Vineyards into being. Aunt Nancy has been a journalist, a restauranteur, and a travel agent, but she also had a hand in my grandfather’s hobby wine-making from an early age. When Grandpa partnered with his friend Buddy Gardner to start their own winery in the 1960’s, Nancy was always on hand as an apprentice wine-maker. My Dad says it was Nancy’s idea to finally start a new company and do business a whole new way, and what you’re seeing now is the fruit of that dream.
Welcome to Lake Onondaga Vineyards! You’ll see it on our label: at Lake Onondaga Vineyards, we love wine!
Fiddly Ruleset 