Whoops I missed two days, will try to do double posts twice this week to make up for that
We are finally fully vaccinated, and ready to take a real vacation. The problem I can’t fly right now. Second issue, our regular dog sitters (a.k.a. my parents), will be out of town when we want to take the vacation, and I hate paying for the kennel (though my dog loves the kennel, it’s also a 1.5 hour drive away from home). So we need somewhere that is dog friendly. Hence I am currently planning a vacation to the Finger Lakes for mid-June.
My significant other went to Cornell for Grad School, and loves Ithaca. Loves the gorges, loves the downtown, loves everything about it. Hence it will be our base for the majority of the trip. I also want to spend some time in Seneca Falls, because of the whole beginnings of the Woman’s Rights Movement thing, so we will spend a few days based there as well.
We’ve been to the area before, but the last time was 5 years ago, so I am guessing things have changed since then, due to both time and COVID. I also can’t walk on two feet this time, or drive long distances which will make things interesting. It will be like going for the first time.
Most of the time in Ithaca is planned, my SO will drop me off at the art museum, and then walk the Gorges with the dog. We will see if I can do upper rim waterfalls trails with my crutches to see some waterfalls, if the easiest one doesn’t work, I can lounge in the hotel and watch HGTV, while the SO and the dog hike on those in the area.
The rest of the vacation will be spent wine tasting, and I mean tasting with spitting. I am still on drugs that don’t mix well with alcohol so having over a glass of wine in a day is not a good idea. Even when I am not in pain, I am not going to wineries/vineyards for the “experience.” I am a millennial who is there for the old fashioned reason, to try wine I want to purchase for later consumption. I also am a wine snob, and not someone who just goes into any winery in a region. Life is too short to drink bad wine, hence I do my research before I go wine tasting.
First reservations are normally important. The vast majority of the best wine places, no matter where you are tasting are by appointment only. Most appointments run 45-60 minutes, though when you make a reservation they will normally tell you how long you expect to be there, add another 10-15 minutes to this for buying wine. On a normal wine tasting day, I try to have 3 well spaced out reservations, and will add one or two walk in places if I have time in between.
I hate calling places, and normally I just use online reservation systems that have become standard in the last 5 years. But due to having the dog and mobility issues, I am not able to do that this time, I have to call. 95% of wineries are great when you call, even if you are calling last minute to see if they have any open appointments the day before or day of (I have called for day of appointments). The 5% that aren’t nice, I don’t care how great your wine is, but I am not going to give you any more business.
In terms of dogs, in many places dogs are only allowed outdoors for tastings, hence it is important to call to check in they are only allowed outdoors or also indoors in case of rain (a few tasting rooms I know even have covered areas you can leash dogs if it is raining so you can taste indoors if they aren’t allowed in).
In terms of mobility. A lot of wineries and tasting rooms were built in an era where they are grandfathered out of ADA rules, so many of them one would need crutches with no fear of stairs to get to a small tasting room. With a broken ankle, I also can’t sit on high bar stools, as my legs dangle, which isn’t good when you have a broken ankle. Due to these reasons I need to call the wineries to find out what mobility device I need to use for each winery, and if they have a place that I can sit comfortably while I am there (if I am not able to stay in a wheelchair).
Now that I have gotten through making reservations, and finding wineries that are functional enough to have both the dog and me, we can get to the interesting part, how I choose my wineries in general.
The biggest worry I have when going on a wine tasting vacation, is that I will end up at a tourist trap winery. A tourist trap winery to me, is somewhere people who drink wines like Kendall Jackson or Sonoma Cutter will love. It will have a certain kitsch factor, a cute little gift shop that sells more than wine, the wines will be overly concentrated, overly buttery or overly sweet, the tasting rooms will be loud and crowded, a few customers will be wearing perfume, and I will be in my own personal hell.
I prefer to be gently educated through my wines with someone who at most is working with one other group. I want someone who is knowledgeable about the wine, the terrior, the region, who clearly enjoys what they are doing. I want to feel the love of the wine, as I am probably going to be buying 1/2 a case at a minimum. Due to this I look for small tasting rooms.
Despite hating wine scores, I do use wine scores in areas I don’t know well. Other then Herman J. Wiemer and Dr. Konstantin Frank, most of the Finger Lakes wines aren’t widely distributed. This means I need some sort of research documentation to figure out which wineries to go to. For many areas I use Cellartracker to find new places to go, clicking on wines I have and love, and finding users who like similar wine, and then finding out what other vineyards wine they have. Most of these users don’t have wine from the Finger Lakes region, so I need another way to scope out wineries, and wine scores seem like the best way. I just look at which wineries have on average the best scores.
I then Google the wineries and get basic information, like “Do you have a tasting room I can visit?”, “Are dogs allowed?”, “what type of tasting is it?”
I then pull up a Google Map (through Google Drive), and start plotting all of the wineries, so I can find clusters I can go to on a single day, so I don’t have too much driving in one day. I normally have a few places we’ve been before I definitely want to go back to (i.e. we loved Bloomer Creek Winery when we were last in the area, and our dog loved playing with their dog too, sadly it looks like they are closed for tastings at the time we are going), and we have on our list a few new places I want to go to (i.e. Heart and Hands Winery). These wineries take precedence on the clusters I choose. I then start on the reservation process, which right now means I call different wineries to check on dog friendliness and if they are able to work with the fact I am currently mobility impaired.
Overall my process is long, but I end up with very few wineries I am disappointed in. I then will follow a similar process to find what restaurants to go to (as Yelp and Google reviews aren’t always the best).
Hopefully this helps other people find great wineries wherever they go.
Girl and her Corgi 