You’ve made me want to hunt down some Kemmeter wines.
Weis Vineyards in the FLX also does a good job with rieslings, and their merlot and blaufrankisch are decent. The founder/owner is from the Mosel.
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I’m right across the river in Jersey City and my office is in Midtown… happy to connect at some point and open one.
I have not. I keep my eyes open for NY Rieslings, but have not seen this one. I will look for it. We are just back from a trip to lake Placid & Saranac lake and none of the stores there had anything like it. But, they sound great. THX
And his wife’s dumplings are great.
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He’s a very small operation and I believe only sells thru the winery.
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I was in the Finger Lakes this past fall and have posted lots of notes so far (we came back with about four mixed cases). We really liked Weis. Couldn’t get into a tour at Kemmeter but bought one bottle each of the range and working through them. While we of course liked some wines better than others I didn’t think any were out and out clunkers. Not sure, I probably have around a case or so left to taste and post on.
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This is correct.
The interesting thing as a producer in the region is that, as we export, it is our top end bottlings that are the most price competitive. For Apollo’s Praise that means “The Knoll” Dry Riesling, but we sell that in London and Stockholm at a remarkable clip precisely because it is viewed as cut from the same cloth as top-end German dry Rieslings, but at a better price. I just find it fascinating, and interesting when a market that is totally new to FLX wine comes up with their own opinions about them.
And to @David_Bu3ker and the comment on Spätlese and Auslese styles, I would agree that there is no reason to make them if you care about your bottom line, talk about an uphill battle. But as a Riesling lover and winemaker, you can’t help but make some expressions in that style when you see what a given site and fermentation is speaking to. So I make 60 cases of one from time to time, mostly for myself to drink and the Riesling geeks who happen to find it 
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Thank you for posting. I really find this fascinating. When are we going to do a blind tasting!
Curious what does The Knoll retail for in London?
Very happy to help organize the blind tasting! I’ll be down in the city again soon enough, if that is a convenient point, just have to get through bottling the first run of 2024s over the next month.
Apollo’s Praise Knoll in London would be right around 60 pounds on a store shelf, according to our importer. Although, to be fair, it largely gets nabbed in restaurants.
I would be more than happy to bring all of the German wines. We can do it at Noreetuh.
Honestly that is fantastic but also shocking. That is 1.5-2x what a Lauer Schonfels or Emrich-Schonleber GG sell for in the U.K.
I have never had the wine. I am going to fix that ASAP.
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To be clear, I wouldn’t suggest the wine deserves to be that much more than Lauer, Emrich-Schonleber, or the equivalent! But shipping costs are also astronomical in comparison. (It actually costs our importer 2x as much to get wine from us in NY to London as it does from the West Coast of the US to London.)
Noreetuh is absolutely the place to post up. Jin was pouring the 2023 Knoll blind for some folks who were in town a couple weeks ago for Rieslingfier, so I daresay he’d be on board.
Hello. I’m new to WB. I plan to do two blind tastings in the Los Angeles area comparing: 1) NY Finger Lake rieslings to Mosel rieslings; 2) NY Long Island cabernet franc and cab fr-based blends to counterparts elsewhere (probably west bank Bordeaux). I know little of NY wines and want to showcase the best examples. Can someone offer some appropriate NY wine names to try to pursue in these two regions? And can someone suggest the best way to buy these wines and have them shipped to me in CA? Thanks.
Sorry. I meant “right bank” Bordeaux, where there are more cab fr blends.
Two FLRs I like and know you can get in Cali (or at least shipped) are Red Newt and Apollo’s Praise.
As an FLX enthusiast and fellow CA resident, here’s the selection I would put together if you wanted to compare Finger Lakes riesling with Germany. These producers have a great portfolio, and these just happen to be my favorite bottlings. Saratoga Wine has the best selection with reasonable cross-country shipping, and I can vouch for them. Cart - SaratogaWine.com
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Two suggestions:
Stick to dry rieslings for the comparison. There are some quite good Finger Lakes rieslings, but the off dry and sweet ones have a different sort of balance than German wines with residual sugar.
Second, consider trying cab francs or other reds from the Finger Lakes. They’ve made great strides with reds, and I’ve generally been very disappointed with Long Island wines, white and red. There’s a huge amount of mediocre LI wine that’s sold to the weekend crowd.
Hermann Weimer and Konstantin Frank were the benchmark producers for years. I haven’t had a Red Newt in years, but they were good. And I visited Forge two years ago and thought their wines were good.
Weis Vineyards (founded by a guy from the Mosel Valley) is doing a good job with various whites and reds, and I quite liked both rieslings and the reds (including teroldego and lagrein) from Red Hawk Ridge, which was founded by a woman who had been a top winemaker at Gallo and her husband.
A friend bought most of the wines for a Finger Lakes tasting from a store in Ithaca that he said has the best range of Finger Lake wines. I know they ship to NYC reasonably, and I assume they’d shop to California.
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For FLX Rieslings Forge Cellars and Hillock & Hobbs are top tier, Wiemer and Ravines also very good.
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I agree WRT long island reds. It’s a little too hit or miss for me. All of the producers I listed above also make good cab francs and other reds. In addition, I particularly enjoy Osmote and Trestle Thirty-One’s Cab Francs.
The more I think about it, the less I like the FLX to Mosel comparison. I would see the Pfalz or even Rheingau as a better option as the Mosel acidity tends to be more pronounced.
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