2024 Harvest Update: Ria's Wines | Hector, New York

New owners are enjoying the quality and the bounty of the 2024 harvest

Ria D’Aversa, co-owner of and vineyard manager for Ria’s Wines in Hector, New York, sent this 2024 harvest update on October 2. If Ria’s Wines is new to you, don’t worry — they took over the old Poplar Ridge Vineyard, a 40-acre vineyard on the east side of Seneca Lake only a couple of years ago.

[We] just started picking riesling this week. All of our hybrid whites and chardonnay have been picked and are fermenting. Chardonnay has amazing flavors of ripe apple, lots of floral aroma.

The quality is very high this year. It's exciting. Plus, there is an abundance of fruit this year, which is not really a problem for us since we are brand new owners of our property and now have a lot to work with (and get used to).

The weather up until now, has been perfect and all of the white varieties have been clean and beautiful. Outstanding ripening and great flavor development. With the rains in the past few days we are starting to see some botrytis develop which leads us to expedite our picking schedule and wrap things up in the next week. This Friday we will pick the rest of our riesling and then finish with the reds.

We picked our merlot this week. Very clean fruit with expedited sugar development this season, probably on account of the perfect ripening weather we had in September. The merlot has pretty plum and red apple flavors, fresh acidity and bright cherry color.

Usually we pick Bordeaux varieties in October and we are going to finish with cabernet franc and sauvignon next week. There's a good amount of fruit to work with as well, which will allow us to play with the style by breaking up the fruit into whole cluster and destemmed lots so we can blend later on.

We are in the experimental phase as new owners and want to see what the vineyard can provide by being open.

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