Finger Lakes’ ‘Amazing’ 2024, Varietal Clarity from Victoria and Uruguay’s Albariño Edge

While on vacation in Upstate New York, Senior Editor Stuart Pigott visited a string of leading producers in the Finger Lakes region, or FLX as it is now commonly known, to get a first impression of the 2024 vintage. Although there are a couple of dissenting voices among FLX winemakers, the great majority of them concur with the words of Julia Hoyle, the winemaker at Hosmer on Cayuga Lake: “2024 is a hands-down amazing vintage!”

With its cornucopia of citrus and stone fruits, her dry Hosmer Riesling Cayuga Lake Limited Release 2024 is concentrated, juicy and joyfully vibrant. It’s got excellent aging potential but is already delicious. Those are very much the virtues of the vintage as a whole, and Stuart found them in everything from dry riesling to pinot noir dry rosé.

2024 is also a vintage in which a number of winemakers have made the leap to world-class quality from the merely excellent. This is most eminently true of Lynne Fahy, the winemaker at Hillick and Hobbs, where she works under the famous winemaker and wine entrepreneur Paul Hobbs.

Their main bottling, the Hillick & Hobbs Riesling Seneca Lake Estate Vineyard Dry 2024, has a wealth of stone fruit plus notes of cassis, sea salt and tarragon on the seamless and silky medium-bodied palate. However, two single-parcel plot bottlings – the super-mineral and very graceful Hillick & Hobbs Riesling Seneca Lake Estate Vineyard Lower Terrace Dry 2024 and the more compact and cooler (think Amalfi lemon and mint) Hillick & Hobbs Riesling Seneca Lake Estate Vineyard North Ravine Dry 2024 – crank up the elegance and excitement to a breathtaking level. And the 2023s are not far behind! This is a great achievement for a winery whose first vintage was 2019.

The story at Red Tail Ridge winery, on the opposite (western) side of Seneca Lake, is very different. Here, founding winemaker and native Californian Nancy Irelan has been joined by Meagz Goodwin, who was previously at Red Newt. This duo have made a completely extraordinary entry-level wine in the Red Tail Ridge Riesling Finger Lakes Dry 2024. The aromas of pink grapefruit, honeysuckle and orange blossom are stunning, but the finesse at the extremely long finish is what we expect from high-end single-vineyard wines.

In a similar filigree style, but way more concentrated with incredible aromas of white peaches, spring blossoms and floral honey, is the frankly sweet Red Tail Ridge Finger Lakes The Noble Pursuit Auslese Gold Cap 2024, one of handful of amazing dessert wines made from botrytized grapes in 2024.

Several of these were made by Weis Vineyards, founded eight years ago by German Peter Weis. At the peak of a fabulous row of off-dry and nobly sweet rieslings stands the Weis Vineyards Riesling Finger Lakes Noble Select 2024. It marries densely-packed dried papaya and mango flavors to great brilliance on the very concentrated palate. Given that Weis hails from the Mosel, the logic of a style that focuses on vibrance and purity is clear.

Keuka Spring has been around for a long time, but in its new incarnation under the ownership of the Simmons family, winemaker Dan Bissell has made an imposing statement with his enormously compact Keuka Spring Riesling Finger Lakes TBA 2024. The raisiny intensity at the finish is off the scale, and this is a wine with decades of life ahead of it.

The astonishing wines of the second vintage from the Apollo’s Praise winery add to this picture of dynamism. The winery draws fruit exclusively from Lahoma Vineyard, also in the ownership of winemakers Kelby Russell and Julia Hoyle (also the winemaker at Hosmer). At the pinnacle of the dry wines stands the Apollo’s Praise Riesling Seneca Lake Lahoma Vineyard The Knoll 2024, which has mind-blowing concentration and mineral energy. And although the entry-level Apollo’s Praise Riesling Seneca Lake Lahoma Vineyard 2024 needs some time, it is a stunner with all the charm and depth of this great vintage.

Stuart also tasted the 2023 vintage wines at Forge Cellars, where the winemaking team of Rick Rainey and Leana Godard are supported by co-owner Louis Barruol of the Château de Saint Cosme winery in Rhone.

They showed Stuart eight single-vineyard dry rieslings that share excellent textural complexity with impressive depth of terroir character. This winery always made some excellent wines, but it has now achieved the consistency necessary to reach the top.

It was hard to pick a favorite, but for Stuart the star is the Forge Cellars Riesling Seneca Lake Breakneck Creek Vineyard 2023, which has amazing intensity of saline minerality and terrific power despite being medium-bodied.

At Hermann J. Wiemer, the established No. 1 in the FLX region, a trio of single-vineyard dry rieslings of the 2022 vintage stood in the foreground. Here’s a winery that has undergone a major stylistic reorientation during the last years, with the wines now seriously dry.

Scroll down for these masterpieces from a vintage that is now in danger of being overshadowed by 2024.

Victoria's Varietal Clarity

Associate Editor Ryan Montgomery was in Australia tasting the 2023 releases from two of Victoria’s most established producers, Giaconda and Best’s, who managed to make wines with precision, varietal clarity and structural integrity despite the year being a cooler one with uneven ripening.

The 2023 Chardonnay from Giaconda is drawn from the estate’s Beechworth vineyard, located on granitic soils at the base of the Victorian Alps. The site is dry-grown and managed with a low-intervention philosophy, emphasizing soil health and natural balance.

The winemaking follows a consistent approach: whole-bunch pressing, fermentation in French oak (including some new barrels) and extended aging on lees without stirring. The result is a chardonnay that reflects its site and season with purity, offering power, minerality and texture that are nearly perfectly balanced.

Giaconda is also pushing boundaries with other varieties, including their release of the Giaconda Nebbiolo Beechworth 2022. This is a small-production wine from the same estate vineyard, planted at elevation with traditional clonal material.

The variety was introduced to adapt classic Italian structure to Australian conditions, and the winemaking involves extended maceration on skins in clay amphorae and a longer elevage period to help soften and extend the tannin structure.

These practices were further highlighted in the 2023 vintage, which results in a wine with high natural acidity and a finely detailed tannin profile. While designed for aging, the wine remains approachable in its youth, displaying clarity and balance.

In Great Western, a subregion of the Grampians wine region in Victoria, Best’s continues to work with some of the world’s oldest surviving vines, including a significant block of pinot meunier planted in 1868. Their Pinot Meunier Great Western Old Vine 2023 is sourced entirely from this dry-grown parcel in the Concongella Vineyard and is hand-harvested.

The winemaking is restrained, relying on open fermentation, gentle cap management and aging in older oak barrels. The wine presents a lifted aromatic profile and a light yet sustained structure. It is released only in vintages that meet the estate’s criteria for varietal expression and quality, and production remains limited.

The Best's Shiraz Great Western Thomson Family 2020 – a wine made only in years deemed exceptional – also impressed. It is sourced from a specific section of the original 1868 plantings, grown on sandy loam soils with excellent drainage.

Fermentation occurs in small open-top fermenters with hand-plunging, followed by maturation in a blend of new and used French oak. The 2020 vintage yielded lower yields and intensely concentrated fruit, enhancing the wine’s structural depth and balance. With an extensive aging history, the Thomson Family Shiraz remains one of the region’s benchmark expressions.

Uruguay's Albariño Edge

The Uruguayan wine region of Garzon is in some ways a  mirror to Spain’s Rías Baixas when it comes to albariño. With slightly lower but still abundant rainfall, it also shares the hallmark granitic soils and Atlantic influence found in Rias Baixas. Garzon, however, is drier and warmer. While there are notable geological and climatic parallels, Uruguayan albariño must be understood on its own terms.

The Familia Deicas Albarińo Maldonado Cru d’Exception 2023 exemplifies this distinction, according to Senior Editor Jacobo García Andrade, who tasted the Uruguayan offerings in our Hong Kong office. Despite its exceptional acidity, this wine's palate is balanced by generous fruit and a creamy, harmonious texture derived from oak aging. Much of the maturation takes place in new barrels, which can be tricky with albariño, as the oak risks overpowering the variety’s delicacy. In this case, however, it works beautifully, delivering an exuberant sense of balance.

The Familia Deicas Uruguay Barrel Select Lote No. 114 2019 is one of Uruguay’s iconic blends. This Bordeaux-style wine, aged underground at the estate, is composed of about half tannat, with the balance mostly cabernet sauvignon and smaller proportions of merlot, petit verdot, cabernet franc and marselan.

It is meticulously cared for from the vineyard – with low yields and rigorous selection – to final bottling. What is striking about this wine is how it evolves over time toward earthy, mushroomy dark fruited nuances that are particularly seductive. It spends three years aging in barrel and a further three in bottle, fully demonstrating how well this wine can develop.

– Stuart Pigott, Ryan Montgomery and Jacobo García Andrade contributed reporting.

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

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