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Valentine’s Day is on a Tuesday this year. Kelly and I always do something special for Valentine’s Day, so we opted to do the weekend-before this time around – and today was spent on our first “official” Seneca Lake wine tour. We’ve visited lots of wineries on Seneca Lake (and other finger lakes) before, so today we got a chance to explore a bunch of new wineries (and new wines) that we’d never visited/tasted before…

The event was called the “Wine and Chocolate Weekend”, in keeping with our Valentine’s Day theme, and each winery offered a chocolate treat, the recipe for their treat of choice, and a sampling of wines to taste. We started the day at 10:30AM at Fulkerson (the only previously-visited winery of the day) with chocolate chili, then moved on to Lakewood to pick up our tickets and the map to follow for the rest of the afternoon. After making a quick stop in Watkins Glen for some bottled water and a gas fill-up, we headed up the (previously-unexplored) East side of the lake and visited Atwater Estate Vineyards, Chateau LaFayette Reneau, Bloomer Creek Vineyard, Red Newt Cellars, Leidenfrost Vineyards, Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards, Tickle Hill Winery, and Penguin Bay Winery.

By about 3PM, we needed a break! We decided to head back down around the South end of the lake, through Watkins Glen and venture up the West side. Since this was the more familiar side for us, we skipped most of the tour stops, opting to visit Miles Wine Cellars, Earle Estates Winery & Meadery (we’d never tried mead before!), Anthony Road Wine Company and Seneca Shore Wine Cellars.

“But Dave,” you ask, “Isn’t that an awful lot of wineries for one couple to visit in a single day?”

Yes.

But if you’re smart about how many wines you taste, and how much of each one you drink, and making sure you’re not tasting on an empty stomach (no problem at this event!) then you can actually do it without ever even feeling tipsy. Kelly didn’t fare this well, so she ended up sleeping the whole way home, but we both had a great time and enjoyed exploring some new places and new flavors in one of our most familiar Finger Lakes stomping grounds.

Oh, and as if our wine rack wasn’t full enough (it is), we bought a little over a case of wine to boot. So if you get invited over for dinner at our place any time soon, plan on wine being served! Now we’ve just got to drink enough in the next 9 months to make space for the wine we’ll inevitably buy if we do the November “Deck the Halls” tour!