2025 Vintage Notes from Winemaker Katey Larwood
The 2025 season was yet another wonderful year in the Finger Lakes. It seems we’ve been blessed with so many in this decade - let’s keep it going! The 2024-2025 winter was a mild one with moderate snowfall but no extreme weather changes. It was marked by a longer period of moderately cold temperatures, and if you lived through it, most people would say it was a “long winter”. Spring 2025 was probably the most nerve-racking part of the season, where rainfall was quite high during the more sensitive periods of budbreak through bloom. This is where we needed to be very diligent about fungal pathogens, most notably botrytis and downy mildew, getting sprays on early before buds opened and continuing the cycles
2024 Vintage Notes from Winemaker Katey Larwood
All the grapes are in! (As of October 23rd.) As the production team continues processing this year’s excellent harvest, we asked Katey, our winemaker, to share some first impressions and updates. Everything’s fermenting and happy. A lot of it is going dry now, meaning the yeast has finished converting all the sugars into alcohol. We use a technique called “sur lie” aging, leaving the finished yeast to settle out of the wine during aging, imparting wonderful flavor and mouthfeel. Most of our white wines we seal up and “put to bed,” letting the aging process occur slowly and naturally. However, for many of our wines, based on the taste of that particular varietal and vintage, we occasionally stir the
Early Harvest, Bright Promise: A Look Inside The 2024 Vintage
Harvest season is in full swing at Damiani! Thanks to the warm weather we've experienced throughout the summer, the grapes are ripening early and fast. While the remnants of Hurricane Debby brought a couple of particularly rainy days in early August, we've otherwise enjoyed minimal rainfall and a lot of sunshine. Our harvest began on August 27th, making it our earliest harvest on record by three days. The first grapes we brought in were Pinot Noir for sparkling wine. As grapes mature in response to heat and sunlight, Brix levels (sugar content) rise while acidity falls. Grapes for sparkling wine need to be harvested on the earlier end of that progression to preserve brightness and acidity. Every year,
Celebrating Two Decades of Damiani: A Weekend to Remember
Our 20th Anniversary whirlwind weekend left us all feeling a bit tired but full of gratitude. Across three days, we danced, drank, ate, and reminisced on the remarkable journey that led us to this moment. We saw many familiar faces and a great many new ones, too. A celebration like this is not only about the memorable wines we’ve produced over our two decades. It’s just as much about the wonderful, one-of-a-kind community we’ve built around these wines, team members and fans alike. The entire weekend was a strong reminder of the beauty of that community. Like the winery 20 years ago, our celebration began in a vineyard. On Friday evening, with mild, late-summer weather, a group of about
The Ecosystem Behind the Wine
A Contemplation of Earth Day Dear Damiani Fan, Some people meditate sitting on a cushion. My dad, Phil, takes his hours of contemplation out in the vineyards and fields. As I've worked with Damiani this year and asked the question, "Who is Damiani Wine Cellars?" the answers I get invariably tie a reverence for land to a love of our community. We've used "Land is Wine" as a tagline, which fits, but where are the people? This thing we are doing together is such a human endeavor. These people and this place in relationship to one another are the tethers of value that endure. As Earth Day approaches, I think about our relationship to the land. How deep, how consistent, how reverent, how reciprocal?
Perspectives from Women at DWC
Perspectives from Women at DWC Women’s History Month is an opportunity to focus our attention on the contributions of women in our own industry and in society at large. It’s also an opportune time to inquire of the female identifying folks we work with about their perspectives and experiences. Though archeological evidence shows that women have been involved in winemaking and innkeeping (where most wine was served in ancient Sumer around 5000 years ago), today only 13% of US wineries are owned by women. Gendered wage gaps persist in our industry, though both wage equity and representation of women across all winery roles has improved, in particular over the past 25 years. You can read about some groundbreaking women in wine here, including the
2022 Vintage Report
Throughout the growing season and in anticipation of the coming vintage, the cellar was met with mixed feelings. The winter months were not kind to our area - a bitterly cold winter damaged buds throughout all varieties and vineyards, resulting in a much smaller crop. But as the growing season progressed and flowers bloomed and shoots grew, the vintage quickly turned spectacular. Several factors contributed to the high-quality year - a temperate and dry growing season, which allowed for moderate but not vigorous canopy growth, little to no disease pressure, and consistent small berry size, as well as some positive factors from winter damage like smaller berry and cluster size due to secondary buds pushing over primary and more nutrients and available water per
Meet Alex and Jimmer
WINES WITH CHARACTER(S) Alex & Jimmer We got the full set! We are thrilled to officially welcome the Bond family to the Damiani family. Jimmer Bond has worked with Damiani on and off since 2011 but doubled down and joined us in a new capacity as bottling manager last year. Over the years he has worn many hats with us including both hand and tractor vineyard work, and he has even poured in the tasting room from time to time. Jimmer began his career in the industry half a lifetime ago when he was 17. He has worked with, in order: Bagley’s Poplar Ridge Vineyards, Rasta Ranch, Hazlitt 1852 Vineyards, Atwater Vineyard, Damiani Wine Cellars, Argetsinger Vineyards, Sawmill Creek Vineyards, Hector Wine
Winemaker for a Day – Club Meritage Blending Class
MERITAGE BLENDING CLASS Club Event - Be a Winemaker for a Day Every spring (that we’re able), just before we bottle our own DWC Meritage, we offer our wine club members and their guests an opportunity to create their own “Bordeaux style” or Meritage blend in our Meritage Blending Class. It’s truly fun and exciting and is always one of my favorite events to work and this year was no exception. We start everyone out sampling the three components we use in our own Meritage: Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. In addition to an instruction text and a blending sheet, winemaker Katey Larwood and assistant winemaker Alex Bond give guidance, viticulturalist Phil Davis talks about… well everything that grows under the
Winetalk – Two Rosés, Two Methods
WINETALK Two Rosés One of the many reasons why I love the Finger Lakes is the variation among every new season. I believe that wine can be a sort of gateway into the past, where we can smell and taste the quirks and beauty of any season and understand its unique mark from our small section in the world. The 2021 year was chock full of challenges both climactic and social, as you all know, but one of the best things coming from the season was something that will brighten anyone’s day – rosé! Here at Damiani, we make rosé in a few different ways. First, we assess the fruit quality and status of each site. If we think the fruit should
Help Feed Ukraine – Fundraiser
WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN FUNDRAISER Let's Help Ukraine's Refugees This weekend, Friday, April 1 through Sunday, April 3, 2022, Damiani Wine Cellars will donate 25% of tasting room and online wine sales to World Central Kitchen, the amazing organization founded by Chef José Andrés to get cooks and food to the places and people that need it, be it natural disasters or, in this case, feeding refugees from Ukraine. But wait. It's not just us. You must read on because this is a rare opportunity to turn $25k into $100k in donations. How does $25k turn into $100k? This effort is being done in conjunction with Lindblad Expeditions, founders of eco-tourism and National Geographic partners. The company itself is matching funds 2 to
Winetalk – Saperavi
WINETALK Saperavi When you first bring saperavi fruit into the cellar, you quickly learn that it stains...everything. This is a dark grape. Saperavi is one of two teinturier varieties in the world, meaning the pulp is pigmented yielding a truly opaque wine. And the color is only one of the few things that makes this variety interesting to work with, from a winemaking perspective. During harvest, every saperavi ferment makes the entire cellar smell like brambly blackberry pie, a scent that can wake up even the sleepiest of interns! Once the 2020 saperavi completed fermentation, it sat on its lees for 9 months in a mixture of French and American oak barrels to further develop. Typically, with this grape a longer period
New Winemaker
NEWS Welcoming Katey Larwood, Our New Winemaker Hello DWC fans, It is with a mixture of sadness and excitement that I will be leaving Damiani Wine cellars and the Finger Lakes. My family and I are relocating to the DC area to be nearer to our extended family as we decided that family had to take precedent over career; as their families all start to have kids, my own kids will need to be there to keep them in line and show them the ropes on this whole “being human” thing. Though I grew up outside of Philly, I’ve lived in the Finger Lakes for almost 20 years now and more specifically, DWC has been my home for almost 13 years. I
Vinetalk – Rosé
VINETALK Rosé At Damiani the passion for Pinot Noir in all its various iterations in the wine world has been at the fore in terms of focus from our inception. The first barrel of wine that Lou and I made was a Pinot Noir from a local vineyard. When I state the first barrel I am speaking literally. Our first year, 1997, as I assisted in the planting of a vineyard on Lou’s property, we made our first attempt at winemaking. Total production, one barrel, thus the flame was lit. One of the varietals chosen for the initial planting was a 5 clonal mix of Pinot Noir. As the winemaking skills developed and the viticulture improved our Pinot Noir became the go
Vinetalk – Cabernet Sauvignon
VINETALK Cabernet Sauvignon Cabernet Sauvignon in the Finger Lakes will never be be the statement grape of the area. It requires a longer growing season than most of the terroir in the region is capable of achieving before the first fall frost harvests the leaves. At Damiani we are fortunate to have a couple of locations that have proximity to the deepest part of Seneca Lake, the deepest Finger Lake. The mitigation achieved by this proximity gives us just enough time and consequent heat units to pull off ripening the fruit and allow for the critical post harvest recovery of the plant. The post harvest recovery of vines is a topic seldom discussed but is a crucial stage to ensure winter hardiness
Vinetalk – Riesling
VINETALK Riesling Our riesling vineyard is our oldest planting of vinifera vines. Planted in 1995 by my father Irving, my brother Allen, Frank Rider, and myself. This was pre-laser planting; just laying out a grid with a tape measure and a sharp eye. Plants were put in the ground by two people riding a planter pulled by a tractor and physically placing each vine in the ground as you crossed the "X" of the grid created for each vine. The key to straight rows lay in the hands, and more importantly the eye, of the driver keeping the focus on the path of the tractor. I have to say, we did a pretty damn good job. The vineyard is well laid out
