Our visit to Bully Hill Winery   August, 2003

From our September, 2003 Newsletter

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Bully Hill Winery was a place that I have wanted to visit for many years. When Pat & I first became interested in winemaking and growing grapes Walter S. Taylor was one of the first winemakers to use Hybrid grapes. We could go to the wine shop and purchase wine made from grapes such as Seyval Blanc, Foch and Baco Noir. Today they still grow and produce wines from these same grapes.

Our daughter Mary stopped at the entrance for a picture. The visitors center, wine shop and tasting room was one of our first stops.

When we returned home we continued to sample some of the fine wines we brought home such as:

Le Goat Blush - A blend of seyval, Aurora, Vidal and a hint of Colobel Noir for color. A perfect picnic wine.
Bulldog Baco Noir - Baco and oak aging produced a bold, intense wine perfect for red meat dishes.
Ravat 51 (Vignoles) - Ravat and Vidal create powerful pineapple/apricot quality. Enjoy with fruit or cheese.
Seyval Blanc - Crisp, dry, elegant blend of Seyval and Aurora to accompany a wide variety of food.
Marechal Foch - Well-balanced Italian Tuscan style with a hint of raspberry. Enjoy with pasta dishes.
Love my Goat - A uniquely mellow, easy drinking wine. Enjoy with steak or pasta
Space Shuttle Red - Blend of Baco, Leon Millot, Rougeon and Colobel. It soars smooth, clean and elegant.
Special Reserve Red - Medium-bodied Tuscan style dry red wine. Great with any red meat or pasta.
State Capital Red - Unique blend of rare red hybrid grapes produces a crisp, full-bodied wine for all meats.

 

 

The theme for many of the wine labels always has something to do with a goat. As the story goes, there was a lawsuit between Walter S. Taylor and his family the Taylor Wine Co. and Walter S. Taylor lost the priviledge of putting his own name on his wine. Therefore the theme: "They have taken away my heritage. But they have not taken my Goat." Signed: Walter S. ######

 

They have some beautiful old buildings on the site. The one on the left is the Greyton H. Taylor Wine Museum.
Inside the museum were many examples of old winemaking and barrelmaking equipment.
We took a tour and were shown the vineyards, lots of tanks, and the bottling area.

How would you like this view from the parking lot.
Rolling vineyards in front of us, Keuka Lake right behind the vineyards and the opposite shore of Keuka Lake in the background.

 

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Winery History
The Greyton H. Taylor Wine Museum. At the birth site of the NYS wine industry.
History of our New World Grapes.
Wine Crystals.
Wine Without Guilt. Why synthetic cork?

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Winery History

Bully Hill Farms was started by Greyton H. Taylor and Walter S. Taylor in 1958. Walter S. Taylor represents the fourth generation of his family to be involved in grape growing and winemaking.The family has been either growing grapes or producing wine since 1878.

In 1920, as the Taylor Wine Company rapidly expanded, the Taylor family bought grapes from numerous local vineyardists. The successful winery needed a consistent water and electrical power supply, which it could not get at its original site.In 1929, the Taylor family moved the winery to a new site, two miles outside the Village of Hammondsport. The original winery site atop Bully Hill was sold to Lloyd Sprague.

In 1958, Greyton H. Taylor purchased the vineyards back from Lloyd Sprague. Greyton and Walter began to convert the vineyards from Native American grapes to French American hybrids, pioneering these varieties in New York State. Slowly they rebuilt a winery , and in 1970 Bully Hill Vineyards, Inc. was formally incorporated. Ever since , Bully Hill has been known as the home of innovation.

Bully Hill Vineyards was the first small estate winery in the Keuka Lake area since Prohibition, and became the cornerstone for the growth of many wineries. To date, 11 wineries grace the Keuka Lake region.

Growing from a small winery, which a limited number of employees, Bully Hill now produces over 200,000 cases of wine each year. Today, Bully Hill Vineyards , Inc. prides itself on the production of the highest quality New York State wines and grape juices.

The Greyton H. Taylor Wine Museum. At the birth site of the NYS wine industry.

In the 1860's, Reverend Bostwick moved from New England to Keuka Lake where he planted grapes in his rectory garden in Hammondsport. Within twenty years, Keuka Lake had become the center of the eastern wine industry and The Taylor Wine Company, founded by Walter Taylor, was on its way toward becoming the most powerful force in the New York wine industry. From 1896 until 1917, the year of the first excise tax, the Taylor led Keuka Lake wine industry recorded an average annual production of champagne, wine and grape brandy worth about $5,000,000.

Before 1917, most Keuka Lake wineries, were known all over the country for their champagnes. Much of the still wines were sold in barrels to restaurants or directly to consumers. Since there was tax or any other restriction on wines those days, the buyers bottle their wines themselves, sometimes blending and selling the wine under their own trade names. Finger Lakes wine producers reserved the use of brand names and labels for their champagnes.

Many wineries relied on local grape growers who provided the wineries with hundreds of tons of grape varieties like Isabella, Ives, and Catawba, most widely used for champagnes. During grape harvest, nearly everyone picked grapes, from schoolchildren (the schools were closed for harvest) to grandfathers.

This golden age of Finger Lakes wineries continued until Prohibition in 1919, when most Keuka Lake wineries went out of business. Prohibition left idle $14,000,000 in winery realty, buildings, equipment, stock and other property.

The greatest success story in post Prohibition Hammondsport was The Taylor Wine Company; the winery moved to a new location in 1929 and became in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's, an important national force. Under family ownership, Taylor winery prospered, absorbing the labels and buildings of other Hammondsport wineries like Pleasant Valley (Great Western), Columbia and Germania.

In the late 1960's Greyton Taylor's son, Walter, began Bully Hill Vineyards on the original Taylor Winery site. In 1968 he established the Greyton H. Taylor Wine Museum. The museum collected a great supply of antiquated winemaking equipment with special emphasis on champagne, the product that made Keuka Lake a powerful wine force.

Today the Greyton H. Taylor Wine Museum is open to the public from mid May through October.

HISTORY OF OUR NEW WORLD GRAPES

In Europe, in the middle of the 19th century, "Phylloxera Vastatrix" attacked the sensitive European vinifera grape root systems, sucking plant vigor from punctured root cells. Nutrients were diverted and the plants died, nearly eradicating European viticulture.

Additional problems arose when native American grape varieties imported into Europe brought with them downy and powdery mildew and black rot. If the root louse didn't get the vines, downy mildew killed the Fruit and blossoms or powdery mildew shriveled and rotted grapes.

European scientists were not interested in native American vitis labrusca rootstock to help create resistant vinifera vines because of the natural herbaceous flavor of their resultant wine, but many other wild grape species in America which were, did not have the forward taste and aroma of the vitis labrusca specie.

French experts, assisted by American vine nursery people, led to the discovery of new vitis species found in Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Texas and Finger Lakes region of New York State. These new vines were suitable for rootstock breeding for taste and quality. In 1883, one of the Americans, Herrman Jaeger, an amateur grape breeder and vineyardists in Neosho, Missouri, sent cuttings of the newly discovered varieties to a man named Contassot in Aubenas, France. Contassot and his countrymen grafted American rootstocks on to European vinifera vines to save their industry. At the same time, Jaeger's cuttings fostered hybridization of new grapes.

Jaegar was a man of extreme patience, he spent years going through tens of thousands of different species and different varieties of grapes in Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas seeking the best specimens for his laborious breeding & grafting experiments.

During his experiments, Jaeger crossed a female selection of vitis lincecumni, which was known for its vigor, with a male seedling of Jeager 60. The latter was previously developed from a female selection of the vitis rupestris. He developed two of his best hybrids: Jaegar 70 and 72.

Impressed with the results of his experimental grafting in France, Contassot recrossed the pollen with some of his select European varieties. Meanwhile, Albeit Seibel and George Couderc, two of Contassot's close fiends and neighbors, acquired some hybrid seeds of Jaeger 70. These became the first generation French?American hybrids. The new hybrids were given numbers such as Seibel 4 1 or Couderc 7?03, etc.

Couderc spent his whole life growing approximately 400,000 seedlings. It took four years before he saw results of one crossing year. After evaluating the plant's disease resistance and vigor, he had to make wines to evaluate their quality. He then replanted the seedling grapes, only those which showed signs of superiority were saved. Another four years would pass and so on, until after fifty years one or two grape varieties emerged with the most potential.

The physical and mental costs on Couderc must have been tremendous. Breeding grape varieties is far more work than the year?round care of tending operating vineyards. Although Coudercs was assisted by his student, Seibel, the work was not shortened. Without computers or other sophisticated equipment, which today could speed up mathematical probability calculations, as well as spew out reams of information in no time, each of the thousands crossed were subject to individual review.

Couderc and Seibel influenced hybridizers like Morris Baco (Baco Noir), Berfile Seyval (Seyval Blanc) and others who struggled their way either to anonymity or fame. Consequently significant acreage of these high quality grapes were planted in France, over fifty percent in the premier districts. Many of these grape varieties were brought to the U.S. by Philip Wagner of Baltimore, Maryland.

One particularly successful twentieth century grape hybrid is Cayuga Blanc, which was developed in our own backyard, at the Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva, New York.

WINE CRYSTALS
Odorless and tasteless, natural potassium bitartrate
crystals in wine are a sign of quality?

Tartaric acid is one of the natural ingredients in naturally produced wine. It is responsible for that tingly, crisp taste which makes wine pair so well with food.

During the winemaking process, some of the tartaric acid precipitates to the bottom of storage tanks in the form of potassium bitartrate crystals, especially when the wine is chilled (we know this product in supermarkets as Cream of Tartar").

"The less one does to a wine the better it is.    Walter S. Taylor"

But even after chilling to 28 degrees Fahrenheit, some of the acid remains in our wine. Later, when the wine in the bottle is chilled, tartaric crystals might appear on the cork or at the bottom of the bottle. They are harmless, tasteless and do not affect the quality of the wine.

We are explaining tartaric because many American consumers believe a wine should be free of sediment in any form, which is not at all how Europeans feel about their wine. For that reason, large domestic wine producers try to keep their wines free of these tartaric crystals. Their wines undergo an unnatural process known as "ion exchange" to exchange potassium for sodium.

At Bully Hill Vineyards we are concerned with creating a natural product for the consumer's enjoyment. We seek to keep the nutrition and flavor inherent in wine, and to add no foreign chemicals or process into winemaking.

"Wine Without Guilt"
WHY SYNTHETIC CORK?

Suppose you produced a product with complete confidence in its quality, only to find that anywhere from 3% to 5% of your production was subject to spoiling from forces beyond your control. This is exactly the problem today facing domestic wineries.

Disease, drought and an endangered cork tree species has placed great pressure on cork producers. These pressures have threatened the quality of cork sent to the United States. As a result, millions of dollars are lost each year within the wine industry, because of deficient cork which taints wine by leaking oxygen in and wine out of the bottle.

In addition, chemical reactions to spores, found in natural cork, and to cleaning compounds used to sterilize cork sometimes create conditions for cork to develope strange odors which infect otherwise premium quality wine in bottles.

Bully Hill Vineyards, Inc. has joined the innovative exploration of synthetic stoppers for wine bottles. Superior in structure and reliability, these new closures ensure that our standards of quality and excellence are preserved.

Bully Hill Vineyards  
E-mail: bullyhil@ptd.net

8843 Greyton H. Taylor Memorial Drive
Hammondsport, NY 14840

Winery: 1-607-868-3610
Fax: 1-607-868-3205

Open May through October

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