Element Winery

About Element Winery

Element Winery has no tasting room at its vineyards; its wines are poured at F.L.X. Provisions, a wine shop and tasting bar on Linden Street in downtown Geneva at the north end of Seneca Lake. The winery is the project of Christopher Bates, the 199th person to pass the Master Sommelier exam, who trained in winemaking at Immich-Batterieberg in the Mosel and founded Element with his father Robert; he runs it with his wife Isabel Bogadtke alongside the couple's F.L.X. Hospitality restaurants. Fruit comes from growers around the Finger Lakes and from the estate's own Equilibrium Wine Farm in Geneva, a gravelly-loam slope facing Seneca Lake planted to Chardonnay.

The house line is that the Finger Lakes is an extreme climate and the wines should say so rather than imitate Burgundy: they are picked for delicacy, lower alcohol, higher acidity and mineral, floral aromatics, with no reverse osmosis or spinning cones and little added beyond sulfur. Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, Blaufrankisch, Merlot and Syrah are the core; the Equilibrium Chardonnay goes through full malolactic and eighteen months on lees in large neutral puncheons, and the flagship "The Element" is a Cabernet Sauvignon-led blend from the estate. A second label, In Our Element, covers early-harvest blends, piquettes and an apple wine, and the Almost 86 library shelf sells back vintages to 2006.

Provisions is a walk-in bar with no reservations: dozens of Finger Lakes wines to taste beside Element's own, F.L.X. Culture House beer, New York spirits, and a pantry of tinned Spanish fish, tapas and hot sandwiches. The patio opens on summer weekends, with heaters and fire pits for the shoulder seasons, and Bates's tasting-menu restaurant F.L.X. Table is on the same street.