Pleasant Valley Wine Company

About Pleasant Valley Wine Company

Pleasant Valley Wine Company occupies a cluster of fieldstone buildings in the valley just south of Hammondsport and the tip of Keuka Lake. Charles Champlin and a dozen partners founded it in 1860, making it the oldest winery in the Finger Lakes and the holder of U.S. Bonded Winery No. 1; by 1873 its Great Western sparkling wine had taken a gold medal in Vienna and earned the place the nickname "the Reims of America." Eight stone buildings sit on the National Register of Historic Places, and after decades under Taylor, Coca-Cola and Seagram, the Doyle family bought the Great Western winery in 2002.

This is a large operation, not a boutique: 500 acres of vineyard, more than 14 million gallons of cellar capacity, and labels including Great Western, Widmer, Gold Seal and Autumn Frost. The core of the range is bottle-fermented sparkling wine. The Brut is Chardonnay-based, while the Extra Dry leans on Catawba and Delaware, native grapes whose grapey, off-dry character defined eastern sparkling wine for a century. Dessert and fortified bottlings, among them a chocolate-flavored Labrusca, a Marsala and Widmer's Lake Niagara, round out an unapologetically old-school list.

Visiting is as much about the history as the glass. The tasting room takes walk-ins, and from Memorial Day into November guided tours cover the stone buildings and original equipment, with summer and fall tours by reservation. The self-guided Great Western Winery Visitor Center adds historic exhibits, a working model of the B&H Railroad and a small theatre built inside a wine tank. Satellite tasting rooms at Caywood Vineyards in Lodi and the Seneca Harbor Wine Center in Watkins Glen pour the same wines on Seneca Lake.