Forge Cellars
Seneca Lake Winemakers · A Hoadley Family Profile
The drive up Mathews Road is the first thing the place does right. You leave Route 414 at Burdett, climb a short steep grade past a stand of second-growth pines, pass a farmhouse that could be 1870 or could be 1970, and then the road opens to a long low barn and a tasting room that feels more like a working cellar than a retail floor. There's no terrace with white umbrellas. There's no event lawn. There's a gravel lot, a stone-faced building set into the slope, and — if the wind is coming from the east — the smell of soil and pine and, in September, crushed fruit. You know within ninety seconds that somebody who has been in a real cellar in Europe had a say in how this place was built. That somebody is Louis Barruol, and this is the most interesting fact about Forge Cellars.
Barruol is the fourteenth generation of his family at Château de Saint Cosme in Gigondas, in the southern Rhône. Saint Cosme makes some of the best Syrah and Grenache in France, and Barruol's name appears on wine lists at restaurants where Finger Lakes bottles, historically, have not. In 2011 he partnered with Rick Rainey — an American distributor with deep Burgundy connections and a Finger Lakes conviction — and Justin Boyette, a Cornell-trained winemaker who had been working the Seneca shale for years already. The three of them started Forge Cellars with a thesis that is, by the standards of this region, radical: that the steep east-facing shale slopes of Seneca's southern half could make Riesling and Pinot Noir that belonged on the same shelf as Alsace grand cru and Burgundy village wine — if they were made the way those wines are made.
"The way those wines are made" turns out to matter. Forge farms a series of parcels — leased, owned, partnered — across the southern Seneca Lake east shore. Each one is picked separately, fermented separately, and tracked vineyard-by-vineyard through the cellar. The reduction of additions is deliberate: native fermentation where the fruit allows, almost no new oak for the Rieslings, restraint with the reds. The wines spend longer on lees than most Finger Lakes bottles. They are bottled unfined and only lightly filtered. They are released when they taste ready, not when the tasting-room calendar needs a new SKU. This sounds like the boilerplate of every small producer that prints "hand-harvested" on a back label, but at Forge it reads as description rather than marketing — the wines show the work.
The entry-level dry Riesling, bottled as "Classique," is the one that argues the case most clearly. It is made from a blend of parcels — some leased from growers Forge trusts, some from estate rows — and it is priced, by Finger Lakes standards, firmly mid-shelf. It's the Riesling we pour at home when friends from the West Coast show up skeptical about East Coast wine, because it answers the skepticism in two sips. It is dry without being austere, mineral without being thin, and when it's from a cooler vintage it has the kind of structure that rewards a ten-year sit in a good cellar. Most Finger Lakes Rieslings are priced to open on the night you bought them; the Classique is priced — and built — to be worth a wait.
The single-vineyard Rieslings are where the thesis becomes visible. In the tasting room, the staff will usually have two or three sites open, rotating through a working list — Les Alliés, Caywood East, Doctor Konstantin, and others, depending on vintage and allocation. The vineyards sit within a handful of miles of one another, all on east-facing slopes, all on broken Seneca shale. And they taste like different places. One is tighter, more wet stone and less fruit. Another is broader, with a register closer to stone-fruit and salt. A third comes across with a slight waxy note, a tension between ripeness and acidity that reads almost Alsace. You cannot drink these blind and think you are drinking the same wine. The site matters. That, in a region that has historically blended everything under a regional label, is the whole argument.
The Pinot Noir program is the less-discussed half of the story, and the half that most consistently surprises. Barruol's Rhône background is Syrah-and-Grenache, not Pinot — but the Burgundy training of Boyette and Rainey's own Burgundy connections show up here in a style that is light-handed, low-extraction, and serious. The entry Pinot, again labeled "Classique," is a pale, cool, translucent wine that will annoy anyone expecting Russian River weight. What it does instead is argue — credibly — that Seneca's climate is closer to Burgundy's than to California's, and that Pinot from a cool East Coast site is allowed to taste like a cool East Coast site. Drunk a little cooler than you'd expect, it's one of the few Finger Lakes reds that pairs well with a proper roast dinner.
A note on the hospitality model. Forge is appointment-only, and means it. The tasting room holds a small number of seated guests per slot. The flight is structured — four or five wines, with context from a staff member who has been trained in the way a Burgundy domaine trains a tasting host, not in the way an American winery front-of-house trains theirs. Nobody hurries you. Nobody pushes the club. You pay for the flight, you talk about the wines, and at the end you buy what you want and leave. We hear complaints, occasionally, from guests who turned up on a Saturday afternoon expecting a walk-in counter. We don't pass those complaints along to Forge — they are the wrong complaint. The reservation discipline is part of the quality; it is what keeps the tasting room from becoming a gift shop.
The bigger story here is the one that doesn't get told often enough. A French vigneron whose family has made wine on the same land for fourteen generations has put his name, his time, and (by most accounts) his money into a Finger Lakes project — not as a one-off investment, not as a hobby, but as a serious producer within his own portfolio. Barruol continues to run Saint Cosme; he also flies to Burdett multiple times a year, tastes barrel samples, and signs off on blends. What he sees in Seneca Lake is what an increasing number of European producers see: a cool-climate region with real soil, honest acidity, and a hundred-year winemaking runway ahead of it. He bet on that in 2011. The bet has paid off.
Forge matters because it is the producer that dragged the region's floor up. The single-vineyard Rieslings have redrawn the ceiling for what a Seneca Lake bottle can command. The hospitality standard — reservation-only, seated, unhurried — has been copied by half a dozen smaller producers since. And the wines, year in and year out, are the ones we most often end up opening at home, on the dock, when the rest of the cellar has gone quiet.
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What we tell our guests to order. The Dry Riesling "Classique" as the benchmark — it's the house wine and it's the point. A single-vineyard Riesling from the current release (Les Alliés, Caywood East, or whichever site is pouring that day) to hear the difference in place. And the Pinot Noir "Classique" to understand why the house also bottles red — the light-handed, cool-climate register is not an accident.
How to plan the visit. Reservations are required on weekends and strongly recommended midweek. Book a week ahead in summer and fall. Allocation-list guests should email ahead — some of the single-vineyard bottlings sell out before they reach the tasting-room pour list. Drive up the hill; the view from the parking lot alone is worth the climb.