How Was Harvest?

A guest on Seneca Lake asks the question every tasting room hears in November, and the real answer is forty yards away on the crush pad.

By Patrick R. Dunn  |  November 4, 2026

The crush pad, forty yards from the tasting room counter.

It was a Tuesday afternoon in early November, one of those weekdays on the east side of Seneca Lake when there are four cars in the parking lot and two of them belong to the staff. The tasting room was in an old barn with a long window behind the counter, and through it I could see the lake gone gray for the season and, closer in, the crush pad, where a young man in rubber boots was hosing the last of the Riesling out of a picking bin, his breath showing in the cold, and stacking the bin on top of the others.

A retired couple from Toronto had come in a few minutes after me. They had driven down for a long weekend that turned into a long week, they said, because a friend told them the dry Riesling here was worth the trip. When the host poured it, the husband swirled it, tasted it, and asked the question every guest asks this time of year, which is how harvest went.

The host was friendly and quick and clearly liked her job. She said it had been a good one, a warm dry summer and some rain in October, and everybody was excited about the vintage. Then she poured the Cabernet Franc and moved on to the barrels.

There was nothing wrong with her answer. As far as I knew it was accurate, and it was close to the same answer I’d heard in half a dozen tasting rooms up and down the lake that week, which told me it had come from somewhere other than her own eyes. The couple nodded along, bought two bottles of last year’s dry Riesling, and left without joining anything.

When they were gone I asked whether I could walk out and say hello to the cellar crew. She laughed and told me to go ahead, but that I’d be lucky to get two words out of anybody that week.

The young man with the hose was named Eli, and he gave me a lot more than two words. They had started picking for the sparkling wine in the second week of September, and he had worked every day since except two, one of which was his sister’s wedding. This year’s best Riesling came off a block on the slope above the lake in late October in a single long night, under work lights strapped to the tractor, because the forecast called for a day and a half of rain and he said nobody wanted to find out what the clusters would do sitting in it. The press jammed twice before midnight. Somewhere around three in the morning the winemaker’s dog climbed into an empty bin and fell asleep, and the crew worked around him until sunrise rather than wake him. Eli said it was the best fruit he’d seen in his three years there, and he told it the way people tell you about a game they won in the last minute.

I asked whether the tasting room hosts had heard any of it. He thought about that for a second and said probably not. Most of them work weekends, and on harvest weekends the crew is either out in the vineyard or asleep, and nobody really crosses the gravel in either direction.

It was about forty yards from the crush pad to the tasting room counter. I thought about that distance most of the drive back to the inn. Restaurants have the same forty yards in the swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room, and inns have it in the hallway between the front desk and the maintenance shop.

Nobody plans it that way. The cellar crew and the tasting room hosts keep different hours and answer to different people, and at harvest both sides are buried at once. By the time the winemaker writes the vintage note in December, the hosts have spent two months telling guests about the weather, because that was the version that reached them. The couple from Toronto had asked to be let in on the part of the place they would never see for themselves, and the only person who could have done it was outside with a hose.

The couple from Toronto will probably open their dry Riesling sometime this winter, with friends, and somebody at the table will ask about the winery. They’ll say it was a pretty drive along the lake and the people were friendly. When I pulled out of the lot, Eli had finished with the bins and was coiling the hose, and the winemaker’s dog was asleep on a folded tarp beside the press.

The names of the people and the winery in this story have been changed.