Ports of New York Winery – Ithaca, NY Pt. 1

In this episode, we talk with Frederic Bouche of Ports of New York Winery. We discuss his history of winemaking and French background.Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all, grape minds think alike. Let's start the adventure.Our featured winery is, we travel to Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University, and also has the highest percentage of workers who walk to work. Seventeen percent of their workers walk to work. Also home to Alex Haley, the Roots author, and Vladimir Nabokov, the Lolita author, and most importantly, home to Frédéric Bouché, and I'm the owner and a winemaker of lots of New York winery.As you can probably guess, Frederic is from France. So just a little background on France. They produce 78 billion gallons of wine per year. And going back even further, the Catholic Church at one time was the largest vineyard owner in France. However, in 1860, France was plagued with wine maladies. They hadn't quite perfected the making. And so, they declared it a national crisis in 1860. So they called in Louis Pasteur. Yes, the same man who perfected pasteurization. And in 1866, his essay, Studies on Wine, became the foundation of modern winemaking. He had saved France's wine industry. So that brings us up to Mr. Frédéric Bouché and his family history.So it started with my great grandfather in 1919. And that was in France, in Normandy. So basically, my great grandfather told me he had vineyards in Baldo, which is yet another region, a true wine region. But he moved to Normandy in 1919 because his wife was from there. And when he moved there, he realized there was no wine, no more. Which was not a wine region? So he saw the opportunity and brought in some of the table wine, just to put it in kind of context.How big is wine intertwined in their culture at that time?So in Normandy, nobody drank wine or very few people because there was no access to it. So they were drinking hard cider. And you are still very complex. Hot cider, cold calvados. And so he brought in the words and ignoring warnings from everywhere from France and then bottled them under his name, alanine, and then that's what he would sell. So he was one of the very first people to sell French wine cellar to hotels and restaurants in the region.They were loving this. They were there was a huge step up from cider to what he was producing. It was really high-end because you could. I mean, at that time, you could get the amazing wines for not much money and restaurants real. So we're doing custom labels for sure. Restaurants. Wow. It's quite amazing. Yeah. You think about 1999, the technology, and just what they were dealing with at the...