I recently re-connected with Ben Hartman, who grew up in my same hometown in Central New Jersey.  I was excited to learn that like me, Ben had also chased the dream of making wine... but he's doing it in the Finger Lakes of New York! He and his wife Michelle own and operate Deep Root Vineyard and are doing some really exciting and interesting things, including a surprising wine from 100+ year old vines from their property.

We have really cool conversation about:

• Giving it a shot and chasing a passion
• The uniqueness of grape growing in this Northern region
• Some recent trends we’ve both noticed in wine consumption
• Changes in the Finger Lakes region
• This week's “Sip Spotlight” wines, where we taste 2 of their small lot creations (and they are like nothing I’ve tasted before!)

Check out their website here and visit their tasting room in Hammondsport, NY to meet them and try some of their wine and jarred sangria!

• Click these links to Follow them on Instagram and Facebook
• If you are in update New York you can find them at the Rochester Public Market  (but not in January!)

You can purchase my perfect pizza pairing Sollevato Sangiovese and Use code PODLISTENER for 10% off your order 

Want to be an "Angel?"-You can Support the Podcast, and buy me a glass of wine to show how much you're enjoying my podcast passion project.

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Mentioned in this episode:

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Well, nicely done.

It is super interesting.

Like I said, the nose, I, I mean, just smelling wines can sometimes give me goosebumps and make the hair of my arm stand up in a good way.

And this wine does it because I think it's just so reminiscent of childhood.

And then there's just that nice, subtle alcohol on there.

Lightly chilled.

This is dangerous.

You have to protect me from my health.

That's why

I only put it in the seven 50 bottles.

That way you have to make a conscious decision to open the second bottle.

So I wanted to take a quick minute to thank everyone who has supported the podcast and shared feedback and thoughts and messages.

If you're enjoying what you're hearing, send me a DM on Instagram at Nikki Lamberti.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and what you'd like to hear on upcoming episodes.

And if you'd like to be one of the angels to support the podcast, there's going to be a link in the show notes where you can do so.

Super helpful to help cover the cost to create this beautiful baby of mine and ensure that we can share the joy with as many ears as possible.

So thank you.

So if you listen to the very first episode of Sip With Nikki, or episode 10, they featured extremely successful and talented and exciting individuals from my hometown, Matawan, New Jersey.

Chef Dan Richer, who's the author of the bestselling book, The Joy of Pizza.

And Chef Melissa Walnock from the Culinary Institute of America.

If you did not listen to either of those, I encourage you to go back and catch up.

But I have really loved reconnecting with people from this tiny little town where I grew up and highlighting what businesses and, and what successes they've had.

So a few months ago, I reconnected with another local kid from central New Jersey, Ben Hartman, and through Facebook, and Ben is making wine just like me on a small scale, but he is doing it in the complete opposite side of the country, up in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

And I was fascinated to learn about his journey where he and his wife, Michelle, decided to chase this passion.

And one summer when he was, uh, off from teaching, they put the kids in the car and threw a tent on the roof of the car and went to find their dream property where they could make wine.

And, uh, you'll hear all about Keuka Lake in the Finger Lakes where they reside now with their vineyard and their, uh, winery that he converted from an old barn.

And, uh, I think you'll enjoy this fascinating conversation because we talk about different grapes that they grow up.

They're very different than what we grow here in California.

One of these grapes is very, um, surprising and nostalgic and has a really long history.

And I'm just so excited to share with you the story of Deep Root Vineyard and Ben Hardman.

Here we go.

First of all, say what you want to say about Facebook, but I love it for this very reason that you and I are connected here and how cool and random that two kids from Monmouth County, New Jersey are now in two different parts of the world, but both making time.

That's bizarre.

How did this happen?

It really is kind of wild.

It's fun.

Let's do this.

Catch me up from, we graduate from Madelon in the mid nineties, where you go from there and how did it take you to where you are today?

Catch me up.

Let's see, well I went up to Oswego for school, and I got a degree in education, and shortly after college, I got married, I got a job teaching, I worked in a couple different districts, and wound up teaching at Elizabeth,

and it was a real fun place to be in, I was trying to buy a house, so then, the nearest place, you know, Our parents bought houses in Monmouth County in like 1980.

It was very different.

Yup.

So the nearest place that, you know, we're like, yeah, we can get a house here.

And it's the place we want to live was way up by the Delaware river.

So I was driving all the way from basically Eastern Pennsylvania to Elizabeth, New Jersey every day, an

hour

and a half each way.

And that got old quick and I started working part time at a little winery out there for summers and weekends.

And it all just started to develop from there.

That's awesome.

So you obviously, like me, had the wine bug, if you were just doing a part time gig at a winery.

When did you find yourself really getting into wine?

I guess it

was, it was probably mid twenties at 26, 27, I, I started, you know, enjoying wine, you know, I was teaching, so I'd pick up work in the summer, I guess it's probably why I gravitated towards wine industry in the first place, but I learned a lot there.

I was doing tours and tastings.

And every time a customer had a question, if I couldn't answer it through my own research, I'd just ask the winemaker and I was making little batches at that little house we'd bought.

We'd bought it from this couple who built it there in like 1962 that when they moved there from Spain and there was a grape barber in the backyard, there was chickens, quince trees and stuff.

So I started making wine from some of the grapes that were out there.

Oh, there were popcorns.

Conqueror.

Conqueror.

And Niagara.

So there's a Conqueror Vine and a Niagara Vine.

Okay.

And what was the winery that you started working at?

Oh, that

was Alba

Vineyards

up there, straight near Philipsburg, New Jersey.

So New Jersey winery.

Look at you.

You've got me beat.

Do you?

Shame on me.

I'm going to confess two things to you right now.

Number one, I have never been to a New Jersey winery because I left New Jersey.

27 years ago.

And I still go back to visit, but I just haven't done any wineries in New Jersey.

And number two, I've never been to the Finger Lakes where you are now.

So shame on me.

Wow.

I, well, Hey, you know, I've never been to California.

So we're, so we're equal.

I'm going to have to get out there too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We got to reciprocate.

This is cool because we kind of have some different parallels where we both started working in wine on the hospitality and tour side.

And also started making like really rustic at home wine at the house.

I did that too.

So then we both graduated from that, you know, garage winemaker, garages, they call it.

So tell me, how did it, how did deep root winery, the property come to be?

And how did you and your wife, Michelle, get that all going?

Well, over those couple of years in that first house, we decided this is what we wanted to do.

Really, I had this crazy idea and I was lucky enough that Michelle went for it.

And she was getting into the wine aspect of it and the hospitality aspect of it as well.

And she grew up in an Italian household and wine was just always a part of everyday life.

So it just seemed like, yeah, let's do this.

Summer of 06, maybe we sold that house and rented a place.

For that school year while I had one more year, we made our plan where we wanted to check and that summer came around and we didn't have the mortgage.

The lease was up.

I didn't teach summer school.

We put the kids in the car, the tent up top and drove all throughout the Southeast.

We started cause there were those little wine regions popping up in Virginia and.

Carolina is out into the hill country in Texas.

We look, they're a great place on, but nothing really seemed to stick, you know?

And at first we were kind of intimidated by the idea of coming up to the finger lakes because, you know, it's got a big name, but then we're like, well, let's give it a shot because nothing else really felt right.

And we looked at one of the bigger lakes and it felt a little, not really exactly what we were looking for.

Then we drove over the hill and saw Kuka and like instantly we're like, this is it, this is home.

And we booked out a spot at the state park, set up camp and went around looking for, for sale signs.

Get out.

That's awesome.

It was a really fun time.

And we found this little property and yeah, it's about eight acres.

And at the time it was just the vines in the barn.

The original farm had been split up into three properties and the house was on a property that was sold off, I don't know, 20 years earlier, but it was a great location.

And we put an offer in on it and then rented the little lakeside cabins throughout the winter.

We lived basically all those two years.

We lived in off season, vacation rentals, one in Spring Lake Heights, and then we're on the road for the summer.

And then once the summer people left the Finger Lakes, we were renting their cabins down on the shore here while we had the house built.

That was an adventure in and of itself.

I'm not sure I'd do it again, that's for sure.

That's

funny, that's what most people say about doing a new build, whether it's kind of on a rustic farm property or in the middle of a development, right?

Most people say, I don't know if I'm up for doing it again.

But, so, eight acres with a barn, so then, where are you actually doing the winemaking?

We converted the old barn to the winery building.

There was a hayloft in there.

So we took the hayloft out and brought the tents in.

I actually brought plumbing in, but for electricity, I keep my electricity usage pretty minimum.

And I run it on a cord from the house.

Most of the time, all I ever, yeah, I'm running either the pump or the press.

You know, or something like that.

So I don't really have a huge draw.

Everything's all right there.

Like you, you get up in your house, you quote, walk to work.

The vineyards there with the eight acres, the wineries there, it's all localized, like in one spot.

Yes.

Yeah.

We're all 100 percent on site, which is a blessing and a curse, I would say.

I

get the blessing, but why isn't it a curse?

Yeah, go ahead.

You never,

you kind of never leave work.

You know, you're like always there.

I get that.

Remember one of the catalysts in your whole life change was the drive to Elizabeth from Pennsylvania, right?

True.

An hour and a half each way.

True.

So it's like the total opposite.

It's

very much the opposite.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

But I do still get off site at least once a week.

I go out to the market up in Rochester, so.

Yeah.

So tell me about that.

Oh, that's fun.

I love it up there, man.

It's just vibrant and alive.

I get to hear at least four or five languages a day.

Usually sell wine and two, if not three, you know, so it's, it's fun.

There's a lot of different groups of people out there.

It's a farmer's market or a public market.

It's a,

it's a public market.

Basically it's open air on Saturdays and peak summer.

There's probably 300 vendors, maybe four.

It's really neat.

In the wintertime it goes way, way down.

In the wintertime there's Maybe 30 of us, 40 of us, they'll show up, but then summer hits and, uh, well, really about April starts hitting and yeah, we're in full swing now.

Nice.

So you sell your wine at this market all year round?

Yeah, I take January off because dry January.

I don't even know what that is.

Oh my God.

Lately, the past four, three, four years, I've been hearing people talk about, Oh, I'm doing dry January.

I'm doing dry January.

I'm like, so now we take January off.

I don't even do field work hardly in January.

From my mom being from upstate, I know a little bit about the winters.

Yeah.

That you guys have up there.

It gets chilly.

So yeah, probably a lot, a lot of field work going on in January.

I'd love to get your take on this.

So you talked about dry January and that's definitely picked up momentum in the last couple of years.

Now I'm even hearing things like sober October.

And again, I don't participate in either one of those.

Wine is too big of a pleasure, too big of a part of my life.

But I respect that people are kind of investigating that.

I don't know if you see what I see, but like a lot of articles and blogs and things just about how wine consumption is changing and people may be drinking less.

So as someone who makes wine as your livelihood, does it worry you?

And what are you hearing about this?

I'm like, okay, trends are going this way and trends are going that way.

But I do notice that, that, that one in particular, that shot my January sales.

Okay.

But there are some weird trends, well, I noticed some things I'm noticing here in the Finger Lakes, our industry here started because it was a great place to grow grapes, you know, and now there's the foreign brewery law and the

foreign distillery law that mimics the foreign winery law, which is great things for people to be able to get into it, but I feel that some things have changed on the trail.

There are places that are seeking to be kind of more of a destination go here for the day.

You know, the, we got places that have are doing concerts now.

The beach boys played a mile from my house on Sunday night.

Like,

yeah, I could hear them from the backyard.

Some of them are really operating as bars at this point.

And now I've got customers kind of expecting me to provide those kinds of amenities.

And that's not really, you know, kind of what I got into it for.

So I see some differences going there.

Yeah.

And it's hard to tell because I, I know I definitely sell more wine each year than I did the last year.

But I think a lot of that's because I have further and further outreach every year, you know, not because like consumption trends are going up or anything like that.

You're growing your audience.

Yeah.

And your customers.

You know,

not, yeah, just basically the capacity that I can continue to make, you know, until I don't have.

Really any place to put more tanks or barrels.

I know what that's like.

Hey, do you think though, when the, when the sales pause in January for dry January, do you feel like it pent up demand in February then, and the people are like doubling down in February?

That is, that has not been my read.

This year has been so

weird, man.

Saturdays have plummeted in temperature.

And I've seen New York, it started in February and kept on going through May.

Where the week would be nice.

It'd be beautiful.

We'd start to get flowers coming up and then Saturday would hit and the temperature would drop and it would rain.

This year is a hard one to judge trends on.

Yeah.

It's tricky when you're dependent on that kind of, you know, retail selling.

So you've got, you've got the market, which you do mostly throughout the year, minus January.

Yeah.

But then people can come and visit you.

It, you have a tasting room set up as well.

Is that right?

Oh, yes.

We have a tasting room up here on Keuka Lake.

And we are open five days a week, usually from the beginning of May through the end of October.

But yeah, we close Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Which is your day off today that you're talking to me.

Yeah, no, tomorrow, uh, tomorrow will be field work.

And I think Michelle's running around getting sangria jars and bottles.

So yeah, it's kind of fun.

We do, we do it as a kind of a fresh drink, you know, close it up and then seal it up in the jar with the, with the fruit in it.

But you know, I don't can it cause it changes it, but it's fun.

We only just started doing those a couple of years ago.

And they've been a lot of fun, but, uh, usually Wednesday is shopping day for, uh, jars and fruit.

Oh my God, I would be all over those sangria jars.

Very cool.

So, your wines and sangria now are exclusively available just through those two outlets, through that Rochester Public Market.

Then through your tasting room five days a week, is that right?

Yeah, we're working on shipping.

The most profitable way to sell your wine is to the consumer directly.

It's right to TC directly.

That's,

uh, that's what we do.

We do basically right from the, the ground all the way up, the entire line of production, the value added product, essentially.

So then is the best way for our listeners to figure out how to get their hands on your wine is just keep on your website and then if, and when you do start shipping, they'll see news of it there.

But in the meantime, public market and your tasting room.

That's yeah, that's probably the best way.

Um.

And also, we got, you know, Facebook and Instagram, that stuff as well.

So, Deep

Root Vineyard, singular, no S.

Instagram and Facebook.

Okay.

Yeah, and the same thing goes on the website.

Okay, so just deeprootvineyard.

com

Yep.

Okay, cool.

And I'll put the link for our listeners too, so they can find you and find your wine.

Awesome.

I found your wine because you sent it to me and it's sitting here in front of me.

So I'd love for us to taste these two wines together and talk about them.

How's that sound?

Perfect.

That sounds great.

Yeah.

We call this our Sip Spotlight.

Sip Spotlight.

The first one I poured in my glass is the Country Red.

And per your instructions, a nice little chill.

I'm both of these red wines, country red smells amazing and makes my mouth water.

Tell me about it.

I love the country.

Right.

It's a lot of fun.

It's actually a hundred percent Concord grape.

And the vines that we have for it are over a hundred years old at this point.

And it's kind of how our property wound up getting its whole name because the roots are really, really down deep after all this time, they're like 12, 16 foot deep.

What I love about this wine is that it's just such a nice, easy sipping.

It works for most occasions, really.

So Concord grape, which is what your eight acres are planted to, right?

Oh, we've got, uh, five under vine.

The property's over here.

Five, okay.

Eight acre

property.

Five under vine.

It's all Concord.

Yeah.

So this is so interesting for me because we don't grow Concord grapes out here in, in California and Napa and Sonoma where I live.

So my familiarity with Concord is from childhood, from like juice, jelly, and welches.

So when I smell this wine.

It is so nostalgic for me and I couldn't quite figure out why, but I was like, Oh, it reminds me of something.

It reminds me of childhood.

Grape juice.

It just has a little kick to it.

No.

Yeah.

That's what I say to people when they come to me market and they're like, Oh, I'm looking for something sweet.

I'm like, well, I've got this one.

It's like growing up grape juice.

Great description.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

I mean, it's a little on the sweeter side, but it's, it comes in at a 3.

5 on residual sugar.

So now it's not actually crazy high in the actual sugar content that's there.

So I kind of like it cause it keeps that balance.

It's usually sweet enough for people that are looking for a sweet line.

But not over the top for people who like something drier.

Yeah.

And it's not syrupy as far as like viscosity.

It feels.

Lighter in the mouth, like a light red, like a Pinot Noir, like it's not viscous, like a juice, but it definitely has those flavors to me, reminiscent of grapes.

Yeah, our field, these grapes used to go to Welch's for the 60 years prior to when we bought it.

The whole field was contracted, all the tonnage would go to Welch's.

And before that, it was going to Pleasant Valley, like during Prohibition.

Uh huh.

And Pleasant Valley would, from what I understand, they just crush it down and ship out buckets of juice.

Uh huh.

With a packet of yeast tape to the top and instructions on how to make sure it doesn't turn into wine.

And then before Prohibition, this property was producing grapes for the, the Pulteney wine company.

It was down the end of the road.

They had a big stone pit that was their primary fermenter and this entire street was lined, you know, so they'd take and they'd crush down into that and they'd do their primary and pump out and I believe they were using.

Large oak casks for storage at that time.

So yeah, the place has a pretty long history and that grape, it's been grown here for a long, long time.

I would say that.

You are part of the legacy with this grape and this property and these hundred plus year old vines and these Concord grapes that Welch is worth buying.

Like that is so cool.

Congratulations.

Thanks.

You know, it's fun.

It's something we've been trying to maintain and keep going.

You know, the Finger Lakes has, especially over the last couple of decades, really upped its ante and reputation, even on the worldwide stage.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it feels like for some reason, a lot of the winemakers have tried to distance themselves from this grape.

And it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

There's a lot of other great grapes out there that people are using.

I mean, obviously we make world class Rieslings, Pinot Noirs, and Cap Francs, but this Conqueror grape makes a fun wine.

And I treat it like I do the others.

I do my primary fermentation on the skin for seven to 10 days.

I've tried a couple other ones that are more thermopressed.

And it gives more of that viscous feeling like you were talking about, that juicy feeling.

But the on skin fermentation gives that more of a red wine mouthfeel, which is what I'm shooting for.

Well, nicely done.

It is super interesting.

Like I said, the nose, I, I mean, just smelling wines can sometimes give me goosebumps and make the hair on my arm stand up in a good way.

And this wine does it because I think it's just so reminiscent of childhood.

And then there's just that nice, subtle alcohol on there, lightly chilled.

This is dangerous.

You have to protect me from myself with this country red.

That's

why I only put it in the 750 bottles.

That way you have to make a conscious decision to open the second bottle.

Good.

No large formats of the country red.

Too easy to finish in Magnum.

Awesome.

And then the second one that you sent me that has this really cool label, that's very, I don't know, ancient looking guy with the big long beard, very Greek looking, is the Chamberson.

So tell me about this.

Yes.

The Chamberson is a 2020 and I aged this one in French oak barrels.

I used older barrels so it doesn't get overly oaky.

And the Chamberson grape is a French hybrid.

It's one of the early hybrids developed in the late 18, early 1900s.

And that was brought over here to the U S in the late thirties when Charles Fournier came over and was doing his experiments in the Finger Lakes with hybrids and 15 or 20 years before Constantine Frank came over and started working with some viniferas out here as well.

It's one of those early hybrids that they brought over and they were working with.

And yeah, I just really love it because it gives that kind of nice medium body Pinot Noir kind of feel to me.

Yeah, it looks very Pinot Noir in the glass.

And For our listeners who are not vineyard and winemaking nerds like you and me, when you talk about hybrids, what Ben's referring to is the genetic material that you plant.

Long story short, there's, there's different hybrids that have been created over time for multiple reasons.

Sometimes it's just to be adapted to the climate and the soil that you're planting and other times it's to be resistant to any pest, right?

That could, uh, Phylloxera took out the wine industry in Europe and the U S and in history, that's what he's talking about.

Yeah, that's, and that is the hybrids job is to be able to be grown, expand the range and to be pest resistant and not like some weird kind of GMO kind of thing.

Like the way they make hybrid grapes is, and they've been doing it for thousands of years really.

At first it was open pollinization, because really all grapes are hybrids.

Because grapes are open pollinated, they're wind pollinated.

Do you know what we say about that?

We say because grapevines are self pollinating.

We say, we don't even need the birds and the bees in the vineyard, right?

That's true.

We don't need them for healthy vineyards and they're good, but for pollination, yeah, the wind does it.

The

wind does that.

Right.

But, and when you're deliberately making a hybrid, you basically shake one flower cluster from one vine over the flower cluster from another one.

And then as those grapes develop, that's the only time you ever grow grapes from seed is then when the grapes on that cluster develop.

You plant those seeds and you evaluate, you know, their disease resistance, true quality, and all that kind of stuff.

And then from there, they choose the one that fits what they're looking for best.

And by they currently, mostly, I mean, Cornell university, they're doing a lot of the grape hybrid.

Work right now, but I do believe University of Michigan is doing a lot.

Yeah.

And then from there, once you decide which one is going to be your cultivar that you're going to put out commercially, you reproduce all, all of them from cuttings from there.

It's not something I've done, but I read a lot about it.

Well, it sounds like something you know about.

So I know you talked about your undergrad at SUNY Oswego and education, but then how did you acquire all winemaking knowledge?

Well, I mostly started out.

I work in tours and tasting room at a winery in New Jersey.

And anytime the customers had questions, if I couldn't research the answer, then I'd ask the winemaker.

And so I learned a lot, like a lot doing that because I hate not having the answer.

Yeah.

Same.

So yeah, so I was going to find it out.

And then some experimentation and reading, you know, on that level and some, you know, homemade wines, like backyard wines along the way.

And then when we got up here, I got a teaching job again for a few years and I started working part time in other wineries and I did some hands on work for a couple of different crush seasons with a couple of different winemakers around.

But one thing that was really great for me is.

At that point, we were not seeing a lot of people up here in the wintertime, and it's increasing now.

We're seeing more and more people up here in the wintertime, but I was working winter weekends at this one place, and his winemaker had recently graduated from UC Davis, and she had all of her textbooks in the office.

So I spent that whole winter reading, and that was great.

And I try to put little things into practice on my batches I was making at home and stuff like that.

It's funny, my laptop as we're recording this is sitting on top of A wine science textbook from my UC Davis certificate program, wine science principles and application.

Maybe it's one that you were reading.

It may have

been.

It's intense.

There's a lot in there.

A lot of equations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't like that part.

I still, this is what's so crazy to me as, as we're having our conversation here.

I keep having these moments where I'm just like, how did these two kids from this tiny town in central New Jersey wind up kind of doing the same thing on opposite sides of the country?

Like if someone had tapped us on the shoulders back in Matawan, you know, 30 years ago, been like, Hey, see that kid across the playground?

Like he's going to make wine.

Yeah.

The Finger Lakes, you're going to make wine in Sanova.

You'd be like, what in the world?

Yeah.

Right.

Ew, wine?

Right.

Probably.

Probably would have said that at the time.

I love it.

It's so cool.

So as I'm sipping on this Chamberson, which like I said, looks very light bodied, pinot color in the glass.

What is this grape known for as far as how it expresses itself in the glass?

Well, it, it is known for a little bit of the earthiness it's described frequently as having depth and earthy tones and a raspberry or bramble berry type fruit, which I think is where the name has to come from that Chambord there as a French hybrid.

But I, I get that kind of that bramble berry type feeling that comes out of it.

Yeah, I mean, if we're saying brambleberry is a little more earthy version of a raspberry that people are used to.

Yeah.

I think that's fair.

There's definitely an earthiness to this wine.

Mm hmm.

Yeah, there's a depth to it.

And it's got a little more tannin, it looks like.

Yeah.

That's so fun.

And then tell me about this really cool label with this big long beard and the guy with the grapes all around.

Uh,

people were asking me if I was a self portrait for a while, but I recently trimmed my beard.

Um, but it's a sculpture actually that hangs on our tasting room wall and Michelle does all her label design work.

And she takes different pictures from around the winery in the field.

She took his picture.

She's like, I think I got the label for the Chamberson.

So.

It's very cool.

Yeah.

It's very unique.

Well, what a cool treat.

I, like I said, I, um, have not spent time wine tasting in the Finger Lakes.

Although now that you and I are reconnected next time I am on the East coast for a family visit in Jersey, I'm going to try to tackle some time to.

Come see you and Michelle and I want to see these hundred year old Concord vines and check out the whole set up.

That would be awesome.

It sounds really cool.

Yeah, I think if you, if you spend, if you come up and spend a weekend up at Kewkalake, I think you'd be happy you did.

It's a lot of fun up here.

And I think a lot of people don't know we're here.

If they know we're here, they don't know what it's like out here.

And there's some really interesting stuff going on.

Well, it sounds like it, it sounds like a special place.

And I know just from kind of keeping up on wine trends that, you know, in the last decade or so, I think New York is in the top five of wine production with California, Washington, Oregon, Virginia, Texas, New York.

So top five or six.

So between what you guys are doing up there in the Finger Lakes and then some Long Island wineries, like it's, it's no joke.

I think it's awesome.

And I can't wait to try it.

Cool.

Yeah.

And thanks for sending yours over, by the way.

When

you do crack it open, quintessential Sangiovese pairings, margarita pizza, Bolognese, the charcuterie board, Parmigiano Reggiano, like all of the stereotypical Italian pairings.

That is what that wine was crafted to be with

nice.

Cool.

Well, yeah, I'll probably wait a couple of years on it.

All right.

Wow.

Cool.

Enjoy it.

Like I said, I'm going to put the link in the show notes for your website and for your social media And especially, you know, I have a lot of listeners on the east coast who may be planning trips up there So hopefully they'll come check it out.

See what you guys are doing.

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

All right, cool.

Thanks Well, thank you for your time friend.

Cheers.

Thanks.

Yeah.

Cheers.

It's great talking to you.

Nikki

You too.

If

that doesn't inspire you to chase your dreams, I don't know what does.

And.

As someone who uprooted her life to do that very thing, I just want to say Ben and Michelle, I see you and congratulations on all your success.

For you listeners, if you are looking to plan a very cool trip up to that region, whether you live in the Northeast and going to make a weekend of it, or you're traveling cross country, there's over 130 wineries in the Finger Lakes region.

And breweries and food and just beautiful scenery.

So I encourage you to check it out and make sure that you have Deep Root Vineyard on your itinerary.

If you're going to be in the area, I'd also encourage you to check out the Rochester Public Market.

It's open year round, although we know Ben won't be there in January.

And you can find Ben and Michelle selling their wine at the market there.

You can also check them out on their website, deep root vineyard singular, not plural, deep root vineyard.

com.

And as Ben mentioned, they're getting set up with shipping soon.

So check that out on their website.

Be sure to follow them on Facebook and Instagram, both of which are Deep Root Vineyard.

And as always, if you'd like to get your hands on some of my Chase Your Dream wine, Solovato Sangiovese, you can visit my website, solovatowines.

com.

Link is in the show notes.

At the time of recording, we've got the 2021 Sangiovese available.

And if you use the discount code PODLISTENER, I will give you 10 percent off your purchase.

As always, all of the links to find these things that I've mentioned will be in the show notes below, so check them out.

And if you're having fun sipping with me, please leave a rating in Apple or Spotify.

And if you know someone who would enjoy being part of our sip community, please share the podcast with them.

As always, sip well.

We're going to call it

cloning.