Montezuma Winery - Seneca Falls, NY Pt 1

Welcome, to The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast. I'm your host, Forrest Kelly, from the seed to the glass wine has a past. Our aim at The Best Five 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: In this episode, we head to the town that hosted the first women's rights convention in 1848. It's also believed to be the inspiration for Bedford Falls, Mary, my wife Clarence, Merry Christmas everybody. Yes, the movie, It's A Wonderful Life, it's Seneca Falls, New York, home to Montezuma Winery. Hi, this is Phil Plummer. I'm the head winemaker for the Martin Family, Wineries Montezuma Winery. Under The Martin family, wineries and distilleries. You have Montezuma Winery, Old Forge, IDOL Ridge Winery, Alder Creek Distillery, and Hidden Marsh Distillery. We're going to focus on Montezuma Winery since you are the head winemaker, Phil. Let's get a little background on yourself. I'm originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but I came to Rochester, New York, to go to college. I went to RIT and I was there for this really like specialized science computer science program, and I got a couple of years deep into that and came to the realization that I was headed for a life where I was going to be buried at a lab bench or behind a computer screen, and that terrified me through the hospitality school at RIT, I'd been taking wine tasting classes, so I decided to start making wine and beer in my college apartment, which was probably not within the letter of the law at the time, but I really fell in love with production. I like making things, and I always felt like maybe wine would be what I did if I won the Powerball someday. I stuck around in Rochester one summer and I managed to get a part-time job at Castle Lager, which is a winery that's kind of between Rochester in the Finger Lakes, and that's where it kind of clicked for me. I've been here for almost my whole career in the wine business, and I worked my way up from being just a cellar grunt to being the head winemaker. Now that we've got your history, can you give us some background on George Martin, the man who started this project? George was a commercial beekeeper. He got his wife, Virginia, and his sons, Ed and Bill involved in the beekeeping business. When he retired, he decided to do that full-time. So he had worked at a local power plant at their peak. They were running hives all up and down the East Coast as part of a commercial pollination business. They started making meads as kind of a way to settle down a little bit when they got started in the late 90s, up in Sterling, New York, on Lake Ontario, which is where they're from. They were just making needs and then they kind of branched out into some like fruit meads and then into some straight-up fruit wines before they moved the operation to the Finger Lakes and got in on grape wines that I think most of us are more familiar with. Being the head winemaker. Is there anything you're not involved in? So I try and stay out of the distillery between our three brands. We're making like 100 different wines here. I don't really have a lot of time to take on distilling to. We have a full-time distiller on staff who handles that. But all the wines, those are mine. It's anything from fruit, wines, honey wines, traditional grape wines. We do it all. Looking at the awards that you've won with your wines and spirits which one would you say you're most proud of? Oh, that's a great question. I don't know. I think any of the wines where we've won are naturally sparkling, probably because that wasn't a program that was here before I was. That's something that grew up under me. I'm texture obsessed. So it's one of the things that I chase in winemaking is that I'm really, really keen on hitting the right textures on things. And there's no more obvious way to manipulate texture than bubble. Texture, manipulation, and bubbles. In our next episode, we'll find out what those all mean with Phil Plummer, head winemaker at Montezuma Winery. Will, somebody answer that phone, it's time boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi, it's Natalia from Spain. My question is I want to go out with my friends, but I'm only 20, so I was wondering if they make any nonalcoholic wine. Great question Natalia. Yes, they do make nonalcoholic wine. They make it the same way as normal wine, except afterward they use a vacuum distillation and reverse osmosis to remove the alcohol. In fact, in Spain, if you stop by your local Birdie Vinos, they've got 43 different kinds of nonalcoholic wine. Hey. Thank you for listening. I'm Forrest Kelly. This episode of The Best Five Minute Wine Podcast was produced by IHYSM. If you like the show, please tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.