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. I’m the owner Frédéric Bouché and the winemaker of Ports of New York Winery. (http://portsofnewyork.com/) Welcome to Part 3 of our conversation with Frédéric Bouché. Can’t wait to get into it. So many fascinating stories with Mr. Bouche. Imagined having a winery with your style and the way that you’re so personable that you hear some interesting stories from your patrons had something to do.
I mean, the winery there is because we make fortified wines and expands. Not that long ago, that was beautiful fast. I had a group of Indians from India and they were all scoters. Only one of them did not speak English at all. And as we were talking about various types of fortified wines, I was using the term Madeira (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeira) , which is also Portuguese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_language) . That person wouldn’t even speak English. I actually picked up on that word and get some saying it over and over again. So I asked the other guests. How come that person doesn’t speak English? Clearly knows that word. Well, this was because Madeira (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeira) is the word in overdo. That means alcohol.
And that opens a completely incredible page of each story. In fact, the Portuguese have been bringing Madeira (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeira) to exchange for spices.
And so it ended up being that they adopted that word Madeira to mean alcohol because, again, it’s not for this alcohol. So I understand that you do not have a vineyard on sites. You do not grow your own grapes. But this isn’t something that is new to you. This goes back a long way. The winery I grew up in, our vineyards were not on site. They were in the fall of the region, which we get them until the late 70s, early in the family. But the winery was the main building where I grew up was no more. So I don’t want to deal with going great. It’s a whole other job. So we are in the middle of it. They got along the water and it’s an open winery, one of the very first one in New York. So it was very challenging as far as laws and everything to make that happen. Well, I should mention something else, actually. We pre-buy our grapes by the ton without knowing what the harvest is, somebody quality. So in a sense, it’s as if we were growing old grape. But the final product is whatever nature is going to bring us. We’re going to deal with it. And it is truly a very different thing to own, to make the wine. Then two on top of it has to deal with a farm.
Let me see if I can get the timeline correct, you arrived in Ithaca, New York in about 1994. The thought of the winery, things started marinating, and then in 2003, there were some new laws are going to be put into effect that would affect your plans built on the land. You put the buildings up, the lights on, and you got to the equipment and everything was finished in 2006. And then four years later, you opened in 2010 and you started making the ports because that takes what you were telling me, a four-year minimum. So from 1990 forward to 2010, almost 16 years, you poured your money into this, so. Yeah. You’ve got to have some money if you want to start a wine business.
I always say to everybody, I go, you have a lot of money. Keep your job. And that’s exactly what we did. We stayed really tight to focus and invested in the know at all in this whole thing and very carefully.
I mentioned this before, but it still amazes me because I just love people that are so well-rounded and accomplished. But if you go to the Web site, it’s ports of New York dot com and you’ll see that the buildings there are Bouché has built are very authentic. And you couldn’t tell that it was freshly built.
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I love building things the way we like to have them. No, we are not afraid to do it and take it down and redo it if it needed before you like it better another way.
So we take our time and do it in a way because of the types of customers. I mean, you have I mean, there are several, but they are the basic line out there one to one problem, just what they think and the one who wants to have the floor expand. And it’s very hard to accommodate both at the same time for most of the time, people who come just for pacing and are benefiting from the full extent.
Yes. Benefiting from the whole experience is the goal. Do you have a favorite scene since you’re running everything from greeting the customer at the front door to taking the grapes and doing the paperwork work in just a building, the building? Do you have a favorite to project that you like?
Well, I think I tried to. I mean, again, my wife and I tried to enjoy every step as much as possible because sometimes it’...
