Posts tagged heron hill

Bully Hill

Ahh… I REALLY needed that. Despite all of the illnesses starting to fly around in our apartment here, my friends and I managed to get out to the Wine Country for the day yesterday. And man, was it awesome.

The particular wine country region we visited was around Keuka Lake. Although we only visited one of the wineries on the trail this time around. My friends went up for a little getaway in the summer and upon hearing how awesome it was out there (and that Bully Hill is one of my favorite wineries) we determined that we would have to go out as a group to explore a bit.

We seemed to pick the perfect weekend to go. The area was beautiful (look below for pictures) with the fall leaves in the valley with the lake situated at the bottom. Of course that also meant there were a lot of people around, but it really was worth waiting.

The directions to Bully Hill that the winery provided (the GPS is really fruity in the area down there) took us past Heron Hill first, so we stopped there. Heron Hill is home to the best bottle of wine my friends have ever tasted, and we visited there hoping that they would have some left (It was a very limited harvest).

The first thing you notice about Heron Hill is the spectacular view from the tasting room.

View From Heron Hill

Another View From Heron Hill

There was a ton of people there, so we had to wait a bit to do our tasting, but…as you can see, this wasn’t really much of an issue.

First thing to note about the tasting, our guy had a name tag on it that said “Dave!” and he was quite the character. He kept us pretty well entertained and informed about the wine, so two thumbs up to Dave!. We did the 6 wines for $5 tasting option, including the bottle of the special harvest linked above. Much like them when they first tried it, I had originally thought that I’d see what all the hype was about and then buy a couple of bottles of cheaper wine. But…when the time came that flew out the window and I had to spent my entire wine purchasing budget for the trip on a single $45 bottle of wine. It is the absolute best wine I have ever had, ever. And considering the conditions that created it was once in a lifetime…I had to have a bottle.

There were a couple of other wines that were interesting there too, especially the other desert wine, the 2007 Late Harvest Vidal Blanc. Very sweet and tasty. Perfect for after dinner. Another standout was the 2007 Blaufrankisch Reserve, which was an awesome red wine. And I don’t really like red wine.

The trip continued after Heron Hill with a visit over to the Keuka Brewing Company. Jay is really more a beer drinker than a wine drinker, so this was his destination of choice. And we were worried as soon as we arrived since the place looked more like a shack in the woods, giving off a serious serial killer type vibe. But once we got in it was really nice and the tasting was good. I liked pretty much all of the beers they had availible, except the IPA. That one was a bit…weird. But I even liked the stout and I am not a fan of stouts. Their Wheat beer was the best of the bunch to my taste buds though. My friends ended up getting a growler of the wheat beer to take home.

The Grapes at Bully Hill

After the brewery, we left for our final destination of the day, Bully Hill. We had plans to take a tour of the vineyards and walk through the museum before having dinner at the restaurant on site. My friends had lunch there when they came up before, but this time we were trying out dinner.

The tour situation was a little weird since we couldn’t figure out exactly where they started, so we hopped on one that was already going and missed part of the story of the winery. But the basic plot is, the Taylor family always had a Winery in the area. Walter S. Taylor ended up being fired from his own winery when he became outspoken that wines from New York should have labels on them showing where the grapes came from (You can (or could, dunno if this changed) label a wine as a New York Wine despite the fact that up to 25% of the grapes came from out of state). The established winery community were not fond of this idea, so they fired Walter. So he started up his own winery, Bully Hill.

A few years later, the Taylor Wine company (the one Walter was fired from) was bought by Coca-Cola. Owning the rights to the name Taylor when attached to Wine, Coke sued Walter to prevent him from using his last name anywhere on the bottles of wine he was selling. Coke, unbelievably, won the case and forced Walter to blank out his name on the labels. Additionally, the court case prevented Walter from ever mentioning the history of the Bully Hill Winery, such as where they came from and who they were. Walter used this setback to vault Bully Hill into popularity.

After we took the tour, which was really neat (I didn’t realize that every year all the leaves from the grape vines need to be cut down individually by hand…now that’s a crappy job) we settled down to enjoy the view over the lake for a little while until it was time for our dinner reservation to arrive.

And oh my. That dinner was probably the absolute best meal I’ve ever had. I settled on having the Sauteed Chicken Breast (with a light Traminette and fresh herb cream sauce; served over pasta (from the menu)). Wassy had the 8oz, Center Cut Filet Mignon (served with pepercorn demi-glace, sauteed mushrooms and onion rings) and Jay had the Bully Hill Crabcake with Day Boat Scallops (Maryland-style crabcake served on a grilled portabella mushroom cap). And we grabbed a bottle of Bully Hill Spring White to go with the meal.

I cannot say enough good things about this meal. We each sampled each others dishes and they were all awesomeness. But Jay won with the crabcake. That was probably the best crabcake I have ever tasted in my entire life. It even beat out the crabcakes I had IN Maryland. The Fillet Mignon was done perfectly, so tender and juicy and my chicken was great as well. The sauce was excellent and they actually prepared mushrooms in a way such that I found them tasty. Then the deserts (I had peanut butter pie, wassy had the apple crisp and jay had the carrot cake) just topped the meal off.

At one point the chef came by to ask how our meal was and Jay had to shake his hand. It was that good.

Sunset Over Bully Hill

An excellent time was had by all, and we went home full and feeling satisfied. I’m definitely going to try to go next year again. As we were leaving, we had a really awesome sunset as well. And the view over the lake at night was really cool.

Two thumbs up for this trip. Would go again. And again. And again.