06/19/2026
for June is here!
All about a single winery - we do that rarely, and only when a winery has earned it. Ravines Wine Cellars has. The estate sits above Seneca & Keuka Lakes in upstate New York, and what we love about it starts with a choice. Its founder could have made wine almost anywhere — he had the training and the pedigree to go wherever he wanted. Instead, he chose the Finger Lakes, a region most of the wine world had barely heard of. Why he did is worth telling.
Morten Hallgren grew up at his family’s estate in France’s beautiful Provence, with vineyards documented back to the 1300s. He trained in the south of France, worked harvests from Bordeaux to Texas, and in 1998 came to the Finger Lakes to make wine for Dr. Konstantin Frank — the man who, decades earlier, had proven that great European grapes could survive this cold corner of New York. It was a long way from Provence. But Morten saw what the region could be, and in 2000 he and his wife Lisa bought seventeen acres on Keuka Lake, tucked between two steep ravines, and made their first wines in a rented barn. The ravines gave the winery its name.
Here was his conviction: the Finger Lakes could make world-class Riesling, and the way to show it was to go fully dry. At the time most of the region’s Riesling carried some sweetness — even bottles labeled dry. Morten went the other way: bone-dry, mineral-driven, the fruit left to speak for the place it came from. It was the road less traveled then. It’s now the style the region is known for, and Ravines was built around it from the first vintage. Today Ravines farms 130 acres of certified-sustainable vineyards across both limestone and shale soils, classical to the core — patient in the cellar, low-intervention, every wine made for the table. Twenty-five years on, the bet looks less like a gamble than like vision.
We chose 3 wines that tell the whole story. The Dry Riesling is the wine that made the reputation. The Cerise is the easy summer red they’ve poured for the better part of twenty years. And the Cabernet Franc is the newer argument — proof that the reds here have grown up too.
Cheers,
P. + E. Mullins
Ravines Wine Cellars
