Things to Do in the Finger Lakes: A Local Guide

The Finger Lakes are eleven long, narrow lakes that a glacier gouged into upstate New York, running north to south like scratches in the land. We make wine on the hills above one of them, Keuka Lake, and we get asked all the time: what is there to actually do out here? Quite a lot. Here's how we'd map it out.

From our terrace outside Hammondsport, we watch first-time visitors try to plan the whole region in one weekend. It's a big area — the lakes are spread across a couple of hours of driving. So the trick is to pick a base and build around it. Let's start with the shape of the place, then get into what to do season by season.

The lakes were pressed into the land by ice sheets more than ten thousand years ago. That's why they run in near-parallel lines and drop so deep — some plunge hundreds of feet below the surface. The big ones you'll hear about are Seneca, Cayuga, Keuka, and Canandaigua, but there are eleven in all, each with its own character and its own set of towns.

For wine, the region is best known as a cool-climate area. According to the Finger Lakes Wine Alliance, the deep lakes moderate the temperature — holding warmth into fall and cold into spring — which is what lets grapes like Riesling ripen slowly on the surrounding hills. We feel that on our own slope above Keuka every single year.

Most visits fall into five buckets. You won't do all of them in a weekend, and you shouldn't try. Here's the honest lay of the land, from where we sit.

The wine is the reason many people come, and it's what we know best. The region grows a wide aromatic variety of grapes on these hills, with Riesling as the signature. If you want to plan a proper wine day, we walk through it in our guide to Keuka Lake wineries — how to pick a route, when to book, and how to leave room to slow down.

But the Finger Lakes are more than tasting rooms. Watkins Glen State Park, at the south end of Seneca Lake, sends a stone trail up through a gorge and past a long run of waterfalls — it's roughly twenty minutes from our door. The Corning Museum of Glass, about the same distance the other way, draws visitors from around the world to watch glass being blown by hand. Both make a good half-day when you want a change from the vines.

Summer is the water season. The lakes warm up, the beaches fill, and the terraces come alive. It's the easiest time to visit — long days, everything open — and also the busiest, so book seated tastings ahead.

Fall is our favorite, and it's no secret. The hills turn color, the vineyards are picking, and the whole valley leans into harvest. It's also the peak of visitor season here. If autumn is your window, we get into the timing in our piece on fall foliage and harvest in the Finger Lakes.

Spring and winter are the quiet halves of the year. In spring, the snowmelt sends the waterfalls at Watkins Glen roaring, and the tasting rooms are calm enough for a real conversation. Winter is honest and slow — fewer guests, a fire going, and time to talk about the wines. We say more about picking your window in our guide to the best time to visit the Finger Lakes.

Here's the short version. Seneca is the deepest and has the longest wine trail, with plenty happening on both shores. Cayuga is the longest lake and home to the country's first organized wine trail, near Ithaca. Both are worth a day if you want range and variety.

Keuka is the one we call home, and it's the odd one out — the only Finger Lake shaped like a Y, branching into two arms around a central bluff. It's smaller and calmer than its neighbors, and the roads hug the water the whole way. For a lot of guests, that's the appeal: fewer stops, more shoreline, and an afternoon that doesn't feel rushed. Hammondsport, at the southern tip, makes a natural home base.

We're Céline and Sébastien LeSeurre — French winemakers who settled on the western hills above Keuka Lake and built a family winery here. Sébastien is the sixth generation of a winemaking family from Champagne, and we make our sparkling wines by the méthode champenoise, the slow, bottle-by-bottle way his family has worked for six generations. That's the short version of who we are: French roots, Finger Lakes soul.

If a Finger Lakes trip is taking shape, we'd love to be one of your Keuka stops. A seated tasting on the terrace is the best way to start — we'll walk you through the wines and the slope they grew on, with the lake right in front of you. You can find hours, directions, and what to expect on our visit page. We're open seven days a week, about twenty minutes from both Watkins Glen and Corning.

One quick note, since it comes up: we also have a separate place on Seneca Lake called 1487 Heritage. It's its own site and its own experience, a short drive from here — worth knowing about, but not to be confused with the winery above Keuka. This guide, and the tastings, are about our home on Keuka Lake.