Experience the quiet, peaceful beauty of South Dominion by visiting our tasting room and vineyard.

Indulge yourself in our wines paired with delicious savory bites, artisan cheeses, and handcrafted chocolates. Enhance your tasting experience as you relax outside on the patio with a glass of your favorite wine.

As September arrives, so does the time for bottling the wine that has been in the works all year. Thanks to a much-needed Food Safety Modernization Act grant from New York State Ag and Markets, South Dominion received funds to purchase a bottling line in 2020 – a huge boost to the time-consuming process of getting wine into bottles. An all-hands-on-deck affair, if all goes as planned, we can bottle all of the wine in a few days. Normally we aspire to get this done before the Washington County Fair, our big event of the season, but in any case, the wine has to get out of the tanks and into the bottles so as to make room for the upcoming harvest!

Preparing for harvest involves a lot of behind-the-scenes work, from ensuring our equipment is ready after the winter to cleaning the lugs used to collect the grapes. We also carefully monitor the sugar (brix), Titratable acidity (TA) and PH levels of each grape variety to decide the optimal time for harvesting.

Our summer temperatures this year were way above the 5-year average and at the beginning of August we were anticipating being ready to harvest by the beginning of September. However, August was significantly cooler than normal and we lost ground on ripening. It now looks like the third week in September will be peak harvest as long as the weather meets the daily 5-year average during September. Once the grapes reach full ripeness, our team will embark on the intense process of hand-picking and processing the grapes – typically demanding 12–16-hour days daily. Each variety is carefully harvested, weighed, and then crushed and destemmed. For red wines, the crushed grapes (known as “must”) are left to ferment in tubs for about a week, converting the sugars into alcohol. White wines, on the other hand, are pressed immediately after crushing to separate the juice from the skins and seeds, resulting in a crisp, clean flavor.

Harvest this year has the potential of being one of our largest yet. In contrast to producing only 15% of our normal crop following last year’s May freeze, yields this year appear to be quite high with the exceptionally warm weather, allowing for the grapes to reach full ripeness. The 2024 vintage promises to be excellent with wine in 2025 to be of the highest quality.