Finger Lakes AVA
American Viticultural Area in New York
Finger Lakes is an American Viticultural Area (AVA) located in upstate New York, approximately 25 miles (40 km) south of Lake Ontario encompassing entirely 14 counties: Cayuga, Chemung, Cortland, Livingston, Monroe, Onondaga, Ontario, Schuyler, Seneca, Steuben, Tioga, Tompkins, Wayne and Yates counties. It was established as the nation's twentieth and New York's second appellation on September 1, 1982 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Treasury after reviewing the petition submitted by the Finger Lakes Wine Growers Association proposing a viticultural area named "Finger Lakes."
The "Finger Lakes Region" encompasses eleven lakes expanding about 5.4 million acres (8,400 sq mi) while the area around Canandaigua, Keuka, Seneca, and Cayuga Lakes is resident to the majority of vineyards. Cayuga and Seneca Lakes were established as sub-appellations, in 1988 and 2003, respectively, based on their unique terroir due to "lake effect." As of 2014, 130 wineries, 9,393 acres (3,801 ha) of vineyards harvesting 54,600 tons of grapes annually making Finger Lakes by far the largest and most productive wine region in the Empire State. About 80 percent of the state's wine production is sourced from Finger Lakes.
History
The Finger Lakes were all carved out by glacial drifts during the ice age. The indigenous Seneca, a group of Iroquoian-speaking people who lived in the region hundreds of years ago were the first to utilize the microclimates created by the lakes varying water temperatures planting fruit crops which flourished. Iroquois legends proclaim the lakes to be the fingers of the Great Spirit and had Seneca names, i.e., Cayuga "People of the great swamp," Seneca "Stoney place," Keuka "Lake with an elbow" and Canandaigua "Chosen spot."
Viticulture in the Finger Lakes Region began in 1829, when William Warner Bostwick, an Episcopal minister in Hammondsport, received some Vitis labrusca vine-shoots from his father-in-law in Massachusetts. Bostwick planted them in his rectory garden in Hammondsport on the southern tip of Keuka Lake. He distributed Catawba and Isabella grapes cuttings to parishioners and soon offshoots from his vineyards spread throughout the region. Commercial viticulture officially began in 1862, when the Hammondsport and Pleasant Valley Wine Companies were founded.
“Finger Lakes AVA” enters the record as american Viticultural Area in New York. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Finger, Lakes and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5450198. Authority coordinates are 42.700, -77.000. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1988, 2003 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Finger Lakes AVA” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.