Premium estate grown wines since 1986.
Enjoy premium estate grown wines in the Prejean Winery down-to-earth, friendly tasting room overlooking beautiful Seneca Lake. We offer old world varieties with a keen attention to quality and detail. Wines offered for tasting include well known varieties such as Riesling, Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc and Merlot, along with more unique varieties such as Gewurztraminer, Marechal Foch and Vignoles.
Picnic on our deck or grounds with sweeping views of Seneca Lake and the surrounding vineyards. The friendly owners and staff look forward to welcoming you.
Dogs Welcome!
We believe that furry friends are an extension of our family, so pets are welcome here! In September 2024, we opened a large, fenced-in area just for our four-legged friends (and their wine-loving owners!).
More Than Just Wine
We also know that wine isn’t all everyone drinks, so we do offer local craft beer on tap for your enjoyment.
The following essay might be too long a read for some, 800 or so words and if that is the case than you may skip ahead to the second to last paragraph to find the main point of the piece. I would hate to have you start this trip and then halfway through take an off ramp to a different destination. But I would also hate for you to start to read a few words and then redefine the piece as more noise than signal and cast it down into that blackhole abyss of TL/DR. There is nothing worse (and perhaps ironic) than to have so many words and paragraphs squeezed and compressed into the flatland world of an acronym.
So, knock yourself out, skip ahead to the main point but be warned, getting right to the point, is missing the point.
The Detour Back – an essay by Tom Prejean
There is a hill just a mile or so past Prejean Winery that slopes steeply downward to the north. The hill on the lakeside of the highway has one of the most magnificent views in all the Finger Lakes. On a clear day the view extends 17 miles to Geneva where I can see the wind turbines, their blades flashing in the sun, on the north edge of town. In the late Fall and early Spring I can see massive flocks of snow geese migrating to or from the Arctic. They must number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands because from this vantage they resemble an ice floe where you might imagine a polar bear, trundling about, hunting for a seal. Across the street is the City Hill Road and City Hill Cemetery where Jemima Wilkinson is buried. She was the leader of a religious movement that settled in the area in the early 1800s. If this is the actual City Hill, I do not know. But I can believe that a person who stood here back in those days, caught up in their fervor might think of the biblical City on the Hill and believe they are witnessing the hand of Divine creation.
There are days, unfortunately too few, on my twenty-minute drive home when I am awake to this majestic hill and its view. I see the magnificent beauty that tens of thousands of years and a mile thick glacier left behind pushing my imagination to its limits. Sometimes, if I focus intently farther away, across this cobalt blue water impastoed with white caps, the lake ebbs away into the past and I am suddenly looking back in time. I can see the glacier receding, leaving behind a canyon with dozens upon dozens of cascading streams flowing over waterfalls. On that hill I can hear Dire Wolves howling beneath a rising moon, their echoes haunting that river valley. I can see millions of years back when trilobites, nautiloids and bivalves rose from the deep on upwelling currents in an ancient, equatorial sea and then see their fossilized remains ascend from the depths of time on currents of earth heaved upward by millions of tons of ice.
But too many days I just drive on, slowing my speed as I descend because I know there is radar scanning about hunting for those speeding up the hill and those racing down. I am tangled up in the past day’s assessments, thinking about the day’s business. I am searching tomorrows and next weeks, doing a recon of the future and not realizing that there is always another bend just around the bend. And that bend is one long ass curve.
So, the to dos, the schedules, the bills to pay, the meetings to attend, the calls to make all whirl around me like a swarming cauldron of bats directing my eyes elsewhere. This lake, with its hundred fathoms of depth, that can take me on a voyage back in time 20,000 years to that wall of ice, is unseen. Seneca can carry me thousands of miles south, two million centuries past, back to that primordial sea, but most days I do not take that journey. All of this is walled up behind all of that day-to-day.
This is my routine commute. I am sure that I am not alone in this. Everyone is caught up in their own duties and responsibilities from time to time. That is quite normal. But as we all have discovered, normal ain’t what it used to be.
Normal crashed hard into a wall a year ago, and while we think we can knock out the dents and paint over the scuffs and scratches, if we take it for a spin, we’ll see that the frame is bent, and the ride is way too wobbly.
So, we replaced Normal with the New Normal which now has become just plain Normal and while the old Normal which was Normal, may come back, the new Normal might have to be changed out for a newer, new Normal so that the new Normal which replaced the old new Normal is now Normal.
I think the hardest part is how do we find our way back out of this Abbott and Costello routine. Talk about a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
Anyway, the point of all this is to say that we are back open for tastings. Back to normal but keeping a wary eye on it.
And yes, I could have come to that point sooner and not have made you travel along this bumpy road of syllables and clauses or the most recent off-road jaunt into gibbering non-sequiturs, but it might be good for us to take a few detours along backroads every now and then. It may take longer to get to our destination, but we just might see so much more.
March 2021, Tom Prejean, Owner, Prejean Winery
At Prejean Winery, we honor the tradition of winemaking that has been handed down for almost a thousand years. Prejean Winery grows grape varieties that originated in Europe; such as Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Riesling, Gewurztraminer, and Chardonnay. Our Gewurztraminer, planted in 1979, is a mouthful in more ways than one.
Prejean Winery’s 2020 Semi-Dry Gewurztraminer was awarded a gold medal and BEST OF CLASS in the 2022 New York Wine Classic.
At Prejean Winery, we honor the tradition of winemaking. Visit our friendly and knowledgeable staff and taste our award-winning wines today.
$10.00 to taste five (5) wines, refundable on a 4-bottle purchase. We are currently offering tastings on a first come, first serve basis for groups of six (6) or less. Groups of 7 – 10 please call first. Tastings are conducted in our Tasting Room (air-conditioned in warm weather), as well as on our porch and in our garden areas (weather permitting). Prejean Winery also offers wine by the glass or bottle, local craft beer for tasting or by the pint and snacks. To contact us, please call (315) 536-7524.
The Seneca Lake Wine Trail is easily accessible and convenient to get to! Whether you are a New Yorker coming in for the day or traveling from farther away, we are an experience you won’t want to miss!
(877) 536-2717 • info@senecalakewine.com
PO Box 437
Watkins Glen, NY 14891
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