Living Roots Wine & Co. is a winery in both the Finger Lakes Region of New York (Hammondsport, Keuka Lake, Steuben County) and the Adelaide Hills region of South Australia. “Sixth generation winemaker and Adelaide native Sebastian and Rochester native Colleen Hardy make wines with regional and varietal expression, minimal inputs, and maximum quality.”
A new Tasting Room debuted one year ago with an incredible view of Keuka Lake and is located on the family’s Shale Creek Vineyard with an urban Tasting Room in Rochester.
“Some wines are made year-to-year while others are one-offs. Each vintage is an opportunity to explore new vineyards and varieties, and to highlight the terroir and natural strengths of these diverse regions.”
“The new Winery and Tasting Room in Hammondsport is located on the family’s Shale Creek Vineyard and features a large tasting bar, retail area, spacious indoor and outdoor seating, indoor fireplace and outdoor fire pits. The site is run on geothermal energy, solar panels and also offers working EV chargers.”
“The estate wines include Riesling, Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Cabernet Franc. Vinifera and hybrid varieties are sourced from other growers around the region. Their most popular wines from Australia are McLaren Valley Grenache, Adelaide Hills Shiraz and Red Blend.”
“Living Roots also offers a range of lower alcohol “Sessions” wines (7 to 10 % ABV), made with natural techniques and spanning from Session Sparkling White to Session Red.”
Proprietress Colleen Hardy joins us to uncork all that is Living Roots Wine & Co.
This is Ann Marie Panerinkin, Culture OC's food columnist. You can follow me online at cultureoc.org. When I want the best in food and dining news outside of Orange County, of course, I tune in to the SoCal Restaurant Show on AMA 30K LAA. Hey and welcome back. And actually Ann Marie Panerinkin will be with us in studio next week with her updates on all the comings and goings on the Orange County dining scene. It is the SoCal Restaurant Show and we're here with you every Saturday morning from 10 a.m. until 12 noon right here on AMA 30K LAA, the home of Angels Baseball 2024. I'm Andy Harris, the executive producer and co-host to the show. Glad to have you out there. And we're enthusiastically presented each and every week by Melissa's World Variety Produce and West Coast Prime Meats. As I've been mentioning the last couple of weeks earlier in the month, I was fortunate to be in the Finger Lakes area of New York for a week as the co-chair of the International Food, Wine, and Travel Writers Association's Annual Member Conference and had a chance to visit some of the spectacular wineries that are part of the Finger Lakes region. And they're well over a hundred. So again, you need to kind of pick and choose very carefully. But when my fellow conference co-chair and Wine Authority, Dave Nourshie, mentioned that on a pre-trip, he had mentioned or visited the Living Roots Wine & Company. Their estate and their new tasting room is in Hammond's port. That's Cucalake in Steuben County. But they also have an urban winery in tasting room in Rochester. And I started doing a little research on them and found out it's a husband and wife team. And not only do they do estate wines from the Finger Lakes, but they also have some spectacular wines from the Adelaide Hills region of South Australia. And I knew I had to get there and I was lucky enough to have a tasting with their cone, or Colleen Hardy, who is, you know, wonderfully enthusiastic, knowledgeable, very hospitable, and of course had to get her on the show. So part in the lengthy introduction, Colleen, but it is a pleasure to welcome you to the SoCal restaurant show. Thank you so much, so that was a lovely introduction. I appreciate it. Well, Colleen, now you have to give us a little bit of a back story about where you grew up and where your husband Sebastian grew up. We sort of gave it away a little bit, but also how did you meet? Because you didn't meet in Hammond's port? No, yes, it is a little bit. I don't know. We're very lucky that our pads crossed in the way that they did, but I grew up in Rochester, New York. So, you know, I spent first 18 years of my life in upstate New York, and you know, obviously being underage at that point really didn't know anything about the wine scene, but we would go and visit the Finger Lakes for, you know, maybe some walks, or whatever, skiing, that sort of thing. And it's a really beautiful region, so I always... Yeah, no kidding on that, Colleen. Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, so just, you know, always was... Yeah, appreciated that side of it, but yeah, it was not incredibly aware of all the things happening on the wine scene. And I left, you know, went to school at Michigan State, studied marketing, moved to Chicago, but at that time, you know, once I started enjoying some glasses of wine, and you know, I was really interested in it just as, you know, as a consumer. And while I was in marketing, you know, my clients were big food manufacturers, but I had friends whose clients were on the alcohol side. So, you know, my friend had a beer, big beer company as their client. Another one worked for a big, you know, sort of more bourbon, distillery client. And just chatting about our projects and our work. And I'm like, that sounds a lot more fun than processed cheese, but it was my main account. And so, you know, I was interested in wine and thought maybe that's an industry that I'd like to pursue. And I also was getting a little bit antsy sitting in a cubicle every day. I couldn't really imagine doing that for the rest of my career. So, I started just, you know, reading books about wine, wanting to learn a little bit more about it. Took an online course through UC Davis that sort of was in sort of wine and wine making. And, you know, really decided this is something I want to pursue. And I just was really itching for a change. And so, I wanted to go, you know, get a hands-on job, learn more about wine making, and kind of the industry. And also, I wanted to get a break from just staring at a computer all day. So, I decided, you know, I'm going to just jump right in and go try to work a harvest somewhere. And just kind of get that experience under my belt so that I'm a lot more knowledgeable about it, you know, if I kind of go back to the marketing side. But it was August when I sort of came to this conclusion that that was my next move. And so, it was just too late to, you know, up and move out of Chicago, find a job for harvest that, you know, was already beginning in California or the Finger Lakes. So, I basically decided rather than wait a whole year, which I couldn't really imagine doing, I would try to find something in this other hemisphere. So, I had never really done, like, a gap year or a study abroad semester. And I just felt like, you know, maybe this was a chance to have, you know, 23 when I made the decision, 24 when I went. And so, I just felt like, you know, it was a good opportunity to have an adventure and also, you know, learn a lot at the same time. And so, that's kind of what got me over to Australia. So, ended up getting a job as just a, you know, harvest cellar hand for the season in the Clare and Val at a winery called Party's Tintara. And that was kind of a small world story, just how I got that job. Because Constellation Brands, which is, you know, huge and owns tons of, you know, household name brands in alcohol business, they at one point owned this winery party's. And so, kind of a Rochester connection was able to do, you know, an intro for me with someone over there. And anyway, so I was really fortunate that even without experience, I was able to go over. And it was a great learning experience. You know, it's a bigger winery, but that actually, I think, was a good thing for learning, being so green because it is pretty structured. They had their, like, 19 cellar hands just for the season. So, I wasn't in it alone. And, you know, I lived with four other cellar hands that were working there that season. So, that was a really great experience just in and of itself. And pretty quickly, when I got there, it was actually kind of a weird story, but I was talking with one of my housemates and sort of just chit-chatting, you know, like, "Yeah, so, you know, I need cute. She was American, but had been in Adelaide for, I think, like a year or so." So I was like, "Oh, you know, if you might need cute aussies," like, just kind of making small talk. But she was like, "Eh, I haven't met anyone for me, but let me think if there's anyone that, you know, I think you had hit it off with." And she actually pulled up Seb's Facebook and was like, you know, "This guy Seb, I think he's really hit it off with blah, blah, blah." And I kind of was just like, "Oh, whatever." Like, you know, I wasn't taking it seriously because we were about to start Hardness, which was like 12, you know, 12 hour shifts. You were either 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. or night shift, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and, you know, you'd work like 10 days in a row, have a day or two often and work another 10. So it was just, you know, the two and 10 actually meeting. But yeah, the chance of us meeting was slim. So I kind of was like, "Oh, yeah, you're cute," whatever. And then, but we go to the grocery store, like, I don't know, maybe within a week, we went to the grocery store. And I'm like, "Saw this guy." And I'm thinking, "Why does he look so familiar to me?" And then my roommate is like, "Oh, Seb!" Like, you know, "Great to see you," whatever. And I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, I had to talk this guy." Like, "Okay." But we ended up kind of running into each other at a few different industry events. And then I think I actually messaged him on Facebook. And we should mention, Colleen, that Sebastian is a sixth generation winemaker and an Adelaide native. So, you know, what a wonderful combination of circumstances. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was a crazy thing, too, is like, you know, just me kind of ending up over there, getting, you know, a job, our paths crossing. But yeah, so whereas I was so new to the industry, Seb, you know, was sixth generation winemaker and not just any wine family, but his great, great, great grandfather had found it hearty. So where I was working, you know, that's not really how we met, because he had worked the previous harvest, not the season I was working. But, yeah, of all of the wineries, like, I ended up working at this winery that his family has this, you know, huge legacy with. And they ended up having to go public in the 90s when the state bank of South Australia collapsed. And it was, you know, really devastating for the family to have to do that. But that's how, at some point, you know, consolation had hands in it. And so it's all this, like, really crazy web connection. But wonderful. Now, before we need to take our first break and pick up the conversation and come back, the estate vineyard that you have in Stu Ben County is the Schill Creek Vineyard. How did your family happen to acquire that property? Yeah, so another weird sort of, you know, coincidence in a way is while I was getting into wine and reading books and all that sort of stuff, my dad was kind of going through a similar, I don't know, journey with learning more about wine. And he was kind of nearing retirement from his telecommunications career but was not, you know, he's not one to slow down. And so we had been passing books back and forth and kind of both getting more into wine. And this property had been on the market for a couple of years. And, you know, he saw how beautiful it was. The view is one of the best in the region. And it had vines on it but it definitely was a fixer upper. It needed a lot of work but it was also a bargain. And so he sort of thought, well, you know, maybe this could be a, you know, retirement project or maybe we fix it up and, you know, sell it to someone else or whatever, but someone should be doing something with this piece of land because it's really special. And so they actually closed on that while I was doing that harvest at Hardee. So it was all kind of happening around the same time. Quite amazing. Yeah. Pretty crazy. Colleen, what we need to do is take a short pause here, come back and pick up the conversation. Then we need to talk about the year anniversary of this wonderful tasting room that you built on the Shale Creek vineyard site. And then of course, we do need to talk about the wine. So hang in there. We are speaking with the co-owner of Living Roots Wine & Company in the Finger Lakes region of New York, Colleen Hardy. We're going to pick up the conversation on the other side. It is the SoCal restaurant shell. We're proudly presented by Melissa's World Variety Proteus. Give us a couple minutes and we'll be back.
