Hermann J. Wiemer is the founder of Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard, a winery specializing in Rieslings in Dundee, New York.
Early life and education
Wiemer was born in Bernkastel-Wittlich, Germany and raised in Bernkastel-Kues. His mother's family has been growing grapes for three centuries, and his father, Eduard, worked for the Geisenheim Grape Breeding Institute (commonly called the Geisenheim Institute) and was the director for a grafting experimental station in Bernkastel. As a grafting expert, Eduard taught his son how to graft Mosel Rieslings onto American rootstock, and Wiemer learned how to clone grape vines at 14. As the only son, he spent a lot of his youth "pulling weeds and pruning" while his schoolmates were playing soccer. While Wiemer was in high school, he worked for two years in Deidisheim, in the Rhine Valley, working in vineyards as a kind of college prep course.
He studied oenology at the Geisenheim Institute.
Early years in New York
In 1965, Wiemer moved to Conesus, New York, for a year where he worked for St. Michel's Seminary and its winemaker, Leo Goering, a 1922 graduate of Geisenheim. There his job was to add 20 acres of European grapes grafted onto American rootstock to the O-Neh-da Vineyard on the west side of Hemlock Lake, one of the eleven Finger Lakes. After gaining experience from his German mentor and learning some English, he returned to Germany. Then Dr. Helmut Becker, the renowned viticulturist who had been his professor at Geisenheim, introduced him to Walter Taylor of Bully Hill Vineyards while Taylor was traveling in Germany. In 1968 Taylor hired him as a winemaker, and Wiemer relocated to Hammondsport on the southwest side of Canandaigua Lake. He helped in the vineyard and in winemaking as Taylor prepared to establish his Bully Hill Vineyards in 1970, but Wiemer was never the fan of French-American hybrid grapes that Taylor was. Wiemer met Dr. Konstantin Frank, the Ukrainian-born winemaker who opened his Vinifera Wine Cellars winery in 1962 just four miles (six kilometers) north of Bully Hill. Dr. Frank had written his thesis on how to grow Vitis vinifera (the scientific name for European grapes) in cold climates and was proving it could be done in Hammondsport. Frank believed that the reason vinifera grapes had not survived the freezing New York winters was because they had not been grafted onto suitable American rootstock.
Seeing Dr. Frank's success with grafted vinifera grapes encouraged Wiemer's interest in growing vinifera on American rootstock in New York. He was also encouraged by the peach and black cherry trees in the area because Germans believed that where those trees grow, so could European grapes. He chose an abandoned farm in Dundee, a village on the west side of Seneca Lake in 1973. The 140-acre (57-hectare) parcel had been a soybean farm and came with a house from the 1880s and a "new" barn from the 1930s. That same year, he began to plant vinifera (Chardonnay, Riesling, and Gewurztraminer), despite local experts claiming that European grapevines could never grow on Seneca Lake because of the cold New York winters. He expanded the blocks in 1978 to a full nine acres of Riesling and another nine acres of Chardonnay.
Wiemer also established a nursery on his new land, where he grafted vinifera scions (the upper part of a grafted plant) onto American rootstock. At the time, he was able to import the vines from Europe. His first customers were from New York and the east coast, but he soon expanded to Michigan, Texas, and all the way to California. The nursery and his job at Bully Hill gave him the income he needed to continue investing in his vineyard to make it a success.
Establishing Hermann J. Wiemer Vineyard
With a thriving nursery, Wiemer turned to establishing a winery, and the timing was perfect because New York had just passed the Farm Winery Act in June 1976, allowing growers of small vineyards to produce and sell wines in tasting rooms on their farms. Before the law was passed, there were only 19 wineries in the state, and there were none on Seneca Lake. Two years later in 1979, he officially established his eponymous winery when he produced his first vintage of 900 cases of two wines. He submitted samples of both to the New York State Fair wine competition in 1980, and his 1979 Chardonnay won gold in the newly established vinifera category, while his 1979 dry Riesling won the bronze. The New York Times wrote a favorable article about him and his new winery in November of that year, saying that he was "proving ... that European varietals can be produced successfully here" in New York and that he was "the leading advocate of cultivating European varietals."