Hofmann Vineyards

We are Karen and Charles Hofmann to owners of a couple of newly planted vineyards in the process of development. About 3 years ago we set out on an adventure to develop our own vineyard and small farm winery. Since the 1960s we have been going to wineries to test and purchase wines we liked. This actually started with us in Poughkeepsie, New York going to the west side of the Hudson River to a winery in Highland New York.  At that time we like many other young people had a liking for sweet wines and they made a Pink Catawba with a tasting room at Hudson Valley Winery. We alone with some of our friends spent many hours cruising up and down the Hudson River partying on the cruiser in the summer all enjoying the fruits of the vine. Over the years we gradually became more accustomed and desiring the much dryer European wines like Cabinet Sauvignon and Chardonnay. This continued into the 1980s as we went to more and more tasting rooms from New York to California and even some places like in Michigan. Then as business travel in the 1970s began to take us to Europe, especially Germany and Northern France we developed a taste for some of the wines more commonly served and for sure a much greater variety then we knew here. There one of the more common wines we grew to enjoy was Müller-Thrugau and eventually Riesling both white grapes. The Riesling wine which was served from quite sweet to very dry and to us had a bit of a sour apple taste that took a bit to get used to. We were also introduced to other more common wines like Müller-Thurgau and Gruner-Veltliner. Finally in the late 1990s we were introduced to Dornfelder produced by a small winery named the Besenwirtschaft Guggugsnecht on Professor-Hubbuch Strasse 21, 76703 Kraichtal. We would bring home a number of bottles on each trip until we found it being produced in the Finger Lakes wineries.