So, our summer officially ended on the day after Labor Day, Tuesday the 8th. Lake George’s season is typically defined as memorial day weekend to labor day weekend. It’s marked for us by our change of hours. We were open every day 10am – 10pm during the summer and it was not uncommon to close even later than that. My husband, Mike worked every single one of those days this summer, staying the entire 13+ hours for four days of the week – I would reprieve him on Thursdays and Sundays and on Wednesdays, we were lucky enough to have one of our trustworthy employees close for us so we could have family time with our daughter.
While many Lake George business are already fully closed and most left remaining will stay open through October, Adirondack Winery stays open year round. However, we’ve scaled back our hours – now we’re open Monday – Thursday 11am – 7pm and Fri-Say 11am – 9pm. I think we’ll scale back those hours more come January.
So, the summer recap – let’s see. We loved seeing so many faces from last year that we remembered, however, there was definitely a ton of new customers walking through our doors this season as well; which we know we can thank a lot of our loyal customers for. We had plenty of people tell us that friends or family told them to visit us, or they tried our wine at a party, or got it as a gift from someone.
I think all of our customers really appreciated that we managed to keep nearly all our wines in stock this summer, too! We had all 30+ of our wine varietals available to taste and buy nearly all season. Strawberry Riesling (Strawsling) ran out for just a short bit, as we were totally caught by surprise that it became our best selling wine this season – last year our Blueberry Shiraz was at the top of the list, so we expected that again, but strawberry emerged as the front runner. Our award winning Chardonnay was the favorite white and our award winning Pinot Noir was the favorite red. We are out (for now) of our Winter Concerto white chocolate port, which ended up the front running dessert wine this year!
It did rain a lot this year, however, in most cases, that meant that many customers forgo their outdoor activities in favor of a trip to the winery. It rarely got unbearably hot this summer, too, which was a plus.
I don’t know if all the talk about “staycations” and the Today’s Show’s Lake George spotlight possibly boosted the number of people visiting Lake George this year, but we certainly saw more people coming through our doors. Also, you could tell people were relieved to get away this summer and while still spending conservatively, definitely let their hair down a bit and took a reprieve from the recession. We only hope the economy is out of the woods by early next year.
However, keep in mind there’s still plenty reasons to visit Lake George in these next few months! This weekend is the Adirondack Nationals Car Show, Next Weekend is the Lake George Jazz Festival, the weekend after that is the fabulous Adirondack Balloon Festival with the yummy Taste of the North Country on Sunday. Then in October, the first weekend is the can’t miss Country’s largest garage sale in Warrensburg. Soon after is Columbus Day weekend, which many of us enjoy getting off from work, and then its the perfect time to go “leaf peeping”.
After that, it will be time to Christmas Shop! Don’t forget you all voted us as the best place for wine and best place to shop for gifts on LakeGeorge.com this year — so we’re really hoping to see our customers remember not only our wines and gift certificates for those people in your life, but also our great selection of unique wine-related gifts.
So what’s next for Adirondack Winery? A few things:
– We’re moving some of our less popular wines to a limited availability list and we’re adding a new fruity wine to our list – to be announced soon. We also plan to have special holiday wines.
– We’ve run out of room in our current Lake George location to continue operating how we have been, so we are seriously looking at an expansion to make wine off-premises, which should give us more room in our Lake George location to double the size of the tasting bar and hopefully have some room for private parties as well.
– We’ll start holding events monthly again in October, likely every month through May. Hopefully we’ll have time this year to do some outside wine tasting events as well.
–We’re offering custom holiday wine labels to customers this year — it’s a really neat Christmas / Hanukkah gift idea for your friends or family, as well as for clients, employees, or co-workers.
–We’re trying hard to get liquor stores near our customers to carry our wines. While it’s not easy by any means, I think we’ll get there little by little.
–We’re continuing to try and get our wines into local area restaurants. This season, we secured the Log Jam, Davidson’s Brewery, Mama Riso’s, Adirondack Pub & Brewery, East Cove, Tamarack Inn, Olde Mill Cafe, and Dunham’s Bay Resort. Lake George Steamboat Company and the Boardwalk Restaurant continue to offer our wines as well. However, our efforts were definitely challenged – we still hope to get our wines into many more restaurants. We welcome your help!
- Send us your thoughts!
Sincerely,
Sasha
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o pleased that The Great Escape Lodge has shown their support of hard-working local small business by choosing us as the producer of their line of house wines. We’ve been working on this venture together for quite a while and the Great Escape Lodge staff has been a pleasure to work with,” said Michael Pardy, Adirondack Winery’s CEO and Wine-Maker.
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