It was a cool April day in 1973 as John and Ann Martini drove down New York’s Route 14 in their Pontiac LeMans with their two small kids. At a remote stretch of rural Penn Yan they turned left onto Anthony Road, but not for its sweeping views of Seneca Lake. John, thirty-one, had just quit his job at a chemical company in Baltimore after a banker friend suggested a radical career change: “Why don’t you grow grapes?”

“Well, we knew nothing about farming or growing grapes,” John, now eighty-three, recalls with a laugh. “So that’s exactly what we did.” Rumpled, white-haired, and manifestly unsnobbish, he’s seated at a table in the elegantly understated tasting room of his family’s acclaimed Anthony Road Winery. It’s a sunny afternoon in the waning days of summer, and at adjacent tables seventeen patrons are sampling some of the best wines made in New York State. “This is one of our favorite wineries,” says Dan Breckenridge, a welding supply salesman from Aurora, New York. “The wines are delicious and the people are great.” He and his wife make it a point, he says, to visit at least once a year, usually with friends.

“We’re dry red people,” explains his wife, Nancy. Today, after sharing two tasting flights while gazing out on the slate-blue lake, they’re heading home with three bottles: a Cabernet Franc, a Lemberger, and, their favorite, a Cabernet Franc-Lemberger blend.

“There’s a lot of fun in that bottle,” says Dan, sixty-three.

The Martinis currently bottle 10,000 cases annually and ship to thirty-nine states. About sixty percent of their sales is wholesale, with the rest sold more profitably out of the tasting room.

The thing is, none of this was supposed to happen. Five decades ago—when all of New York boasted just eighteen wineries—John and Ann rarely drank wine and had no intention of launching the nineteenth. Growing grapes had appealed simply because Ann’s parents lived ten miles up the road in Geneva. And the giant Taylor Wine Company in Hammondsport was paying good money for the grapes it turned into the sweet, fortified ports and wines then popular across America.

“My philosophy has always been ‘try something,’” John explains with a shrug, though eldest daughter Sarah Eighmey, head of operations since 2013, offers a different explanation. “Dad can get talked into things very fast.”

“It’s been an interesting ride,” says John, though he concedes it’s lately turned bumpy. Consumption of fine wines and other alcoholic beverages is in marked decline, especially among younger adults turning to cannabis or drinking less for health reasons. In July the percentage of U.S. adults who drink alcohol fell to fifty-four percent, the lowest since Prohibition.

Nevertheless, today all four of the Martini children are active in the operation. In addition to Sarah, son Peter is vineyard master, Liz runs the tasting room, and Maeve is office manager. Several spouses and grandchildren also take part.

“Every day I try to figure out how much we have to make to support the families and staff under this umbrella,” says Sarah. Sales of Anthony Road wines are down six percent over last year, and this sunny tasting room, with its soaring ceiling and sleek rosewood tables, is seeing about 200 fewer patrons each month than in 2024.

“But I think the wine industry goes like this,” she says, and makes an undulating, wave-like gesture with her hand. “We’re in a down phase now, but I think positively—that there’s going to be an up—and that we’ll ride the wave. But we’re not going to chase wine in a can or box wine….We’re staying true to who we are and what we’ve been.”

And how many different wines do they now make? She thinks for a moment, reaches for a tasting menu, and starts counting off the offerings: sparkling riesling…unoaked chardonnay…pinot blanc…skin fermented pinot gris…barrel fermented gewurztraminer…rosé of cabernet franc…pinot noir…lemberger…“Thirty,” she tallies, and laughs. “Too much.”

Perhaps. But their winemaker, Peter Becraft, is “proud of them all.” He strives to “create wines that are balanced,” he says, and an “expression of our site.” He began as a vineyard worker here nineteen years ago, then apprenticed for six years in the cellar under his predecessor. “I’m lucky because I have the luxury of estate-grown grapes. So it allows you to really understand the place.”

Dry riesling and the rosé of cabernet franc are their top sellers, followed by pinot gris and cabernet franc. Their 2022 dry riesling—which Peter’s notes describe as tasting of “ripe fruit, lemon, peach, and honeysuckle”—was rated a 92 by Wine & Spirits magazine and a 93 by wine critic James Suckling. He also gave a 92 to their rosé of cabernet franc (“cherry floral, herb, watermelon, and nectarine”) which Wine Spectator rated 87.

Danielle Kane, a Rochester native now living outside Frankfurt, Germany, pronounced them “very good” on a recent visit as she sampled flights with a friend. “I appreciate dry wines. These meet the German wine region expectations...It was worth the drive.”

The Road More Traveled

That farmland the Martinis visited in 1973 had never grown grapes, but the soil was of a type known as honeyoye, high in lime, well drained, ideal for grapes. The climate was moderated, too, by the presence of Seneca Lake two-thirds of a mile away. And so, with a five thousand dollar loan from his father, they bought a hundred acres—unaware the location of their Martini Vineyards had linked them to an epic moment in American history.

They wouldn't remain unaware for long.

On the night of February 15, 1898, the US battleship Maine was docked in Havana Harbor when an enormous explosion ripped off its bow. The sinking ship was instantly plunged into darkness, forcing its captain, Charles Sigsbee, to feel his way out of his cabin toward the quarterdeck.

But as he groped blindly down a rapidly tilting passageway filled with smoke he collided with someone coming towards him. Private William Anthony had rushed into the ship to inform his captain that their ship had been “blown up,” and escorted him to safety. Both survived, but two hundred and sixty crew died that day. Believing it to be sabotage, America declared war on Spain.

Captain Sigsbee never forgot Anthony’s “soldierly conduct.” Instead of fleeing to safety on that “dangerous occasion,” the forty-five-year old had chosen to “fulfill…the precise duties of his position,” he wrote to the Secretary of Navy, and recommended Anthony’s promotion to sergeant.

Hailed as “the nation’s hero,” Anthony fought in the Spanish-American War aboard another ship, retired with the rank of sergeant-major, and died in New York City the following year. The Navy would name two destroyers for him, and Penn Yan would name a road for him.

John and Ann—who could relate to Anthony’s plunge into the unknown—would one day name their winery in his honor.

Grateful for Grapes

The vicissitudes of farming, meanwhile, would reveal themselves almost as soon as John and Ann rolled a repossessed, three-bedroom trailer—with no plumbing or electricity—onto their then-houseless property. Grape seedlings take two to three years to mature into fruit-bearing vines, they discovered, and that meant John—a trained chemist—would have to find some other source of income.

And so, as he started testing animal feeds and fertilizers for the New York State Agriculture Experiment Station at Cornell, Ann began the laborious task of hand-planting five acres of the red grape variety known as marechal foch for which Taylor Wine Company had contracted. “Nine feet between rows,” he recalls, “and six feet between the vines.”

The future of grape growing looked bright back then. Taylor was the sixth largest winemaker in the country, and public thirst for their sweet wines seemed unquenchable. Best of all, Taylor paid well, and soon—with the help of an automated planter—the Martinis were growing thirty acres of foch, aurora, seyval blanc, vignoles, and DeChaunac. These were French-American hybrid varietals to which the Taylor Company added abundant sugar to produce inexpensive wines high in alcohol.

“Cornell allowed us to make it week to week,” recalls Sarah, “and the grapes paid the mortgage” on the house they built.

Indeed, Taylor’s future looked so bright that the Coca-Cola Company bought it in 1977—only to discover that the public’s appetite for their sweet, syrupy wines was drying up. As sales tumbled, Taylor was forced to scale back grape buying, and grapes that once sold for four hundred dollars per ton now fetched just a hundred. By the early eighties, dozens of Finger Lakes growers who’d relied on Taylor were plowing under their vines or scrambling for new markets.

Ann, by now the mother of four, found herself driving grapes to the wineries at the far end of Long Island—a seven hundred-mile round trip—and selling juice to home winemakers who knocked at their door.

“There was a lot of stress and strain in those days. I can remember my mother having to stretch twenty-five dollars to feed a family of six,” says Sarah. “But they weren’t the type of people who gave up.” And wine growing in the Finger Lakes was undergoing a sea change thanks to the vision and persistence of one man.

Dr. Frank

For more than a century, Finger Lakes winemakers had supposed the region too cool to grow the superior vinifera grapes of Europe like chardonnay, riesling, gewurztraminer, pinot noir, and cabernet sauvignon—hence their reliance on budget-friendly sweet wines.

Then, in the 1950s, a young viticulturalist from Ukraine arrived on the scene. Dr. Konstantin Frank had grown vinifera grapes in regions of the Soviet Union far colder than upstate New York, and was emphatic they would prosper here. He was greeted with much skepticism until Gold Seal winery invited him in 1958 to grow a demonstration crop. It met with such success that in 1962 Dr. Frank launched his own winery on Keuka Lake—and with it a wine revolution in New York State that would gradually topple the Taylor Wine Company.

“If Taylor had not failed,” says John, “this industry would not be here the way it is. You either got out or you got deeper.”

And the Martinis might have walked away in these difficult times had not their friend Scott Osborne, owner of nearby Fox Run Winery, mentioned in 1987 he had 1,500 riesling “sticks,” or seedlings, that he could not use. Did John and Ann want any? A few of their Seneca Lake neighbors, including the Hermann J. Wiemer winery, had just begun making riesling with notable success. The Martinis took all Scott had to offer.

“It was a really good decision,” says John. “They grew beautifully. Rieslings would go on to take Finger Lakes wines out to the world—to establish our reputation.” In short order they began planting more vinifera grapes, like chardonnay, pinot gris, cabernet franc, and pinot noir. Their biggest leap would come in 1989, as John sat at a local tavern with his friend Derek Wilber, a young winemaker then working at Widmers Wine Cellars on Canandaigua Lake.

“Over a beer in a bar is always a good place to make a life-changing decision,” John jokes. “But Derek knew how to make good wine and put it in a bottle. So I said, ‘Why don’t we start a winery?’ And that’s what we did.”

A Little Labor Intensive

Their first “cellar” was a renovated machine shop, where they parked four oval, stainless tanks from a scrapyard in Newark, New Jersey, that once held fragrances for Colgate-Palmolive. That fall, with a few hired hands, Ann helped pick twenty tons of grapes. She then crushed them with a hand-cranked apple press, layering the grapes between cheesecloth and squeezing the juice into tubs underneath.

“It’s fun to talk about now, but wow…” says John. “I used to tell her she should have stuck with her first boyfriend.”

Ann shakes her head fondly at the memories. “I would take the cheesecloth to a laundromat at night so no one would see me.”

She still helps out in the tasting room as needed. She and Derek earned little or nothing those first years—their employed spouses brought home the only paychecks—but not for lack of labor. In addition to tying and pruning vines with whatever help she could find, Ann was also head of sales, this in the days before the internet, email, and cell phones. She drove around the region with sample bottles, cold-calling wine stores.

“She’d look them up in the Yellow Pages,” Sarah recalls.

They produced 2,000 cases in 1990, with grand visions of one day reaching 70,000. But in thirty-five years they’ve never produced more than 20,000, and even that was a challenge.

“It’s one thing to produce that much,” explains Sarah, “but then you’ve got to sell it.”

Changing Tastes

With Finger Lakes wines enjoying newfound prestige, new wineries sprouting like weeds, and “wine trails” forming around Cayuga, Seneca, Keuka, and Canandaigua Lakes, tourists became an increasingly important source of revenue for Anthony Road and others.

“In the early days nobody charged for their tasting bars,” says Liz, who manages the tasting room. “You’d have a tasting sheet, and some people would take their time” to savor. But then began the tour buses, whose passengers were often out for the free wine. “People would just sit at the bar and stick their glass out. It really took away from what we were trying to do.”

Despite growing recognition of their wines’ quality, it was an unpretentious, semi-sweet wine called Tony’s Red, initially selling for six bucks, that originally proved their biggest source of revenue. In that first decade they also started a distribution company, Finger Lakes Premium Wines—essentially a cooperative—that marketed the wines of a half-dozen wineries before it was bought out by Opici, a leading wine distributor.

“So we did OK. We never went on food stamps,” says John, who quit working for Cornell’s Experiment Station in 1998. That freed him to take an ever-expanding role representing the region’s wineries and grape growers in Albany and Washington, DC.

“I didn’t lobby,” he says with a wink. “I educated.” He would become president of both the New York State Wine Grape Growers Association and the Wine Grapegrowers of America, chairman of National Grape and Wine Initiative, and serve on the boards of numerous other trade associations. It’s a testimony to his efforts and influence that in August, 1984, Governor Mario Cuomo signed legislation at Anthony Road legalizing the sale of wine coolers in food stores, and in 2013, Governor Anthony Cuomo came to sign legislation easing regulations for the state’s farm wineries. In 2022 the New York Wine and Grape Foundation honored John with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1999 their son Peter, who’d been working in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as an auto technician, returned to take over as head of Martini Vineyards, the family’s thirty-five acre grape-growing side of the business. One year later Derek decided to move on to Swedish Hill Winery on Cayuga Lake, so the Martinis had to find a new winemaker. But it wasn’t going to be John. “I’d made some good wines, but I just don’t have the attention to detail,” he admits. “My brain is always somewhere else.”

So they turned their attention to an accomplished young winemaker, Johannes Reinhardt, whose family had been making wines in Bavaria for six hundred years. He’d worked in the Finger Lakes for several years but was back in Germany when John called to see if he might consider joining Anthony Road.

“We never talked about how he made wine, just our philosophies of life,” John recalls, “and he said ‘I’ll do it.’...By now Peter was learning to grow better, and we had cabernet franc and lemberger and pinot gris, and Johannes was blending this with that, trying to produce the best.”

Johannes and other winemakers would meet periodically to sample one another’s work, asking “Why did you go with this? What if you did that?’” John remembers. “It was a rising tide thing: Anything you could do to improve the region’s reputation was a plus for everybody…Johannes changed us and helped change the Finger Lakes.”

After training his apprentice, Peter Becraft, to take over—Johannes had put him in charge of chardonnay one year, three wines the next, and six the year after—Johannes left Anthony Road to start his own winery, Kemmeter Wines in 2013, on a property adjacent to theirs. “The respect, trust and love the Martinis showed me was simply remarkable,” he says on his website.

The covid pandemic forced, or mercifully allowed, wineries to restrict crowd sizes at their tasting rooms, and that’s when the Martinis replaced the bars and barstools with tables and chairs. “We still get a lot of boomers, but they’re passing,” says Sarah. “And while we see a lot of women in their forties, we’re not seeing so many of the twenty-somethings.”

And those they do see are “not so loyal to one brand. They want to experiment. They want things a little quirky or different, like a skin-fermented pinot gris. So we try to meet those tastes.”

But Anthony Road’s future might well depend on John and Ann’s twelve grandchildren, for whom the vineyards and tasting room and cellars are a second home. “Our hope is the next generation, because I do want to retire some day,” says Sarah, sixty-five. “We all do, and we’ve earned it. We value what Mom and Dad did, but we don’t want to work that hard for our entire lives.”