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Lakewood Vineyards Completes Fifth Expansion

Glass-walled tank room creates new façade for the Finger Lakes winery

by Linda Jones McKee Watkins Glen, N.Y.—When wine tourists drive north from Watkins Glen, N.Y., on the west side of Lake Seneca, one of the first wineries they come to is Lakewood Vineyards. For the past 28 years, the winery has looked something like a gray warehouse with an office and tasting room on the south end.
 
This summer Lakewood Vineyards changed its look.

The Stamp family, owners of the winery, expanded their tank room and sought to enhance the aesthetics of the building. “This latest addition wasn’t just to add tank space, Chris Stamp, Lakewood’s president and winemaker, told Wines & Vines. “It was part of a bigger effort to improve our curb appeal, something that’s more of an afterthought for us farmer types.”

The result is a new 30-foot by 54-foot (1,620 square feet) production space with a vaulted ceiling and floor-to-roof windows. The tall tanks allow for better use of the floor space but also create a grander view from the road and for visitors as they follow the path from the expanded parking lot to a new entrance to the tasting room.  A total of 21 custom-built windows comprise two-thirds of the west-facing wall of the addition and wrap around part of the southern wall. Inside, five-2,500 gallon tanks made by Vance Metal in Geneva, N.Y., are currently in place in the new tank room; three more are on order, and there is room for a total of 12 tanks.

“We wanted to improve the exterior appeal of the winery and make it noticed from the road,” Stamp said. “It’s had the right effect, as our customer counts have been up this summer.”

The Stamps also added a parking lot and a garden area in front of the winery with four 30-foot Black River Birch trees, hundreds of perennial flowers and several park benches.

Twenty-eight years of expansion projects
When the family first built the winery in 1988, the production room measured approximately 28 feet by 28 feet (784 square feet). “It was also our warehouse the first few years. As we’ve expanded, it has been repurposed numerous times and is currently an overflow tasting room, used mostly for bus groups,” Stamp said. “In 1992 we built our first expansion, adding on an 1,800-square-foot tank room. At the time I recall saying to myself, ‘Oh my lord, we’ll never fill this room.’”

The next expansion in 1998 converted the 1992 addition into a warehouse and added a new tank room measuring 54 feet by 80 feet (4,320 square feet). Ten years later (in 2008), the 1992 addition was changed back into a tank room when the Stamps completed a 7,400-square-foot warehouse/bottling room and a 1,728-square-foot barrel room.

In 2012, a 2,590-square-foot press house was constructed. “The new press house allowed us to bring our entire pressing operation indoors,” Stamp noted, “as well as creating a small amount of additional tank space. When pressing season is over, we use this room for our counter-pressure bottling machine and two 1,200-gallon Brite/pressure tanks.”

The wine production space at Lakewood Vineyards now stands at 20,244 square feet. Stamp said the space allows Lakewood Vineyards currently to produce about 33,000 cases of wine, and he anticipates that they will make about 90,000 gallons (38,000 cases) during the 2016 harvest.

Second project for 2016: a 'compost compound'
With Lakewood Vineyards producing that volume of wine, the winery also generates between 130 and 140 tons of pomace each harvest. “Some might call pomace a waste product,” Stamp said, “but to us it’s a diamond in the rough. Loaded with nutrients vital to plant health, properly treated pomace is a fantastic enrichment to vineyard soil. We’ve always composted our pomace–it’s a no-brainer.”

However, a large volume of compost in one place is a potential pollution risk, and the compost pile wasn’t too far from a stream. While Lakewood hadn’t had a problem, the local soil and water district recommended that the Stamps build a containment facility to protect the compost from runoff during heavy rainstorms.

Aided by an 80% grant from the Schuyler County Soil and Water Conservation District, the Stamps designed and built what Stamp calls the Taj Mahal of composting facilities. The 6,000-square-foot "compost compound" cost $200,000 and features walls on three sides, a cement floor to prevent leaching, a forced-air system to cool and aerate the compost during decomposition and a roof to protect the compost from rainwater.

Dave Stamp, Chris Stamp’s brother and the vineyard manager and vice president of Lakewood Vineyards, said the building and grounds are complete and the forced-air system will be done in the next couple of months.

The next project?
When asked what’s next for Lakewood, Chris Stamp thought for a moment, then said:  “The tank room project this year will give us room for a while in the winery. The next project? Probably we’ll expand the tasting room. We won’t add a restaurant, and we don’t do weddings, but we could use more space for our customers.”

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