Every year in October, my husband and I celebrate our anniversary with a wine trip to the Finger Lakes in New York.

One thing we like about the Seneca Lake Wine Trail is that the tasting rooms on Seneca Lake are as varied as the types of wines. Some have just one small room with a single tasting bar, and others are huge buildings with several rooms and gift shops. When we go on our wine trip, we always like to check out any new wineries, and this year we found three new additions to the Seneca Lake Wine Trail.

The first was J.R. Dill, on the eastern side of Seneca Lake. The tasting room was bright and airy, with a beautiful tasting bar made with colorful Seneca Lake glass. I hate to admit it, but being an artist, I occasionally get drawn to wine bottles with interesting labels. That may be the reason we walked out with a bottle of Jabber Waulkie White, complete with a wine label boasting their own Seneca Lake Monster, the Jabber Waulkie, and a fun monster story to boot. The wine was a nice sweet Cayuga, tasting of peach, mango and tropical fruit.

A new addition to the western side of Seneca Lake was Magnus Ridge Winery, a huge, impressive-looking tasting facility decorated with gigantic metal chandeliers made from wine bottles. This winery had something no other on the wine trail had — seated tasting tables. Groups can go in separate rooms and sit down at tables to do their winetasting. With a beautiful pond and waterfall that can be seen through the back of the tasting room, this new winery is a work of art!

On the other end of the tasting room spectrum is Serenity Vineyards. Their tasting room is a plain building, housing winemaking equipment, with barrels and cardboard boxes stacked high. The tasting bar was nothing more than a piece of wood atop wooden wine barrels, decorated with visitors’ comments/signatures scrawled in markers. But luckily, we don’t judge wine by the tasting room. I bought three bottles of their wonderful Semi-dry 2008 Riesling, which may be my new favorite.

After exploring these new wineries, I ended up on a mission to find more bottles of Riesling at my old favorites. At Heron Hill, I found a fruity, crisp bottle of their 2009 Semi-dry Riesling. I found another at Hickory Hollow Wine Cellars, best known for their “Liquid Wisdom,” a super-sweet wine that, thanks to the FDA, must bear a humorous disclaimer that the wine does not actually make you smarter. But this year, I discovered their 2008 Semi-dry Riesling, which tasted like peach, lemon and honey.

We had a wonderful weekend of winetasting, and I can’t wait to see what new favorites we will discover next year.

— Tracey Cullen, art director