On the west shores of Seneca Lake is a story that started in New Jersey before settling in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State. Jason and Sabrina talk to Mike and Jayne Gibbs at Toast Winery about their beginnings and their great wine selection as well as a sneak peak of what's coming up in 2022. Visit them on Instagram @ToastWineryFLX and plan a visit to their wonderful facility.
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Hello, it is Bruise Day, and you know what that means. That means it is time for the Buffalo Bruise Podcast, and that makes me your host, Jason Ettinger. Thank you for joining us as you do each and every week, whether it's this episode, the last episode, episodes before that, episodes in the future, giving us a listen, a subscribe.
We really enjoy bringing this content to you, and this is episode 32 coming up, which is one of my favorite numbers, and you might ask, why 32? I don't know, it's just one of those numbers that has really resonated with me growing up, so it's only appropriate that we bring this episode 32 to you. One of my favorite wineries that you'll hear this interview with in just a few moments. I will tell you right now that the name of the winery is Toast Winery.
They are located on Seneca Lake out in the Finger Lakes region. Mike and Jane Gibbs are the owners, and while you're listening to this podcast, I encourage you to go follow their social media at Toast Winery FLX, and take a look at everything that they've got going on, and you're going to hear a lot about their beginnings, about what is going on now at Toast Winery, and some sneak peeks at what's coming up. One of the things I do want to tell you about is coming up for the Buffalo Brews podcast.
Off of the success of our first live episode, I am happy to announce that we will be having our second and third live episodes in the month of July and August, respectively. Our second will be on Saturday, July the 30th. We will be disclosing the location and the times, etc., this coming Friday.
You'll be able to find out that information by following us. Why are we doing that? Because we are part of the Buffalo Beer Geeks scavenger hunt. This is the second annual event.
I am one of about 20 teams that are involved in this scavenger hunt that will take place over about a two-month period. One of the items, which is listed on your sheets as number 3M as in Mike, is basically taking a picture with a beer-centric podcast host. They included the Buffalo Brews podcast in that listing, and we are grateful to everything that Joe and the team over at the Buffalo Beer Geeks have done.
On that day of the live, again on July the 30th, location and time to be disclosed this coming Friday, you'll be able to take advantage of what will be three points in the scavenger hunt by coming by the live podcast on that day and having a drink with us and taking a photo that you can use for your team. That is coming up. All right.
That's enough. That's enough of the gab. I just wanted to get that out of the way and let you know.
Now, here is our interview with Toast Winery. All right. We start off with our very first winery interview, and of all the wineries that I have had the pleasure of visiting, just like we had mentioned a few moments ago, there are few as open, inviting, as face-recognizing, and as cool as coming to Toast Winery.
Here we are on the west side of Seneca Lake, and we are here with Mike and Jane, and this is Toast Winery. We're super happy to sit down with you guys after, what is it, almost two years that we've been seeing each other and a year of talking about sitting down that we've actually been able to do this. Mike and Jane Gibbs, you're the owners of Toast Winery, and then we're going to talk a little bit about the other portion, which is Pompous Ass Wines.
I know there was a whole evolution that took place here, and you've got a fantastic story. Tell me how... You're originally from New Jersey, right? How did Toast Winery come to be? Yeah. That's a great question.
We think it's a good story. I think like any kind of sometimes story, it all starts with a dream. I think that was what I would say, how we started with it was really a dream.
Being in New Jersey, we used to frequent the Finger Lakes area quite a bit ourselves from the other side of the tasting bar. So being customers, and we loved going wine tasting, we love this area, so beautiful. And every time we came up here, we walked away with this like, we would just love to be able to do something like this ourselves.
We both are career corporate finance people. Jane also has a little bit of education experience as well. And we just didn't know, how do we do something like this? We didn't even know where to start from that standpoint.
Company new job took us down south to the Charlotte, North Carolina area. We still managed to come back here a couple of times as well. But the dream didn't go away.
I started making wine from an amateur standpoint with no hopes of ever being able to actually put that to practical use. But I really just thought, I want to make wine. Who knows, maybe one day we'll actually get to be able to do this.
And I started out wanting to do it the right way from the very beginning, if that makes sense. So I didn't, you know, a lot of times homemade wine, they just, it's like 20% alcohol and super sweet because they just throw sugar into juice and say, oh, here's my homemade wine. You know, it's like moonshine.
But I wanted to do things the right way. And I bought like every book that I could find on winemaking before I ever even made my first batch of wine. You know, I like studied and studied and really just wanted to learn all the right techniques and how to do things the right way and started making wine at home.
You know, Jane, I'll tell you, the dining room was full of carboys and all kinds of fun stuff. I started in my kitchen and quickly got kicked out to the garage. Boy, how many stories do we hear like that? Taking up too much of the kitchen or the dining room, you got kicked out to an insulated closet in the garage.
Is making wine at home, is it very similar to the beer making, the beer making game at home? You were talking about carboys. And it's similar but different. So the concept of making wine is, I don't want to say it's not as complex.
Beer is very temperature sensitive. Not that I'm certainly not an expert on making beer, but two different processes. But a lot of the equipment is similar in terms of using carboys and things like that to make it happen.
OK, yeah. So you're making the home wine. Making the home wine, we discovered another wine region while we were in North Carolina called the Yadkin Valley.
So we continued to have the dream and again loved visiting the wineries there, befriended a couple of winery owners. And one of the owners actually asked us if we'd be interested in buying a vineyard that they had because he knew that I was buying grapes from them to make the wine down there. So that's when we first started getting serious again about, hey, maybe we can do this.
Right. And so we started doing some research on buying a vineyard. What would it take to build a tasting room? Started actually looking at it for real.
Like even from a, listen, it's one thing to have a dream, but when it comes to business and capital and money, I mean, there's a lot of things to think about there. So we really started diving into the financials and started to understand just from a business standpoint, you know, what it really meant to kind of own a winery and what it would take and what your costs were versus sales and things like that. And we did, we thought a bit about, you know, maybe maybe we could buy something there in North Carolina, but our hearts were back up here in North and the Finger Lakes.
That's where our family is. Yeah, our family's up here. We love the Four Seasons.
I know people think we're crazy, like, why would you move back to New York when people go to North Carolina to get away from this, right? You get all four seasons in the same week sometimes. Yeah, that's true, that's true. But we love it.
We love it here. And we just started looking up here as well. And we're doing some compare and contrasting in terms of different regions.
And at the end of the day, we just we were ready to come back home, back up north. And we love this Finger Lakes region so much. And we figured out how to make it happen.
And we found this place, which was the old Pompous S winery, was for sale. Also, ironically, the very first winery we ever came into, the very first time we visited the Finger Lakes. Really? It was Pompous S. Yeah.
I don't know that we ever went back, but it was our first one we ever went to. Full disclosure. But yes, that is kind of an ironic story, part of the part of the story there that we this was our first winery that we ever visited.
And we thought we could make this work, we really did, we figured out, not to get into details, we figured out a way to and we were risking a lot, we were risking our savings and everything, but we we did a lot of research, felt like we did our homework, but it felt like we knew what we were getting into and we said, let's go for it. And then COVID hit, of course, and we were like, I think we made an offer. Yeah, we had the very first week in March.
And we gave them a deadline to like, you know, you have to hear back, like, you know, buying a house, right? Like, you have to hear back from this date. And that date came and went. It was like March 13th and then March 16th, the world stopped and we're like, oh, maybe not.
So we pulled back that offer at that time. It was so frustrating because we were like, this is everything we've been talking about for years and we're finally going to do it. I can't believe we're making an offer on a winery.
And then COVID hit and we're like, oh, my God, what are we doing? We can't do this. There's so much uncertainty. We didn't know what was going to be happening.
We did. We pulled the trigger back and then. And then May came and we're like, you know what? Our dreams haven't changed.
This is a beautiful wine region. Everybody's not closing up shop and going home that like, let's just keep moving forward that. Yeah, we love the location here, right? Right on 14 on the west side of Seneca.
So we just thought, OK, we're going to we're going to do it. We may never have another chance to do this again. Right.
Because we didn't have like an unlimited budget either. We had to find a place that fit within our means. And this one did.
And I didn't I wouldn't know if another one would. We also felt like there was a lot of potential here. Like we could really kind of turn things around.
And we pulled the trigger, came in here, and that was the start of our journey, which we're still really in the early stages of that journey. But but we're pretty excited about it. We introduced toast.
So toast was we knew we wanted to do something different. Right. Our initial thought process was, well, we're going to come in here and we're going to rebrand it and we're going to turn it into a winery that focuses on quality wine.
And so we came up with the name toast. Toast is actually a winemaking term. A lot of people are not sure what or they think toast means something different, like maybe cheers or something like that.
But it's actually a winemaking term that stands for wine barrel toast level. So when you when you buy a wine barrel new you as a purchaser of that, you have to decide how you want to buy the inside of a toasted. And there's different levels all the way from light all the way to heavy.
And it's a it's definitely a decision that has to be made. So we like the name toast because it was clean. It was simple.
It had this this winemaking term to it. And and this is where I can geek out a little bit, like kind of in my homemade my amateur winemaking days, I used to like struggle over the smallest details. And and like I'm simply like putting like little wood spiral oak sticks into wine to give it like an oaky flavor.
Like I'm not working with barrels or anything. But you even then you chose a toast level for these. I used to agonize over, oh, do I want medium? Do I want medium plus? Do I want front? You know, when you're making five gallons of wine and it really probably doesn't make any difference at all.
But it's just the way I'm kind of like roll with these little agonize over these small details. So that's why I like toast, too, because it just was one of those things that I always did. Did you toast your own spirals in the kitchen? I did not.
No, they come pre-toasted. They come pre-toasted just like your barrels come pre-toasted. But we also like the name, too, because it's got some fun other plays we can do.
Oh, yeah. We've got some some vintage toasters. We're definitely going to get to the the play of these the toasters.
It's yeah, it's interesting how that came about as well. I didn't even know about when I first learned about wine that, you know, the your level of tannins that are, you know, administered to the wine as a result of the toasting process. I just thought you make wine, you put it in a barrel.
You know, it takes on the flavor, you pour the wine. So there's so many things that I learned. And then this was the perfect example of, you know, name association.
And then obviously we're looking up at the wall with the different toast levels that you that you have. So we've got an example on the wall for for customers to see. And, you know, part of the part of educating from our standpoint is to to have that there so they can appreciate the name as well.
And you're right about the tannin levels, too. And the more toast that a barrel has, actually, the softer the tannins are. It seems like people might think it would be the opposite, right? But the the when you toast that wood, if you don't toast it, it just the tannins are much harsher and much as they grip your tongue a lot, a lot more.
So you want that toast actually softens those tannins as well as introduces some other complexity and flavors into the wine as well. So with the with the the line that you have here, because you have a very diverse line of wines that are available. And I think just jumping right into the name association with the toast levels, what would be some examples that you have of those lighter or natural toast levels versus, let's say, the heavy or your medium plus? Sure.
I mean, and you know, in terms of barrel aging, typically we're aging reds in barrels. So first of all, you can do some whites in there, too. Typically Chardonnay.
I'm actually barrel aging some Riesling right right now as well. With a white wine, you're generally going to use a lighter toast level in terms of the barrels. And then with a red wine, you're probably going to be more in the medium, medium plus range to to soften those tannins, because a red wine definitely will have some some harsher tannins.
And you want to soften those up a little bit with the more medium, medium plus oak. Yeah. And again, more education of the white.
So I enjoy a good dry red, but there are some brands out there that I've had to kind of pull away from because the tannin level is so heavy. It's almost like for me, it's almost headache inducing. And now I'm now I can understand the fact that, OK, maybe that's because they barreled in something that was just too light for what my body would.
Or didn't barrel long enough. Because that that is like that, that aging that that's what what softens those tannins a little bit and also even bottle aging. Right.
So it's not that they could have they didn't do it right. Maybe they they want that bottle to age. So the higher if you have higher tannin levels, a nice dry wet red will age for for a number of years.
And those tannins will get softer and softer each year. That's amazing. So what and so now with everything that happened with COVID and coming on board as as toast, what would be then considered your your birth date here, your anniversary date? That's a good question.
Yeah, well, we first opened in September of 2020. That's when the doors first opened. Oh, and I was here in October of 2020.
You were really, really new. Yeah. Yeah, we definitely were.
Now, if you Sabrina, if you remember, though, we opened the doors not as toast, but as pompous as winery. Yeah. It takes time to to get get wine in a bottle when when you're starting out as you're bringing your inventory level up.
So we actually didn't launch the toast brand until March of 2021. So what's what's our birthday? I think we think of both of them as our birthday. Right.
One was the kind of the first day we opened the doors in March of 2021 was when we first launched toast. Yeah. So for toast would be March.
That's what I would think of as our kind of anniversary. All right. All right.
They so. So then so pompous ass to the former name toast with the new name, but you kept the pompous ass wine variety on hand. How did you so how did you come to acquire the for lack of a better term recipes to to continue with that? I don't think that I and Mike would know better than I. But I don't think that recipes really applies that much to wine.
It's more blends and each winemaker is going to have its own touch on it, even if you follow the exact same blend. I probably very biased look on it. I like to think that we elevated pompous that first just by introducing toast.
Right. So pompous is a fun brand that maybe wasn't taken as seriously as other brands out there because the nature of it. Right.
You can have the best products in the world. You put a funny label on it. It's just a joke.
So toast is elevated pompous, just showing you that we're serious about making wine. So people take pompous a little more seriously. And then I think Mike's done a great job.
And this is where I'm probably biased. I think that even the sweet line tastes better than it did before. That just a lot more flavor, a lot more nose on it.
And and, you know, I like having both. I like having that fun, sweet wine and that serious dry line. I think there's a time and a place for each.
And we have actually expanded the pompous line with two bubbling lines. So two bubbling, which I was very excited. Yeah, I love the the white one.
It's like a Prosecco. It's like a really nice. It's really nice one.
But yeah, so so I think we've kind of, you know, expanded that line, too, and made them a little more elevated than they were before. Plus, it's nice to have a huge variety. It is.
Yeah. Because everyone likes something different. And you can't say, oh, well, you know, we can't make sweet because and that's what I like.
I'm sorry. We only have sweet wine. Yeah, I like having both.
I like that you come in here with like, you know, like a couple of couples. And if somebody likes sweet and somebody likes dry, everybody can do a tasting. Everybody can pick what they like.
And and some people there's a time and a place for each. Right. I might drink those slushies.
That's what I use it for. I love summer time by the pool. And that's what I always say, that that that's your your porch wine, your summertime wine.
You're sitting out with your girlfriends by the pool line and then you have your dinner wine. So it's nice to have both. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, I've I've. So I've been here twice.
This is this is the third time here. Really? That's it. I feel like we won't count.
Listen, I have a great face for radio, so it's me you keep seeing. I always say that's what that was the thing. I'm just with a different group every single time.
That's true. That's very true. I bring all my friends.
I love it. When I when I talk when I talk about your winery and I talk about it a lot to to a fault, I tell people all the time. It's one of those places where you go in and they just recognize a face.
Even if you haven't been there for almost a year. Yeah. And they and they just know.
So and they and they it doesn't take long to get reintroduced. Yeah. I always like to be up front that I'm not so good with names, but faces.
I got you. That's to say I'm the same way. Horrible, horrible with faces or horrible with names.
Great with faces. Yeah. I like the big example I always talk about.
I was like a youth football coach for nine years and I'll be in the store and I'll have people that come up to me. Hey, coach, you know how you've been. And, you know, I was talking about, oh, what are they doing now? Oh, yeah, they moved on from football and they're playing hockey now.
And, you know, have a little conversation. All right. Well, good to see you.
You know, you don't take care. Walk away like, who was that? I don't know. I don't remember.
I don't remember who their child was. And I'm like, I don't know if that's old age or it's just too many people. Too many people.
Yeah, that's a lot. And, you know, we're talking about the so different aspects when we're coming down 14 here. And I've always said that with Seneca Lake, you could barely get your car up to full speed before you're slowing down to get to the next winer because they're they're everywhere.
But what I love are unique estates and unique places. And you have a unique color to your building. And then you come in, you have a unique decor as well.
So I wanted to bring up the chandelier that you have over over the bar, as well as the tree in the corner. And I know that the tree itself has a great story as well. Yeah, that's true.
So we have a wine tree in the tasting room, probably about seven and a half feet tall with the bottles on it. There are two hundred and sixty six wine bottles on this tree. I will put my hand up and say that the fun fact is that I have partaken in every single one of those two hundred and sixty six bottles on that tree.
But yeah, it goes back to kind of our story as well, because our first again, our first Finger Lakes trip here, I saw a wine tree like that at a winery and, you know, no free ads, but I'll mention Glenora Wine Cellars that they have a wine tree. They still have it today that's out there. And I like I want one of those trees, like, you know, personally thinking I'm going to get one of those.
I don't know where they got it. I don't know how I'm going to get one. And I started saving my my wine bottles after I finished drinking at my empty Finger Lakes wine bottles because I only wanted Finger Lakes wine, wine bottles on there.
It's only appropriate. And it took years to find this wine tree. And Jane and I moved a few times, you know, over that time period.
And I kept moving like cases of empty wine bottles that I was just saving and saving and saving. Why don't you just recycle? And yeah, and just, you know, one we we were getting ready to relocate down south and I'm still looking for this wine tree and I happen to find it. Find one on Etsy.
I said, here it is. I said, OK, we're going to get it once. Once we move down there, I'm going to get it.
I found it. So then after, I don't know, a few months after we moved down there, I said, OK, well, let's look for that wine tree again. So I look for it on Etsy.
I see it. The person that makes those trees was in the same exact town that we had just moved to, which was like unbelievable. And he just like brought it over in his truck.
Like, here you go. And in Jersey, he was like looking at it. He's like, oh, the shipping.
Because I mean, it's it's a metal wine tree. Right. It's going to be too much.
And then, yeah, like we move there and the guys like down the block. It was like it was meant to be, actually. Yeah.
And then and, you know, never then. Even then, what I envisioned that we'd have it sitting in a tasting room at a winery, but here it is. And in a way, it symbolizes our a lot of our journey, like a lot of those wines, again, that they were purchased here.
They were part of experiences that we have. It's it's not just a toaster or pompous or toast and pompous wine tree. It represents many, many different wineries here in the Finger Lakes.
And again, our journey, right? Yeah. Part of our journey. In fact, I could probably tell you stories about a few of those wine bottles on the tree there that I just still remember.
You know, I really do. I mean, it's just all part of that history that we have here. So I love having it here.
I love having, you know, all the different wineries as part of our journey represented. And we display it proudly. We've got some cool LED lights that we put on it so we can change it for the different seasons that goes on.
I think I have a picture every time it changes. Yeah, because when I was here in November, I believe it was Christmas colors. Then it's clear.
Then. Yeah, I read multiple. Yes, I have multiple pictures because I feel like I must never come around the same time.
It is. It's become a little bit of an iconic photo. Yeah.
For people to come in. Yeah, I want to take a picture next to the tree. So it's pretty cool.
Like I said, we're pretty, pretty proud of that. What it represents to us personally means a lot. I feel if there was ever a Seneca Lake scavenger hunt, that would have to be photo with.
Yeah, there's that. Sadly, I mean, you know, I guess everybody has their own story as to why. But there you know, there's even wineries on there that aren't around anymore, too.
So sure. A lot of history on that tree there. That's great.
We know. So that will be one of the pictures that I think we post, you know, the early part of this interview to, you know, show people who listen to this exactly what we're talking about. But it's yeah, it's definitely a sight to behold here.
So we were talking about the different the many varieties that you that you have here, the different styles of wine. But you have several that are iconic and award winning that you have that you have here. Yeah, no, true.
One of our and she's just just full disclosure now, we're down to like three cases left of our of our semi dry recently. Get here now. So, yes.
I don't know when this is going to drop. In Rockstream, New York. That that's been our biggest seller, our semi dry Riesling.
It's won some gold medals in the there's a wine competition they have every year called the Eastern International Wine Competition. So it's wineries all on the East Coast, as well as internationally that that enter into this. And we got a gold medal from that for our semi dry Riesling.
And not only that. So it's it's actually then the winners of each category of the different wines goes to face off against the winners of the West Coast. So they have a West Coast competition.
And then it's like East meets West kind of like it. So we are the semi dry Riesling didn't win that category, but it got the same score as the winning Riesling. So we were pretty excited about that.
So we were right there. That's a good honor. And it really is.
Yeah. And it's wonderful. It's just a wonderfully balanced wine, which is what I tell people, the beauty of that is.
And it's almost you can't describe balance sometimes with the wine. You feel it. I just feel it in your mouth, that balance.
And so that's been really good for us. We launched a petulant natural this year from our twenty twenty one harvest and starting to get a little bit of a reputation for that. People have been coming back for that or people have been telling their friends and they've been coming in here looking for it.
Petulant natural, it's it's it's a wine in the style of the natural wine movement that you may have heard about. Now, people are wanting these natural wines that are clean. The definition of clean is sometimes is very broad and misunderstood, I think.
But, you know, as little done to it as possible, like what it was meant to be. And so a petulant natural, the oldest known method of naturally carbonating a wine. We we take that wine before it's done fermenting.
We pull it right from the tank and you're capturing all the essence and funkiness and everything that's going on with that fermentation. You bottle it. You put a bottle cap on it.
It finishes the fermentation in the bottle, which creates its natural carbonation. And the wine is what it gives to you in a natural way. There's no sulfites added into it.
And ours turned out, I think, really well. People compare it to a kombucha. It's funky.
It's fruity. It's hazy. It's dirty.
Some customer came in the other day and said, I want some of that dirty champagne. So I thought that was pretty a pretty cool description for it. And so that's our petulant natural.
And definitely we'll we'll continue to produce that that every year. We just did a limited run this year. We still have some of that left, too.
But we'll continue to do that one, which is pretty cool. I'm excited to drink it. Take home the dirty champagne.
Ours is made with Pinot Noir. I should point that out. Oh, Pinot Noir.
And it's.
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