His father, Sayre Fulkerson, diplomatically looks away and pulls some weeds while his son contemplates his answer.

“It’s a good heritage any person would want to keep,” smiles Steve Fulkerson. Fulkerson graduated last summer from Cornell’s School of Viticulture and now helps his father manage 106 acres of vineyards and a grape juice business on the scenic hills overlooking Seneca Lake. (His father is also a Cornell Ag school graduate with a degree in pomology, the study of fruit production.)

The picturesque winery sits on land purchased in 1805 by Caleb Fulkerson, a fife and drum corps veteran of the American Revolution. Migrating from Somerville, N.J. to Dundee, N.Y., Fulkerson cut a walking stick from a willow tree during his travels, and arriving at his future farm, stuck the willow stick into a spring to mark his claim. From the tree that rooted, many years later he created willow coffins for his wife and himself. The graves are still there in the Fulkerson family plot amid the vineyards, overlooking the lake.

While some of the oldest vineyards on the farm date back to 1852, the farm primarily grew blackberries until the 1970s.

Sayre Fulkerson, with his wife Nancy, opened the current winery in 1989. Before becoming a winery, the Fulkersons first operated a grape juice company for home winemakers, which is still a large part of their current business, with a 5,000-plus customer base.

The juice business “has a following,” said Sayre. “Some people drive all the way up here from Texas,” to purchase the varieties he grows exclusively for juice.

The vineyards host a mix of well known varieties of grapes as well as more offbeat ones such as Traminette, Dornfelder, Vincent and Himrod.
Walking through the vineyards, Sayre shows off three acres of some recently planted Noire variety from the Cornell Agriculture Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y. “It’s a low alcohol variety, good for table grapes, or to make a sweet, light wine.”

“The size of the plants are doing well,” said Sayre, standing in soil rich from years of grape pumice being worked into the land. “The number, not so great.” The Fulkersons do most of their own grafting of new plants, which is more labor intensive than a simple rooting. The advantage to grafting, explained Sayre, is it gives a stronger more disease-resistant root stock.
Sayre Fulkerson credits a lot of his farm’s success to a good team, particularly the efforts of their vineyard manager Eric Labeck. “He’s an amazing guy.”
In addition to the vineyards, the farm has expanded in recent years to include U-pick orchards of cherries, peaches, and apples. Next Steve would like to grow Asian pears.

The Fulkersons also raise some Scottish Highland cattle, mostly to manage the pasture as they’re a hearty breed that will eat most any sort of weed.

The farm has also experimented with precision agriculture, which Sayre was introduced to through a farming show sponsored by Cornell’s Yates County Cooperative extension. The Fulkersons purchased a Wagner laser planter and used it to plant 17 acres of vineyards, each in exact nine-foot rows. Precision planting makes mowing and spraying much easier. It increases the efficiency of the equipment, because of the maneuverability that improves when the rows are clearer. “Before it used to take six days to spray, now it takes two,” said Sayre. They also do some custom planting for other farms in the area.

Asked if he’s considered preserving the land as farmland, Sayre replied it’s something he weighs. “You never know how business will go.” He would hate to hamstring his son’s financial future, should farming not prove a good livelihood.

Later Sayre drives to the family cemetery plot. It’s a stunning piece of scenery, a verdant slope overlooking Seneca Lake below. There the sixth generation stands amid the graves of the first through fifth generations of Fulkersons. Whatever the future, Fulkerson’s Winery is an incredible example of one family’s farming endurance.