How the Finger Lakes Became an Official Wine Region

On September 1, 1982, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms published T.D. ATF-113, the final rule establishing the Finger Lakes viticultural area. The rule took effect one month later, on October 1. From then on, qualifying wine producers could use “Finger Lakes” as an appellation of origin on labels and in advertising.

The boundary was not simply copied from the broadest popular definition of the region. The Finger Lakes Wine Growers Association had petitioned for an area covering fourteen whole counties. In the final rule, the agency described that original proposal as approximately 8,400 square miles.

The rulemaking drew substantial participation. The agency held a public hearing in Geneva on February 11, 1981. Its final account reported sixteen written comments, all but one in support of establishing the area, as well as ten hearing witnesses who supported the original proposed boundaries.

Support for an official appellation did not mean the original map survived unchanged. The agency concluded that the fourteen-county proposal was too broad to define a distinct grape-growing area. It distinguished the state's tourism and grape-reporting regions from the physical geography needed for a viticultural boundary, then reduced the proposed area from roughly 8,400 square miles to less than 4,000.

The amended boundary was adopted in the final rule. The result was a legal geography shaped by the rulemaking record, not merely by a familiar regional name.

That distinction still matters. “Finger Lakes” can describe a landscape, a tourism region, a group of communities, or a wine appellation, and those meanings do not always share identical borders. The 1982 rule records the moment when the federal government defined the wine meaning with a line on a map.

Source note

The story is based on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' controlling final rule, T.D. ATF-113, Establishment of the Finger Lakes Viticultural Area, 47 Federal Register 38516–38518 (September 1, 1982). Petition and procedure appear on pages 38516–38517; comments, hearing, geography, climate, and boundary reasoning appear on page 38517; labeling effect, maps, and regulatory text appear on page 38518. The TTB American Viticultural Area reading room provides the agency's surviving online rulemaking documents.

The final rule summarizes the public hearing and submissions; this draft does not claim to reproduce every participant's position because the full hearing transcript and complete historical docket have not been inspected.