About Red Newt

Red Newt Cellars began in 1998 with a first vintage and a fairly simple idea: make wines that reflected the Finger Lakes, cook food that belonged with them, and see what the two could teach us about this place.

The winery and Bistro opened to the public in June 1999 on the east side of Seneca Lake in Hector.

From the beginning, Red Newt was the meeting of two paths. David Whiting had trained as a biologist before finding his way into winemaking in the 1980s, working at several Finger Lakes wineries while the region itself was beginning to change. Debra Whiting had worked in science at Cornell before turning increasingly toward food through baking, catering and, eventually, professional cooking.

Red Newt brought those interests together.

We never really thought of the Bistro as a restaurant attached to a winery. Wine and food were part of the same exploration. What does this place taste like? What grows well here? Who is growing it? And what happens when the food on the plate and the wine in the glass come from the same landscape?

Those questions have stayed with us.

An Early Surprise

Red Newt was still a very young winery when our 2000 Riesling won the Governor’s Cup at the 2001 New York Wine & Food Classic, selected as the best wine in New York from a field of 485 entries.

For a winery that had been open barely two years, the attention was startling. Newspapers and wine writers suddenly appeared, and bottles disappeared almost as quickly.

But in retrospect, what matters most about that award is not the trophy. It came at a moment when the Finger Lakes itself was beginning to be recognized as a serious cool-climate wine region, and particularly as a place capable of making distinctive Riesling. Contemporary coverage of the competition reflected that larger excitement about what was happening here.

Riesling became central to Red Newt, but never because we believed there was one correct way to make it.

We made it dry and off-dry, sparkling and late harvest, from individual vineyards and from blends of sites. We worked with Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris, Cabernet Franc, Pinot Noir, Merlot and plenty of other grapes along the way.

The question was rarely, “How do we make this taste like wine from somewhere else?”

It was much more interesting to ask, “What does this grape become here?”

Wine, Food and the Finger Lakes

Deb approached food in much the same way.

The Bistro menu followed farms and seasons rather than a fixed repertoire. Deb built relationships with vegetable growers, cheesemakers, livestock farmers and other producers throughout the region, and those relationships determined what arrived in the kitchen.

She also became deeply involved in the emerging Finger Lakes local-food movement. Through Finger Lakes Culinary Bounty and countless individual relationships, she helped connect farmers, chefs, wineries and customers around an idea that seems almost ordinary today: that a regional food culture is worth building deliberately.

At the time, it was considerably less obvious.

The wine list followed the same philosophy. We poured Red Newt wines, of course, but also wines from our neighbors. We wanted people visiting the Bistro to encounter the Finger Lakes, not simply Red Newt.

A wonderful Edible Finger Lakes profile from that period captured the idea especially well: the goal was to put the Finger Lakes in the glass and on the plate.

That was exactly it.

David and Deb were constantly tasting things together. Sometimes a wine suggested a dish. Sometimes a dish changed the way we thought about a wine. Sometimes nothing worked and everybody went back to the kitchen.

We also created events such as Nine Wines Blind, pairing multi-course dinners with wines tasted without labels or preconceptions. The point was never to tell people which wine they were supposed to like. It was to taste, compare, argue a little, discover something and have fun doing it.

That combination of curiosity and informality became part of Red Newt’s personality.

From Grapes to Vineyards

As the years passed, another question became increasingly important.

Not simply what grape is this?

But where did it grow?

We began working more closely with particular vineyard sites and discovering just how different they could be.

Sawmill Creek, Curry Creek and Glacier Ridge were among the early vineyards that pushed us in that direction. Tango Oaks and Lahoma became important later. Even when the grape variety was the same and the winemaking was similar, the wines could have remarkably different personalities.

That changed the way we thought.

By 2010, Wine Spectator was writing about a small group of Finger Lakes producers beginning to identify individual vineyards on their labels and specifically pointed to Red Newt’s work with Sawmill Creek, Curry Creek and Glacier Ridge. The article argued that recognizing individual sites was an important step in the Finger Lakes becoming a serious cool-climate wine region.

For us, it was less a movement than a discovery.

Once you begin seeing those differences, it is difficult to stop looking for them.

And sometimes understanding a vineyard takes much longer than we expect. An older bottle can overturn an assumption we were quite confident about twenty years earlier.

That is one reason we have kept so many wines in the cellar.

Change and Continuity

We lost Deb unexpectedly in 2011.

There is no tidy way to describe what that meant to Red Newt. She was not simply the chef of the Bistro. She was one of the two people whose ideas had created the place.

The business changed because it had to.

But many of the things Deb cared about remained embedded in Red Newt: curiosity, hospitality, regional food, relationships with growers and farmers, and the belief that something grown here becomes more interesting—not less—when it tastes unmistakably like here.

The winery continued to evolve as well.

Kelby Russell took over primary winemaking responsibilities and helped push our exploration further into dry Riesling, vineyard-designated wines and the question of how Finger Lakes Riesling develops with age. His years at Red Newt were a period of real growth and experimentation. The wines became increasingly focused on texture, lees work, reductive handling and the distinct personalities of individual vineyard sites. Critics began paying attention not only to the top vineyard bottlings but to the depth of the Riesling program as a whole.

When Kelby left in 2023 to pursue the next chapter of his own winegrowing career, we were extraordinarily fortunate in who came next.

Christina Zapel arrived at Red Newt with more than a decade of winemaking experience and a career that had taken her from New York to Australia and through some of Sonoma County’s most respected cellars. She grew up in a large Italian-American family where food was central, studied Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at NYU, and found her way into wine through restaurants, tasting rooms and wine education before deciding that she wanted to make wine herself.

That decision took her west.

After formative cellar experience in Australia, Christina spent five years at Flowers Vineyards & Winery on the Sonoma Coast. Flowers is known for Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grown in a cool, demanding coastal environment, and Christina has described those years as particularly important in shaping her approach to winemaking. Working with native fermentations, minimal intervention and a team constantly experimenting in pursuit of better expression of site reinforced an idea that would later make her feel immediately at home at Red Newt: the job of the winemaker is not to impose a style on the fruit, but to help the vineyard become visible in the wine.

She went on to become winemaker at Foley Sonoma in Alexander Valley, taking responsibility for wines from vineyard through bottle and adding the experience of leading a production program of her own. By the time she came to Red Newt, she brought not simply a résumé of highly regarded wineries, but a fully developed point of view: preserve natural acidity, use oak judiciously, work comfortably with native yeast, keep additions restrained, and remain curious enough to keep experimenting.

That combination made the transition feel less like a reset than a continuation from a different direction.

Christina’s first Red Newt vintage was 2023, and the early wines have already begun to show her imprint. More important than any individual score or review, the wines feel unmistakably connected to the vineyards they came from.

Today Christina leads the cellar while David remains actively involved as founding winemaker and collaborator. The relationship is deliberately collaborative rather than ceremonial: decades of Finger Lakes experience meeting a winemaker whose perspective was shaped by New York, Australia and California.

People change. Vintages change. Techniques evolve. The questions evolve with them.

The basic approach has remained surprisingly durable: pay attention to the vineyard, intervene thoughtfully, taste carefully and try to understand what the season has given us.

A New Chapter in the Kitchen

In the past year, that way of working has begun to find its way into another part of Red Newt.

David has returned to the Bistro kitchen in a much more direct role, developing the menu and cooking from a perspective shaped by nearly three decades of making wine.

In some ways, it is an unexpected turn. In others, it feels remarkably familiar. Food and wine have always been part of the same conversation at Red Newt. What has changed is the direction of that conversation.

For years David thought about food from the winemaker’s side of the table: How will this wine work with what we are eating? What flavors does it bring forward? What does it need beside it?

Now, standing in the kitchen, the question is often reversed:

What wine would we love to drink with this?

That question has become the starting point for the new Bistro menu—seasonal ingredients, familiar flavors and dishes developed deliberately with the wines in mind.

It is not an attempt to recreate Deb’s cooking. Her food came from her own experience, instincts and way of seeing the region. This is something different: a winemaker exploring the other half of a conversation that has been part of Red Newt from the beginning.

And the process turns out to have a lot in common with winemaking. Taste. Adjust. Pay attention. Try something. Discover that a small change matters more than expected. Occasionally discover that a very good idea wasn’t one.

The longer David spends in the kitchen, the more familiar that process feels.

Still Learning

Maybe that is the thread running through all of it.

More than twenty-five years after our first vintage, the Finger Lakes—and Red Newt itself—feel both much more familiar and considerably more complicated.

Riesling has established itself as one of the region’s great strengths. Cabernet Franc has become increasingly compelling. Individual vineyards have developed recognizable personalities. Growers have become more precise. And the older bottles in our cellar are finally giving us a long enough perspective to see which of our assumptions were right—and which were not.

The kitchen is now adding another set of questions.

We know considerably more than we did in 1998.

We are also much more aware of how much we still don’t know.

That may be the most enduring part of Red Newt.

We are still curious about vineyards, vintages, food, wine and the people who make this region what it is.

Red Newt is still, at heart, an attempt to understand the Finger Lakes a little better—and to share what we find.