Competitive Intelligence · Keuka Lake peer set · MVP v0.2
● Single-subscriberCompiled 11 August 20268 peersbuild 2026-08-14 16:28 UTC
Executive Scorecard
One-page roll-up for an owner who won't read the rest. Grades are computed from the verified data in this report only. Click any dimension below to jump to the module its evidence comes from.
Refresh: Monthly · Peer set: 8 Keuka Lake wineries · Window: All available public data through 11 Aug 2026
C−
Composite
58.7 / 100
Solid on Google, near-absent where trips get planned
Google rating
4.7
4.63 sample-adjusted — 5th of 9, exactly the median of the set
Google reviews
142
Peer median 423. Lowest in the set, tied with Hunt Country
TripAdvisor reviews
7
vs 1,093 at Dr. Frank. #20 of 32 Hammondsport attractions
Tasting price
$$
No published FLX flight price; peers range $3–$75
Reservations
None
Walk-in only. 4 of 8 peers accept or require bookings
Verified events
4
Active series running now — strongest programming density in the set
Dimension grades
Rubric v1.1 · Google primary
The composite above is computed from the five dimensions below, not asserted. Weights are fixed and disclosed, and identical for every subscriber. Press "how it's scored" for the full arithmetic.
The three things to act on
Priority 1 You are visible on Google and invisible where trips get planned
This is a platform gap, not a volume problem. On Google you hold 4.7 across 142 reviews — a normal footprint for a winery your size. On TripAdvisor you hold 4.7 across 7, against Dr. Frank's 1,093. The same guests, the same experience, a 20× difference in evidence left behind. That is why you sit at #20 of 32 things to do in Hammondsport while Bully Hill (4.4) and Heron Hill (4.3) outrank you.
The distinction matters because the two platforms serve different moments. Google catches people already searching nearby. TripAdvisor is where someone three states away plans a Keuka weekend two months out — and there you are effectively absent.
Your 7 TripAdvisor reviews all fall Jul–Nov. Zero between December and June, despite being open year-round.
Google is not a solved problem either: 142 is the lowest in the peer set against a median of 423. But that is a 3× gap you can close, not the 30× the TripAdvisor number implied.
Priority 2 The reservation path is broken and contradictory
A Tock page exists for Living Roots Finger Lakes, and the FAQ's Finger Lakes block links "Make a reservation" to it. But the site footer says WALK-IN ONLY, and two separate FAQ answers on the same page contradict each other — one says "No reservation needed," the other says "We don't accept reservations at the moment, though we plan to for seated tastings in the future." A guest planning a Keuka day cannot tell what's true.
Every reservation is a captured email address. Walk-in-only means your highest-intent guests arrive anonymously and leave without entering the club funnel.
Keuka Spring runs the same Tock stack you already have provisioned. This is a configuration and copy decision, not a build.
Priority 3 Your brand story isn't what guests are actually talking about
You position on intercontinental family heritage, low-input natural winemaking, Riesling and sparkling. Across all 7 public TripAdvisor reviews, not one mentions Riesling, sparkling, natural wine, or sustainability. What they mention is the view (4 of 7), that the wines are "different from most FLX wines" / Australian (3 of 7), and the wine guide. TripAdvisor's own popular-mention tags for you are just "wine guide" and "wines."
The view is doing your selling. That's a fragile moat — Heron Hill was named one of Travel + Leisure's 10 most spectacular tasting rooms in the world, and Weis, Keuka Spring and Dr. Frank all have hillside lake views too.
Your sustainability and low-input story is buried in the FAQ, not on the Visit or Finger Lakes page where a trip-planner reads.
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Competitor Gap Report
Amenity, experience, product and digital coverage across the Keuka Lake competitive set. Columns are sortable. Blank cells mean the winery does not publish it — not that the answer is no.
Dual-hemisphere shop, shipping map, club portal with self-serve pack editing
Dr. Konstantin Frank
not verified
Phone + online
Club w/ tour discount
not verified
Tiered experience menu with distinct price points
Bully Hill
not verified
not verified
not verified
not verified
Restaurant listing presence across aggregators
Heron Hill
not verified
Phone (ext. 15)
Club promoted in-room
not verified
Employment + events pages actively maintained
Weis Vineyards
not verified
not verified
Yes
not verified
Award-led homepage positioning
Domaine LeSeurre
shop.dlwinery.com
Rec. for premium only
not verified
not verified
Separate commerce subdomain
Keuka Spring
not verified
Tock (live)
Reserve allocations
not verified
Tock experience listings with per-experience pages
Hunt Country
not verified
Encouraged
not verified
not verified
Sustainability microsite presence + EV charging listing
Point of the Bluff
not verified
Ticketing platforms
not verified
not verified
Distribution across Vivid Seats, TicketSmarter, Bandsintown
"Not verified" appears where the data point could not be confirmed from a public source in this run. Per your instruction, nothing has been estimated to fill these cells. A connected-data version of this report (POS, Tock, Commerce7) would close most of them.
Wine club structure — subscriber detail
Curated 4 Most popular
Cadence
3× / year — March, July, November
Pack
Mixed 4-pack, selected by Seb & Col; no substitutions
Friction Cancellation terms are stated three different ways
The club page says the commitment is "a minimum of one year [i.e. three releases]" with "no fee to cancel after one year's worth of club releases." The FAQ says the commitment is "at least three club releases" with "no fee to cancel after three club releases." Both attach a $50 early cancellation fee. Because releases are 3× a year, one year and three releases are the same thing — but a prospect reading both pages sees an inconsistency at exactly the moment they're deciding to hand over a card.
One skip per membership is allowed. 90-day pickup window before auto-ship at member's cost.
Peer club cancellation terms are not published anywhere public, so no benchmark is possible in this run. Flagged as a coverage gap rather than estimated.
Rating and volume position across the peer set, on Google as the primary source with TripAdvisor alongside. The core finding: a normal Google footprint and near-total absence on the platform trip-planners use.
Refresh: Weekly · Google via Places API, pulled live 14 Aug 2026 · TripAdvisor, Yelp & Facebook verified manually 11 Aug 2026
Google rating vs. review volume
Bubble size = review count. Top-right is the goal; you sit far left.
Google review volume
Log-scaled. Lowest in the set at 142, against a peer median of 423.
Platform gap Twenty times more evidence on Google than on TripAdvisor
142 Google reviews against 7 on TripAdvisor. Every peer shows a far tighter ratio — Dr. Frank 1,114 / 1,093, Heron Hill 358 / 420, Hunt Country 142 / 121. You are the only winery in the set with an order-of-magnitude split, which points at how you ask rather than how many people visit.
The platforms serve different moments. Google catches people searching nearby, often already in the car. TripAdvisor is where a Keuka weekend gets planned two months out — and there you are effectively absent.
Google ratings run systematically higher across this set: Domaine LeSeurre +0.3, Hunt Country +0.2, and Keuka Spring, Weis and Bully Hill all +0.1. The two cannot be averaged, which is why the scorecard now uses Google alone.
Google vs. TripAdvisor google primary
Winery
Google
Google reviews
TripAdvisor
TA reviews
Delta
Living Roots FLXYOU
4.7
142
4.7
7
0.0
Dr. Konstantin Frank
4.7
1,114
4.7
1,093
0.0
Bully Hill
4.5
804
4.4
451
+0.1
Keuka Spring
4.8
540
4.7
212
+0.1
Weis Vineyards
4.8
488
4.7
112
+0.1
Heron Hill
4.3
358
4.3
420
0.0
Domaine LeSeurre
4.7
224
4.4
103
+0.3
Point of the Bluff
4.3
184
not listed
—
—
Hunt Country
4.7
142
4.5
121
+0.2
Google figures pulled live via the Places API. Point of the Bluff has no comparable TripAdvisor attraction listing under Hammondsport — it is listed under Pulteney. Bully Hill's 804 may combine winery and restaurant traffic; its TripAdvisor listings are separate (winery 4.4 / 451, restaurant 4.2 / 575). Subscriber also holds Yelp 18 reviews and Facebook 4, not yet rated.
Sample-adjusted ratings feeds scorecard D4
Winery
Raw
Reviews
Adjusted
Rank
Keuka Spring
4.8
540
4.712
1
Weis Vineyards
4.8
488
4.707
2
Dr. Konstantin Frank
4.7
1,114
4.672
3
Domaine LeSeurre
4.7
224
4.635
4
Living Roots FLXYOU
4.7
142
4.625
5
Hunt Country
4.7
142
4.625
6
Bully Hill
4.5
804
4.534
7
Point of the Bluff
4.3
184
4.509
8
Heron Hill
4.3
358
4.462
9
Google ratings shrunk toward the peer mean in proportion to sample size — R_adj = (v/(v+m))·R + (m/(v+m))·C, with m = 423 (peer median review count) and C = 4.60 (peer mean rating, subscriber excluded). Living Roots lands 5th of 9, a percentile of 50.0 — exactly the median of the set. That percentile is dimension D4 on the scorecard. Note that Keuka Spring and Weis overtake Dr. Frank here: a 4.8 on 500-odd reviews survives shrinkage better than a 4.7 on 1,114.
TripAdvisor detail — subscriber
All 7 TripAdvisor reviews
Six 5-star, one 3-star. Google star distribution is not exposed by the API.
TripAdvisor review timing
All 7 fall Jul–Nov. Zero Dec–Jun across the full history.
Fragility The TripAdvisor rating is the fragile one, not the Google rating
Your Google 4.7 rests on 142 reviews — a single bad one barely moves it. Your TripAdvisor 4.7 rests on 7, where one 1-star review drops you to 4.3 overnight. Two identical-looking numbers with completely different durability, which is why the scorecard shrinks both toward the peer mean before scoring.
Seasonality No off-season footprint on TripAdvisor at all
All 7 TripAdvisor reviews land July–November. You are open daily year-round, so Dec–Jun visits are producing no evidence on that platform. For a trip-planner searching in April you have no recent social proof there — and TripAdvisor's ranking weights recency. Google month-by-month timing is not exposed by the API, so this pattern is confirmed only for TripAdvisor.
Themes extracted from the complete public review text. With n=7, this is a signal inventory rather than a statistical pattern — treated as such throughout.
Refresh: Weekly · Basis: Full text of all 7 TripAdvisor reviews, Jul 2024 – Jul 2025
Method Sample size disclosure
Seven reviews is too small to call any theme a "pattern." Nothing below is presented as a trend. Each item is a discrete observation with the exact review it came from. Once volume reaches roughly 40–50 reviews, this module becomes a real frequency/severity matrix with quarter-over-quarter movement.
Severity × frequency
Once
Twice
3+ times
High severity
1× Staff demeanor — "not friendly, in fact rather grumpy"
Only 3-star review on record. Reviewer said it cost them the recommendation.
none
none
Medium severity
1× Kitchen closed — water issue, no food available
1× Flight composition — got one wine they liked, one they didn't
none
none
Low severity
1× Wait for a tasting on a Saturday evening
Reviewer still gave 5 stars — staff handled it by pouring a glass during the wait.
Absence of complaint at n=7 is weak evidence of absence. Parking is worth watching specifically — your own FAQ warns the gravel lot "can get a bit slippery," which is a latent complaint category that hasn't surfaced publicly yet.
The full review record
★★★☆☆Christine A · Canton, OH · Aug 2024 · Friends
"We had a couple people highly recommend this winery and so we felt compelled to go. We were all disappointed in the service. The host we had was not friendly, in fact rather grumpy… my wife and I really liked the two Syrah. Unfortunately we were given one of the Syrah but the other wine we received was one we didn't care for… Based on our server, we wouldn't really recommend this winery."
Service — high severityFlight compositionWord-of-mouth damage
★★★★★Heather R · Cincinnati, OH · Sep 2024 · Couples
"Great find in Keuka! I'm shocked I'm only review #3 here! Very modern architecture, phenomenal views, interesting wines + an EV Charger (J1772)… We had a small wait for a tasting (enjoyed a shared glass during the wait). The receptionist was attentive… Due to some water issues, the kitchen wasn't open."
Wait time — recoveredKitchen closureEV chargingLow visibility, guest-noticed
★★★★★Matt B · Jul 2025 · Couples
"The view, the wine, the experience, were all top notch. The wines are different than most FLX wines. They originated in Australia and still have the Aussie flair. Tyler was our wine guide and gave us an in-depth tasting experience. So and enjoy this pet friendly experience!!"
Named staff — positiveDifferentiation landsPet friendly
★★★★★Heather · Chesterland, OH · Oct 2024 · Couples
"This is our second year visiting… In previous years we saw the sign for the vineyard but never saw the pop up open… There are many indoor and outdoor seating areas and the views from the wall of windows at the tasting bar overlooks Keuka Lake right at the 'Y' of the lake. This will be a regular stop for us."
Repeat visitorLegacy pop-up confusionView is the hook
★★★★★ImaBlueman · Owego, NY · Oct 2024 · Couples
"This is a relatively new winery in Hammondsport… Beautiful new building and great view… And for guys like me, they also have beer to enjoy while your wife does the tastings. With so many wineries and vineyards in the area, I recommend putting this one on your list as it may be different than most."
Beer option valuedNon-taster accommodation
★★★★★Elizabeth V · Aug 2024 · Solo
"Good view of Keuka Lake. Up on a hillside. Nice staff. Great nosh. I got the marinated goat cheese with bread and dukkah… and homemade raisins from their own grapes. You can even order a half glass of wine if you are not a big drinker like me. Quiet, peaceful, relaxing."
"No reason to visit any other winery. The view from Living Roots is just so spectacular…as is the wine! Well worth the ride from Penfield, NY."
Drive-market pull (~90 min)View-led advocacy
Response-rate benchmarking
Not covered No management responses were found on any reviewed listing
Zero owner responses appear on the subscriber's TripAdvisor reviews, including the 3-star service complaint that explicitly said "we wouldn't really recommend this winery." A response on that review costs nothing and is visible to every future reader. Peer response rates could not be systematically captured in this run and have been omitted rather than estimated.
Gap Analysis
Where the stated brand, the priced offer, and the guest experience diverge from what the peer set does and from what your own reviewers actually say.
Refresh: Monthly · Method: Stated positioning vs. review language vs. peer offer inventory
Positioning gap
What you say
Sixth-generation intercontinental winemaking heritage · Adelaide Hills & Finger Lakes · wild ferment, no additions, unfined, unfiltered dry wines · Riesling and sparkling as the Finger Lakes focus · sustainability written into the founding vision · ~5,000 cases per country per year · emerging and re-emerging hybrids for low-input quality
What reviewers say
The view — 4 of 7 reviews lead with it · "different than most FLX wines" / "Aussie flair" — 3 of 7 · the wine guide by name · pet friendly · EV charger · goat cheese and dukkah · beer for non-tasters · half-glass pours
Gap Zero mentions of Riesling, sparkling, natural wine, or sustainability
Across every public review, none of your four stated pillars appear. TripAdvisor's own auto-generated "popular mentions" for your listing are just "wine guide" and "wines" — the most generic tags a winery can earn. The Australian connection is landing (3 of 7), which is the one differentiator guests are repeating back to you unprompted. That is your real hook, and it isn't the one your homepage leads with.
Your "Our Wines" section on the homepage still describes the Rochester "new[old] industrial home on University Ave" — copy written for the urban winery, serving on a page a Keuka trip-planner reads.
The low-input/sustainability story lives only in the FAQ. Hunt Country puts the same category of claim on a sustainability map listing, a Rochester Beacon feature, and an NYWGF award page.
Price–value gap
Winery
Standard tasting
Price
Premium tier
Premium price
Complaints re: price
Living Roots FLXYOU
Curated flights, no custom builds
not published online
None at FLX
—
None on record
Heron Hill
Standard tastings
$3–$5
Tower Tasting — 5 wines + stemless glass
$10
not analysed
Bully Hill
Tasting incl. glass to keep
$5
not published
—
not analysed
Dr. Konstantin Frank
Signature seated tasting
$15
1886 Food & Wine Experience / 2-hr tour
$75 / $75
not analysed
Domaine LeSeurre
5 wines, first-come
$15
Paired experience · children's tasting $20
$40
not analysed
Keuka Spring
5 wines
$15
Vineyard Walk & Tasting w/ pairing plate
not published
not analysed
Weis Vineyards
Walk-in tasting
not published
not published
—
not analysed
Hunt Country
Guided tasting
not published
not published
—
not analysed
Gap No published price and no premium tier at the Finger Lakes room
Two separate issues compound. First, a guest planning a Keuka day cannot find what a Living Roots flight costs without arriving — every other priced peer publishes it. Second, the ceiling is missing entirely: Dr. Frank monetises at $75, Domaine LeSeurre at $40, and you have no verified premium experience at Hammondsport at all. You built the equivalent asset in Rochester (the Vault, private tastings for 8–24, wine classes) and did not replicate it at the site with the vineyard, the view, and the working winery.
The 3-star complaint was partly about flight composition — a guest who got "one wine we didn't care for." Your FAQ explains why custom flights aren't offered. A priced premium tier is the standard resolution: guests who want control pay for it, and the standard flight stays curated.
Zero price complaints on record is a genuine asset. It means you have room to introduce a higher tier without touching the entry price.
Experience gap — what shows up in peers' 5-star reviews and never in yours
Guided vineyard & winery tours
Dr. Frank runs a 2-hour tour at $75 ($60 for club). Keuka Spring runs a bi-annual Vineyard Walk. You sit on Shale Creek Vineyard with a working winery on site and offer no tour — Rochester's tour is blocked because it's an active work zone, but that reason doesn't apply here.
Bus & limo trail traffic
You decline buses and limos at all three locations and refer them elsewhere. On the Keuka trail this is a named, recurring, high-spend segment routed to peers by policy. Defensible as a brand choice — but it should be a quantified decision, not a default.
Family / kids offer
Domaine LeSeurre sells a $20, 40-minute children's tasting experience. Your published policy covers dogs in detail and children not at all — a gap for the multi-generation Keuka visitor group.
Certified sustainability
Hunt Country holds a 2020 NYWGF Sustainability Award, 24 certified-organic acres, 300+ solar panels, geothermal, and five free Level 2 EV chargers. You have an EV charger that a guest discovered and posted about — you don't market it.
New York recognition
Weis has been NY Winery of the Year three consecutive years (2022, 2024, 2025 — fourth time overall). Your marquee award, Halliday Best New Winery 2023, is Australian and means little to a Keuka day-tripper.
Ticketed venue revenue
Point of the Bluff's purpose-built pavilion, open since 2019, distributes across Vivid Seats, TicketSmarter and Bandsintown — inventory that markets the winery for free. You have no ticketed venue product.
Outstanding Ideas, Services & Events
Verified offerings running at other Finger Lakes wineries, plus what you're already doing better than the set. Each carries a fit assessment against your specific constraints.
Strength Your programming is the best in the peer set — and almost nobody knows
Four distinct verified series running concurrently at Hammondsport right now: LIDO (Chef Cullen of Work In Progress, seafood — oysters, crudo, tartare, carpaccio — Thursday through Sunday), Simply Red Kitchen Fire Table Fridays (Chef Samantha, live-fire BBQ on the patio), Vintage Cruises with the Finger Lakes Boating Museum (four tastings aboard the historic Pat II out of Depot Park), and Trail Ride & Tasting with Mountain Rose Farm (guided horseback through Shale Creek Vineyard, then a tasting). No peer in this set runs anything comparable in density or originality. This is a marketing distribution problem, not a product problem.
Spotted elsewhere — worth evaluating
Ticketed amphitheater programming
Point of the Bluff Vineyards, Pulteney — pavilion open since 2019
Covered pavilion plus open lawn. Americana, indie, classic rock, jazz and singer-songwriter nights, comedy and seasonal festivals from late spring through fall. Also runs workshops, yoga classes and farmers markets. Explicitly not taking weddings — a deliberate choice to keep the calendar for ticketed events.
Fit: Low, near-term. High capex and it fights your "quiet, peaceful, relaxing" review language. Worth noting they've proven Keuka audiences will buy tickets to come to a vineyard.
Vinyasa in the Vineyard
Hosmer Estate Winery — select Sundays, 10am, led by Shanelle France
Outdoor yoga among the vines on a recurring Sunday slot. Tabora Farm runs a Sunset Wine Down & Goat Yoga variant with a complimentary estate glass afterward.
Fit: High. Sunday 11am opening is your softest slot, you own the vineyard and the view, and you've already proven the third-party-partner model with Mountain Rose Farm.
Harvest kick-off as a ticketed event
Hosmer Estate — "Some Like It Hot," 5 Sep 2026
Turns the start of harvest into a dated, promotable event. September–October is peak winery-event and grape-picking activity across the region.
Fit: Very high. You're already hiring a Harvest Intern / Cellar Hand, so harvest is staffed. Your dual-hemisphere story makes harvest genuinely more interesting at Living Roots than at any peer — you do it twice a year on two continents.
Priced premium paired experience
Domaine LeSeurre $40 · Dr. Konstantin Frank $75
LeSeurre pairs hand-selected wines with European-inspired bites; Dr. Frank's 1886 Experience is a seated educational flight with small foods plus winemaking and vineyard tours.
Fit: Very high, lowest lift. Your LIDO and Simply Red partnerships already put a chef in the building four days a week. A ticketed pairing seating on top of existing food service is packaging, not new operations.
Take-home glass bundled into the tasting fee
Bully Hill ($5) · Heron Hill Tower Tasting ($10)
Both bundle a branded glass into an entry-level price. It converts a tasting fee into a merch impression that sits in the guest's cupboard.
Fit: Medium. Modest revenue, real brand persistence — and it gives staff a natural, non-awkward moment at check close to ask for a review.
Children's tasting SKU
Domaine LeSeurre — $20 per child, 40 minutes
A priced, structured non-alcoholic experience for kids in the party, sold as its own line item rather than tolerated as a nuisance.
Fit: Medium-high. You already stock non-alcoholic beverages and local snacks. Converts a group your policy is currently silent about into revenue.
Category shifts worth tracking
Low-intervention & hybrids
You are already ahead here — wild ferment, unfined, unfiltered dry wines, and an explicit bet on "emerging and re-emerging hybrids that can produce high quality, low input wines." The Drinks Business ran a 2025 feature on hybrids as a climate hedge. Position taken; story untold on the pages that matter.
Finger Lakes region halo
Wine Enthusiast named the Finger Lakes its 2025 American Wine Region of the Year, and Travel + Leisure named it the best US wine region. Regional inbound interest is rising — which raises the cost of being #20 of 32 in local search.
Non-alcoholic as a priced line
You stock NA beverages and a reviewer specifically valued the half-glass option and the beer for a non-tasting partner. Peers in the region are building NA into structured, priced offers rather than leaving them as afterthought inventory.
Open roles across the peer set, read as strategy signals. A winemaker req reads differently from a tasting-room surge.
Refresh: Weekly · Sources: Winery career pages, Indeed, ZipRecruiter
Winery
Open role
Comp
Signal read
Living RootsYOU
Harvest Intern / Cellar Hand
not published
Production-side seasonal only. Career page updated 5 Aug 2026 with a single listing. No tasting-room, marketing, events or DTC req open — consistent with the visibility gap this report identifies. You are staffing to make wine, not to be found.
Heron Hill
Tasting Room Server + Cellar Hand (harvest)
$20.00–$26.95/hr
Front-of-house and production simultaneously, with the cellar role flagged as having "potential to grow into a long-term role." Published wage is high for the region — an aggressive talent posture. Duties explicitly include promoting Wine Club memberships, i.e. FOH is a measured DTC channel.
Domaine LeSeurre
Tasting Room Associate / Wine Educator
not published
Title choice matters — "Wine Educator," with wine knowledge explicitly not required. They're hiring for teachability and staffing an education-led tasting model, consistent with their $40 paired experience.
Keuka Lake area (aggregate)
16 winery roles incl. Cellar Operator, Club Manager
varies
A Club Manager req somewhere in the Keuka set is the most strategically loaded signal in this table — someone is investing in recurring-revenue infrastructure. Employer attribution was not resolvable from the aggregate listing and has not been guessed.
Dr. Frank · Bully Hill · Weis · Hunt Country · Point of the Bluff
no public postings found this run
—
Absence of a posting is not evidence of no hiring — many wineries staff through walk-ins and word of mouth.
Read Nobody in the set is posting a winemaker req
No winemaker or head-of-production openings surfaced across the peer set this run. That means no visible style or quality discontinuity is coming at any named competitor — the usual leading indicator of a portfolio shift. Worth continuing to watch weekly; it's the single highest-value posting type in this module.
Contrast Heron Hill publishes a wage band and you don't
Heron Hill's $20.00–$26.95/hr is public and searchable. In a small labour market, a published band that specific sets the anchor for every FOH candidate on Keuka Lake — including yours. You compete with that number whether or not you name your own.
NY Winery of the Year at the 40th NY Wine Classic — third consecutive year, fourth overall (also 2022, 2024). 2025 Zweigelt Dry Rosé named Best Pink Wine; 2024 Riesling Ice Wine named Best Dessert Wine.
Heron Hill
Named by Travel + Leisure among the 10 most spectacular tasting rooms in the world.
Hunt Country
2020 Sustainability Award, New York Wine & Grape Foundation.
Region
Finger Lakes — Wine Enthusiast 2025 American Wine Region of the Year; Travel + Leisure best US wine region.
Your recognition — verified
Halliday 2023
Best New Winery of the Year, Halliday Wine Companion Awards — Australian programme
Wine Spectator
Featured in Apr 2021 Finger Lakes Riesling tasting highlights (up to 92 points)
Wine Enthusiast
Multiple features 2018–2025 incl. urban winery, NY sparkling, winemaking couples
Gap Strong trade press, no New York State competition record
Your press file is genuinely deep — Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, Forbes, Decanter, VinePair, Imbibe, plus international coverage in France, Italy and Japan. But no NY Wine Classic result appears anywhere in it, while Weis has converted that exact competition into three straight Winery of the Year titles and leads its homepage with them. For a Keuka visitor choosing between two hillside tasting rooms, a New York State title is legible in a way that a Halliday award is not.
The 2026 NY Wine Classic has already run — Ryan William Vineyard of Burdett took the Governor's Cup. Entry for the next cycle is the action item.
Your press coverage skews national and trade; your review footprint is local and thin. That is exactly inverted from what a walk-in tasting room needs.
Asset Editorial reach no peer in this set can match
Wine Enthusiast, Forbes, Decanter, Wine & Spirits, The Buyer, Gourmet Traveller Wine, Winart (Japan), Les 5 du Vin (France) and l'Enologo (Italy) have all covered you. None of the eight peers has a comparable international footprint. This is real leverage for distribution and trade — it just doesn't convert a car on County Road 87.
Live New York State Liquor Authority filings for the Keuka set. Because a winery files with the state months before it announces anything, this is the earliest-warning module in the report — and the only one built on primary government records rather than what a competitor chose to publish.
Refresh: Weekly · Source: NY Open Data — SLA active (9s3h-dpkz), pending (f8i8-k2gm), inactive (6dg3-2z7i) · State refresh: Daily · Pulled: 11 Aug 2026
Live signal A new winery is conditionally approved 80 yards from Bully Hill
Rabbits Winery LLC filed a Farm Winery application for 8763 Greyton H Taylor Memorial Drive, Hammondsport on 1 December 2025. Status as of today: Conditionally Approved — the last step before issuance. That address sits on the same road as Bully Hill (8843 Greyton H Taylor Memorial Dr), on the stretch of west-side Keuka that carries the heaviest tourist traffic in the region.
This is the only pending winery application anywhere in Steuben or Yates County. Every other pending filing in the two counties is a restaurant, grocery or food-and-beverage permit.
No press coverage, no website, no social presence found. The SLA filing is currently the only public evidence this business exists.
Also pending nearby: Osteria Allora, a restaurant at 138 Water St, Penn Yan, filed 16 Jul 2026 — relevant to the Keuka dining scene your guests plan around.
Your licensing profile Living Roots Wine & Company LLC
License
Class
Premises
Issued
Expires
Status
0031-24-306175YOU
Winery
8560 County Rte 87
12 Mar 2024
28 Feb 2027
Active
0032-24-331801YOU
Farm winery
8560 County Route 87
8 Oct 2024
30 Sep 2027
Active
0032-21-321828
Farm winery
8560 County Rte 87
24 Aug 2021
31 Jul 2024
Lapsed
Read Your licence history corroborates the pop-up-to-permanent story
A Farm Winery licence at Shale Creek dates to August 2021 — the seasonal pop-up era — and ran until it lapsed on 31 July 2024. In parallel you added a Winery licence in March 2024 and a fresh Farm Winery licence in October 2024. Holding both classes at one premises is the notable part: a NY Farm Winery licence is built around New York–grown fruit, while a Winery licence carries no such requirement. That pairing is consistent with a producer selling both Finger Lakes wine and imported Adelaide Hills wine from the same room — a structural need none of your peers has.
Housekeeping: neither active licence carries a registered DBA. Every peer that trades under a name different from its legal entity — Heron Hill, Weis, Hunt Country, Keuka Spring — has one recorded. Yours read only as "LIVING ROOTS WINE & COMPANY LLC," and the two active records spell the same street two different ways ("County Rte 87" vs "County Route 87"), which is exactly what breaks automated matching in third-party databases.
Peer licensing footprint
Winery
Legal entity
Registered DBA
Licences
Classes held
Next expiry
Living Roots FLXYOU
Living Roots Wine & Company LLC
None recorded
2
Winery + Farm winery
28 Feb 2027
Point of the Bluff
Point of the Bluff Vineyard LLC
none recorded
4
Winery + Farm winery, ×2 premises
30 Nov 2027
Dr. Konstantin Frank
Konstantin D Frank & Sons Vinifera Wine Cellars Ltd
none recorded
1
Winery
30 Sep 2028
Chateau FrankFrank family sparkling house
Chateau Frank Inc
none recorded
1
Farm winery
29 Feb 2028
Bully Hill
Bully Hill Vineyards Inc
The Lake Keuka Wine Co
1
Winery
30 Sep 2028
Heron Hill
Heron Hill Vineyards Inc
Heron Hill Winery
1
Farm winery
31 May 2028
Weis Vineyards
FLX Grapes LLC
Weis Vineyards
1
Farm winery
30 Nov 2026
Domaine LeSeurre
Domaine LeSeurre LLC
none recorded
1
Farm winery
30 Sep 2028
Keuka Spring
Keuka Spring Vineyards LLC
Keuka Spring Vineyards
1
Farm winery
30 Jun 2028
Hunt Country
Hunt Country Vineyards LLC
Hunt Country Vineyards
1
Farm winery
30 Apr 2028
What the filings reveal that the websites don't
Structure Point of the Bluff runs two licensed premises across two counties
Four active licences, not one: a Winery and a Farm Winery at 10304 County Route 76, Hammondsport (Steuben), plus a Winery and a Farm Winery at 8524 Broadview Heights, Keuka Park (Yates). The Keuka Park Farm Winery licence was reissued 17 June 2026 effective 1 July 2026. Nothing on their public-facing marketing indicates a second licensed site. This is the largest licensed footprint in the peer set by a factor of four.
Structure A second wine brand is licensed at Point of the Bluff's exact address
Drink This Production LLC, trading as "Drink This; Le Monè," holds both a Winery and a Farm Winery licence at 10304 County Route 76 — character-for-character the same premises as Point of the Bluff. Two separate legal entities producing at one address is the signature of a custom-crush, alternating-proprietorship or incubator arrangement.
That is a revenue line — renting licensed production capacity to another brand — that you have the winery infrastructure to offer and currently don't.
Same pattern visible historically at Pleasant Valley: Ito Wines LLC (dba Traveling Vineyard) held a Winery licence at 8260 Pleasant Valley Rd, Pleasant Valley Wine Co's address, until it went inactive on 30 Sep 2025.
Watch Three licences in the wider set expire within four months
Weis Vineyards (30 Nov 2026, 111 days), Stever Hill Vineyards in Branchport (30 Sep 2026, 51 days), and Tabora Farm & Winery (30 Nov 2026). Renewal is routine and the overwhelming likelihood is all three simply renew — but a licence that moves to inactive rather than renewing is the single clearest signal of a closure or sale, and it appears here before it appears anywhere else.
History Weis took over a premises that had already failed once
Before FLX Grapes LLC trading as Weis Vineyards occupied 10014 Day Road, the same address held a Farm Winery licence under Red Willow Ventures LLC, dba Lime Berry, which expired 31 Dec 2018. Also gone from the Hammondsport area: Crooked Lake Winery at 14248 State Route 54, lapsed 31 Aug 2022. Useful context for how much of Keuka's tasting-room inventory turns over.
New entrants near Keuka since 2024
Entity
Class
Location
Licensed
Why it matters
Rabbits Winery LLC
Farm winery
8763 Greyton H Taylor Memorial Dr, Hammondsport
Filed 1 Dec 2025
Conditionally approved. Same road as Bully Hill, on the highest-traffic stretch of west Keuka.
Ryan Vineyards LLC
Farm winery
8990 Boyd Hill Rd, Pulteney
9 Feb 2026
Newest active winery on the Keuka west side.
E. Keiko Doi Sake LLC
Winery
4776 Belknap Hill Rd, Branchport
7 Nov 2025
A sake producer licensed on Keuka Lake — a genuinely new category for the trail and a novel tasting-room draw.
Divided Sky Vineyard LLC
Farm winery
9570 Middle Rd, Hammondsport
15 May 2025
Middle Road corridor, between Dr. Frank and Chateau Frank.
Sylvan Farm LLCdba Sylvan Cider
Special Farm winery
8080 Van Amburg Rd, Hammondsport
31 Jul 2024
Cider adjacency in Hammondsport — competes for the same tasting-room visit.
Yates CellarsAlan D Hunt
Farm winery
3170 Route 54A, Bluff Point
15 Jul 2025
East-side Keuka. Note the principal's surname relative to Hunt Country.
Six new or pending licensed producers within roughly 12 miles of your tasting room since mid-2024. Competitive density on Keuka is increasing while your review footprint is not.
What this module does and doesn't cover
Scope Liquor licensing only — not construction or zoning
The three SLA datasets cover licence issuance, renewal, expiry, pending applications with status, premises addresses, legal entities and DBAs, statewide, refreshed daily by the state, free and unauthenticated. They do not cover building permits, site-plan approvals or zoning variances — those live with individual town clerks in Urbana, Pulteney, Wayne and Jerusalem and are not digitised consistently enough to poll. Claims about construction and expansion have been left out of this module rather than inferred.
A licence amendment for an altered premises can hint at a physical expansion, but the open dataset does not expose alteration filings as a distinct event type — only the resulting record. Treat address and class changes as the signal, not as proof of construction.
Weekly polling with a diff against the prior snapshot is what turns this from a static list into an alert feed. This first run establishes the baseline.
What this run covered, what it deliberately did not, and what a connected-data version would add. Per your instruction, no figure in this report has been estimated to fill a gap.
Living Roots Finger Lakes sits at 8560 County Road 87, Hammondsport, on the family's Shale Creek Vineyard above the "Y" of Keuka Lake. The peer set is Keuka Lake wineries only — Seneca and Cayuga trail wineries behave differently on traffic, pricing and visitor mix and are excluded deliberately.
Note on the Rochester location: Living Roots also operates an urban winery at 1255 University Avenue, Rochester, and a cellar door in Kuitpo, South Australia. This report scores the Hammondsport tasting room only. Rochester assets are referenced solely where they reveal a capability the Finger Lakes site lacks — the Vault private-tasting room being the clearest case.
Peers (8): Dr. Konstantin Frank · Bully Hill Vineyards · Heron Hill Winery · Weis Vineyards · Domaine LeSeurre · Keuka Spring Vineyards · Hunt Country Vineyards · Point of the Bluff Vineyards. Four are official Keuka Lake Wine Trail members (Heron Hill, Hunt Country, Keuka Spring, Weis); the trail's fifth member, Vineyard View, was excluded for insufficient public data.
Covered this run
Competitor gaps
Amenities, access, product, digital, club structure — 9 wineries
Review overview
TripAdvisor all 9; Yelp and Facebook for subscriber
Complaint themes
Full text of all 7 subscriber reviews, categorised
Gap analysis
Positioning, price–value, experience
Ideas & events
Keuka set + broader FLX trails
Hiring signals
Career pages, Indeed, ZipRecruiter
Press & awards
Trade, competition, regional
Pricing
Published tasting and premium tiers
Licensing signals
NY SLA active, pending and inactive filings — primary government records
Deliberately omitted — no verifiable data
Module
Why omitted
What would unlock it
Google review text
Ratings and counts are now live via the Places API. Review text is capped at 5 per place by the API, with no pagination — not enough for complaint analysis
Business Profile API (unlimited, but only for locations the subscriber grants you manager access to)
Social engagement benchmarking
Follower counts and engagement rates not publicly retrievable at comparable granularity across 9 accounts
Meta/Instagram Graph API, or a social listening tool
SEO & digital visibility
No verified rank data for target terms; site speed and GBP completeness not measured
Ahrefs or Semrush, plus PageSpeed Insights
Wedding & event market
WeddingWire / The Knot presence and pricing not confirmed for the set. Point of the Bluff explicitly does not take weddings
Direct platform scrape or manual audit
Construction & zoning permits
SLA licensing is now covered in full (see Licensing Signals). Building permits and site-plan approvals sit with individual town clerks in Urbana, Pulteney, Wayne and Jerusalem and are not digitised consistently enough to poll
Manual clerk requests or FOIL — does not scale to a monthly product
Rating trend over time
Historical rating snapshots do not exist for a first run — trend requires a baseline
Second run establishes the first delta
Review response-rate benchmarking
Peer response rates not systematically capturable. Confirmed only that the subscriber has zero responses posted
Per-listing manual audit or review-management platform
Reputation risk alerts
Requires continuous monitoring against a baseline; not possible in a one-time run
Amenity and pricing changes · wine club terms · new offerings · press and awards · executive scorecard recompute
Quarterly
Peer set review · positioning gap re-analysis · sustainability and certification changes · permitting scan
MVP note Known limits of this build
Ratings and counts are point-in-time as of 11 Aug 2026 and will drift.
Complaint analysis rests on n=7. It is an inventory, not a trend, and is labelled as such throughout.
"Not published" and "not verified" mean the data point could not be confirmed from a public source — not that the answer is negative.
Dimension scores are relative to this 8-winery set on verified public data only. They are not survey-derived and carry no confidence interval.
Point of the Bluff is listed on TripAdvisor under Pulteney rather than Hammondsport, so its rating was not captured in the same sweep as the rest of the set.
Build architecture
This report is generated from report.json by build.js. Every fact, finding, table row, quote and source link lives in the JSON; the build script holds only layout, styling and chart configuration. The HTML you are reading has the data inlined so it works offline as a single file, with no fetch and no CORS restriction.
The scorecard dimensions carry a module field naming the tab their evidence comes from, so the label on a dimension card and the link it points at are read from one source and cannot drift apart.
To regenerate after a data change: node build.js. To add a module, append to modules[] — tabs, panel IDs and navigation are derived from that array, not hardcoded.
How the composite is calculated
Rubric v1.1 · Google primary · applied to Living Roots FLX · 11 August 2026
Grades used to be assigned by judgment. They read as precise and were not — no stated weights, no stated transform from raw data to a 0–100 score, and no reason a second analyst would land on the same letters. This version replaces that with fixed, disclosed arithmetic. Two honest points about what "objective" means here: the weights are a business judgment rather than a derivation, and everything downstream of them is mechanical. Given the same inputs, any analyst reproduces the same composite to the decimal.
Composite = Σ ( wᵢ × Sᵢ ) / Σ ( wᵢ )
Suppressed dimensions drop out of both sums, which redistributes their weight proportionally across the survivors rather than scoring them zero.
This report's arithmetic
Dimension
Weight
Score
Contribution
Grade
D1 Demand Capture
30
71.8
21.54
B−
D2 Guest Experience & Monetization
25
31.3
7.81
F
D3 Recurring Revenue
20
94.1
18.82
A
D4 Perceived Quality
15
50.0
7.50
D+
D5 Recognition & Differentiation
10
30.0
3.00
F
Composite
100
—
58.67
C−
Recomputed on every build from the dimension scores above. If a score changes, this table and the composite change with it.
Scoring methods
Bayesian-adjusted rating
The single most important correction, and the one that changes this report's headline. A raw star rating is scored only after shrinking it toward the peer mean in proportion to how thin the sample is.
R_adj = ( v / (v + m) ) × R + ( m / (v + m) ) × C
R = the winery's raw rating; v = its review count
m = peer-set median review count, the confidence threshold — 423 here
C = peer-set mean rating excluding the subscriber — 4.60 here
Living Roots: 4.7 raw on 142 Google reviews becomes 4.625 adjusted, landing 5th of 9 — exactly the median. Keuka Spring's 4.8 on 540 overtakes Dr. Frank's 4.7 on 1,114, because a higher rating with adequate support beats a lower one with more.
Absolute benchmark index
Used for volume-type metrics where an external standard is meaningful. Log-scaled, so the difference between 7 and 100 reviews matters far more than between 900 and 1,000.
V = min( 100 , 100 × ln(x + 1) / ln(B + 1) ) B = 500
Unlike peer min–max scaling, this never assigns 0 to last place merely for being last.
Percentile rank
Used where only relative position is meaningful — adjusted rating, price position. Robust to the outliers that wreck min–max at a sample size of eight.
P = ( n − r ) / ( n − 1 ) × 100 r = rank, 1 = best
Checklist score
Used for capability inventories — amenities, club structure, recognition.
S = ( points earned / points available ) × 100
"Available" excludes any item that could not be verified. Unpublished data leaves the denominator; it does not score zero.
Grade bands
A trap worth naming. Because most sub-metrics are percentile ranks within an eight-winery set, the median winery scores near 50 — which on a school scale reads as a D. Being mid-pack in a strong peer set is not a D, so the bands are recentred: C means "at peer median." Plus and minus are assigned on thirds within each band.
Composite
Grade
Reading
85 – 100
A
Leads the peer set on most weighted dimensions
70 – 85
B
Above peer median, with identifiable soft spots
55 – 70
C
At or near peer median
40 – 55
D
Below peer median on the heavily weighted dimensions
0 – 40
F
Materially behind the set on demand capture or revenue
Rules that constrain every dimension
Every sub-metric names the field it is computed from. If the input cannot be named, the sub-metric is cut.
Rating is shrunk toward the peer mean by sample size before it is scored.
Volume-type metrics score against a fixed external benchmark, not peer min–max.
Quality-type metrics score as percentile rank within the peer set.
Unverifiable checklist items leave the denominator; they do not score zero.
A dimension with under 60% of its inputs available is suppressed and its weight redistributed.
Known limits
Peer checklist completeness is the binding constraint, not the method. D2 and D5 currently score the subscriber against a fixed rubric rather than against peers, because too many peer amenities are unpublished.
D1 is running on one of three specified sub-metrics. Review velocity and local attraction rank need a peer baseline this run did not collect, so D1 is scored on volume index alone and will move once they are.
D4's complaint-severity component is suppressed for want of a peer baseline, so the dimension currently rests entirely on adjusted-rating percentile.
B = 500 for review volume is a chosen constant. Once several subscriber sets exist, a defensible successor is the 75th percentile of review counts across all wineries scored to date.
Grade bands assume the peer set is competently chosen. A subscriber benchmarked against weak peers scores well and learns nothing. Peer-set definition remains the one irreducibly editorial step.
The rubric does not weight by variance. Scaling each weight by its coefficient of variation across the peer set would make dimensions that actually separate competitors count for more — more defensible in principle, harder to explain, and it makes grades move when the peer set changes rather than when the winery does.
Full specification: scorecard-rubric-spec.docx. Weights are fixed across every subscriber so reports remain comparable.