(September 25, 2006) — Rune and Giulietta Hilt sold their home in South Philly for The Red Dove Tavern, a Cheers-style restaurant/bar they plan to open next month in downtown Geneva. Any new restaurant is a gamble, but the Philadelphia transplants swiftly decided on the new venture after visiting two years ago. The hook: wine.

“Wine was really becoming a wonderful thing up here,” Giulietta Hilt, 31, said of their discovery. “Previous to the past few years, you almost heard horror stories about wine in New York state. We were really impressed and we continue to be impressed. We feel like this area has great potential.”

The Hilts are one of a growing number of people enticed to the Finger Lakes by the promise of the wine industry. Some of the entrepreneurs continue to open their own wineries, but others are taking a try at boutiques, bed and breakfasts and restaurants.

New York, led by the more than 100 wineries in the Finger Lakes region, produces more wine than any state but California and ranks third behind California and Washington in terms of vineyard acreage and annual harvest, according to The New York Wine & Grape Foundation.

And while lodging and eating establishments are the top beneficiaries, limo services, tour businesses and farmers are starting to partner with wineries. Manufacturers also are benefiting from the success, with larger orders for winery equipment and supplies.

“The wine industry is really an economic engine. It has so many spinoffs as far as indirect impact,” said Jim Trezise, president of The New York Wine & Grape Foundation.

Andrew Harkness, president of the Canandaigua Chamber of Commerce, said the bottom line from the burgeoning wine industry is more jobs.

“In the longer term, it supplies more business in the area; it will generate taxes. A lot of the jobs will be good for younger people.”

The restaurant and café world has been one of the first to benefit from the wine industry’s limelight.

Besides the Hilts’ new restaurant, other new eateries include Madderlake Café on Route 14, where many of the wineries along Seneca Lake are located. Scott Snyder and Laura Kudla serve up cuisine with a touch of Finger Lakes and Napa. The couple, veterans of the food and wine industry, sold their house in St. Helena, Calif., and left behind the fast-moving Napa and Sonoma counties to take a gamble on this region.

“We just kind of got the feeling that things were starting to happen,” said Snyder. As many as 40 percent of Madderlake’s customers are tourists en route to wine tastings.

Rob Gladden, president and CEO of the Geneva Area Chamber of Commerce, said that wine and food go together. The chamber’s fast-growing membership includes wineries, hotels and bed and breakfasts.

Several new bed and breakfasts are set to open. The E.B. Morgan (Guest) House just opened and the Toganenwood Estate Bed and Breakfast was set to open this month.

Betty McDonald and her fiancé, Brian Bolger, relocated from the Adirondacks and Pennsylvania, respectively, to open Toganenwood Estate near the Seneca Lake wineries.

After falling in love with the area during a vacation in Naples a few years ago, McDonald and Bolger decided to relocate. They snagged an 1832 Greek Revival-style house and transformed it into a bed and breakfast.

Debbie Meritsky and Marc Rotman, who are relocating to the Finger Lakes from Cleveland, are putting finishing touches on Black Sheep Inn in Hammondsport, Steuben County, which is to open in the spring of 2007.

Judith Austic, owner of Barrister’s Bed & Breakfast in Seneca Falls, said that she taps into the industry potential by joining the various wine trail associations. Eighty percent of her guests come for wine tastings.

“There’s kind of a symbiotic relationship” between the wine industry and B&Bs, said Austic, who is president of the Finger Lakes Bed & Breakfast Association.

The wine business also has helped the limousine and tour bus business. Imperial Limo Inc. owner Vincenzo Raffaele-Addamo, who averages three tours a week over the year, said that business has tripled in recent years.

“I think it’s going to be as big as California in the next five to 10 years,” said Raffaele-Addamo, also the founder of the Rochester Winos, a new wine club that meets monthly for wine and food tastings.

Mike Fitzgerald, the owner of Finger Lake Winery Tours, recently launched a wine trolley tour and expects major success.

Then there are the surprise industries that have been swept up by the wine wave.

Vance Metal Fabricators in Geneva has seen a steady growth in business in producing wine tanks. The idea was sparked by John Martini, owner of Anthony Road Wine Co., eight years ago. Now Vance supplies tanks to 20 wineries, and has customers as far as North Carolina and California. Joseph Hennessy, Vance’s president, forecasts that the wine tank business will eventually grow from 2 percent to as much as 10 percent of total revenue.

Prospero Equipment Co., a wine supply company based in Pleasantville, Westchester County, opened an office in Geneva in 2002 because of its burgeoning Finger Lakes customer base.

“I said we should open a branch up here because it was growing — not just the wineries here, but also at Niagara-on-the-Lake, (Ontario), and it is three and a half hours to northern Ohio wineries,” said operations manager Richard Turner

The growth has generated optimism.

Brian Nicholson, 34, left Hoboken, N.J., with his young family in 2000 to return to Red Jacket Orchards, becoming the third generation in his family’s business.

He came for a lifestyle change but also opportunity. “People are returning back here; it’s really the whole tide rising,” said Nicholson. “When I left here, it was like, ‘How this area is going to survive?’…(Now) there’s opportunity whereas there wasn’t as much before.”

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