Perry Goldschein of the Hudson Valley Wine Market. (photo by Lauren Thomas)
Hudson Valley Wine Market on Main Street in Gardiner has the greatest inventory of homegrown Hudson Valley wines of any wine boutique. Owner Perry Goldschein, who purchased the business (formerly known as Enthusiastic Spirits) in January of 2013 from town supervisor Carl Zatz, said that he has “always enjoyed good wine.” But it was when he lived in the Napa Valley region in northern California for several years in the 1990s that he fell “in love with wine-tasting and the wine tourism there.”
When he moved back, he tried to sample some of the local wines where he grew up in New Jersey and then in Virginia. “They just didn’t taste good.” When he and his family moved to Gardiner several years ago and he went to visit many of the vineyards, he said, he was “pleasantly surprised by how far the Hudson Valley wineries had come, how good their wines were and how little people seemed to know about them and their amazing quality.”
After educating himself more on the variety of Hudson Valley wines, styles of winemaking and the rules and regulations of the New York State Liquor Authority, he decided to purchase the existing wine store in a renovated Colonial home in the hamlet of Gardiner and put an emphasis on selling and promoting Hudson Valley wines. “We do have a great selection of wines from all over the world, but our highest percentage of inventory is of Hudson Valley wines,” he said.
As he continues to stock more and more local wines, some of the many best-sellers thus far include Whitecliff’s Awosting White, as well as the vineyard’s Pinot Noir. “They’re very popular,” he said. The Warwick Valley Black Dirty Red, a Baco Noir, has also been a hit, along with Millbrook Chardonnay and the Riesling produced by Brotherhood out of Washingtonville.
Asked if there was a signature grape or style of winemaking in the Hudson Valley region, Goldschein said, “Not yet. I think it’s still too new. The Finger Lakes region in New York, for example, has really made a name for itself with Rieslings. The Hudson Valley also makes some wonderful Rieslings. But if I could think of one thing that sets this region’s wines apart, it’s the amount of expert winemakers. They know how to make great wine, and understand what grapes will work in this cooler region.”
Because he has visited so many of the wineries and spent a lot of time learning about the various grapes and hybrid wines and the winemaking process that is unique to each winery or vineyard, he feels that he can talk “about Hudson Valley wines with customers with a lot of knowledge and greater understanding of how they’re made, what food to pair them with, what a customer likes and which wine would best suit their palate.”