Alex and Julia Alvarez-Perez met in 2012 while working in New York City restaurants. They spent many years as sommeliers and restaurant managers, per their website bio, before transitioning to winemaking.
After working at wineries in Austria’s Burgenland and Australia’s Adelaide Hills, they returned to the East Coast and settled in the Finger Lakes. Once back, they created Usonia Wine in 2019, and two years later began farming their own vineyard, currently planted with Riesling and Cabernet Franc vines. They share in the winemaking dutires.
The winery is located at 6963 state route 89, Ovid, New York, aside Cayuga Lake.
Usonia hosts tastings, led by Julia and Alex, on their farm. They last about an hour, include at least five wines, and cost $15 per person (payable after the tasting).
Tastings are currently limited to eight people, and they’re hosted at a communal table. Per the website, please note that it’s a functioning farm. Kids and dogs are welcome as long as they’re well-behaved (dogs) and leashed (kids). There is currently no food with the tastings.
Send an email to gday@usoniawine.com if you have any questions or don’t see availability.
Julia brought a Soon Different 2025 (50% Regent, 30% Aravelle, 20% Aromella) and a 2024 New Suns Red (100% Cabernet Franc) to the gathering of 12 East Coast winemakers that took place on Aug. 4 at Black Ankle Vineyards in Maryland.
She took some time this week to answer several questions sent to her and email them back.
Q, How long did it take to come up with the winery name … and maybe this is a spot, too, to mention the artist of your label. I know I asked you the same thing at the summit. Just love the label.
A, It took us a little while to come up with the name Usonia. At first we tried every possible combination of our names, my maiden name, old family names...none of them stuck. We wanted something clean, preferably one word with a feminine ring to it. My husband, Alex, is from Buffalo, where there are several Frank Lloyd Wright homes, so he had heard of his concept of “Usonia” before. We did a bit more research and we liked the ethos behind it — America as a truly democratic and distinctive space that’s not beholden to European norms or traditions. On a podcast I once heard Usonia described as “America as it could be at its democratic zenith.” When we first started out, we were only working with European vinifera varieties (Riesling, Cab Franc, and Blaufränkisch) but now that we’re working predominantly with hybrids, many of them American bred, I think the concept of Usonia fits a bit better. We think the idea of a hierarchy of grape varieties (i.e. Pinot Noir and Chardonnay at the top, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc at the bottom) is nonsense at best and actively harmful to the future of grape growing at worst. We’ve really come to love lesser-known, obscure hybrids because they can grow much easier in our wet, humid climate, can be made into more affordable, accessible wines, and importantly, can make distinctly New York wines. I think this ties into our understanding of what Usonia means.
Our label designer is Elana Schlenker. We wanted bright, eye-catching labels that incorporated many different fonts (like in many old school Italian labels) and she came up with the grid system. She finds a different illustrator every year, and in the last few years we’ve given them prompts to flesh out the landscape of Usonia. The 2023s were fantastical creatures of Usonia, the 2024s were historical figures (artisans, peasants) of Usonia, and the 2025s are Gods of Usonia.
Q, It sounds like working at wineries abroad sort of created the spark. Was there one thing that made you two decide to open the winery, or just a desire that built up ahead of 2019?
A, Alex and I met working at a wine bar in Brooklyn, and we continued working in restaurants for about six more years before we got burned out. We were both focused on the wine side of restaurants, but got sick of how detached we were from the actual process of making wine and speaking with producers. We also came to realize that so much “somm speak” can be total bullshit (if I’m being honest.) We had traveled a bit together visting producers — some in California where we were living at the time, and a bit in France and Italy — and we always felt the most engaged with wine while tasting one-on-one with the producer and walking through vineyards. I think this really drove home in our minds that wine, first and foremost, is farming. I had worked on farms in Italy a bit in my early 20s and worked a harvest in the Willamette Valley, and I was itching to get out of restaurants and back to winery work. We decided to leave the Bay Area, work a harvest together in Austria, and if we enjoyed it enough we would pursue it in the Finger Lakes. I had never been to the Finger Lakes — Alex had — but we wanted to get back to the East Coast, and it felt like a place with a lot of opportunity. At the time, there were very few producers making low-intervention wines in the Finger Lakes (Bloomer Creek being the main exception) and we thought that was a good niche to explore.
Q, Love the description of the New Suns vineyard. Has the makeup changed since the writeup on the website? And, what is the potential you see in hybrids?
A, Oof, our website is a bit out of date! We started farming New Suns in 2021, which was a catastrophically wet year in the Finger Lakes and really made us re-think how and what we wanted to farm. When we took over the vineyard there were MANY dead spots. After 2021, we began to give hope for vinifera in the Finger Lakes, so we decided to replant hybrids in spots where Riesling and Cab Franc had died. Ultimately this was not the best decision (and we probably should have listened to the people that told us so.) Hybrids are better suited to organic farming, but the timing of Marquette, Noiret, and NY-81 are much earlier than Riesling and Cab Franc and we don’t have the bandwidth to pick them on their own. So, sadly, the animals tend to get to the NY-81 before we can! We will likely rip out the Marquette next year (it was only about 80 vines.) This year we gave in and re-planted Riesling in Riesling, and Cab Franc in Cab Franc.
We also planted one acre of Steuben this year — it’s an old hybrid bred at Cornell in the 1920s. While we gave up on interplanting hybrids and vinifera, we’re committed to planting hybrids in their own blocks. We have roughly another 2 acres that we can plant, and we’ll continue to work with hybrids (though we still haven’t decided which ones yet.) So currently New Suns is 1 acre of Riesling, 2.5 acres Cab Franc, and 1 acre of Steuben, with a smattering of Marquette, Noiret, and NY-81 (now known as Aravelle.)
Our thinking about hybrids really changed when we started farming our vineyard, and once we saw the amount of work (mostly handwork and sprays) that are needed to keep vinifera vines healthy. For us, how you farm is more important than what you farm, so we let our desire to farm organically dictate what we plant. This year, for instance, to farm our vinifera organically and have relatively healthy vines, we’ve sprayed 18 times in the growing season. 18! That’s an insane amount of labor, tractor passes, and spray materials (which, being organic, are more generally more expensive than conventional materials.) While we don’t have a year’s experience farming hybrids, we think we can spray half as many times (if not less) with hybrids. For example, Corey Christie, who grows the Steuben that we work with, sprayed four times in 2024. We’d love to cut back on the inputs and labor in the vineyard, especially considering it’s just the two of us out there. To do this we don’t think we have to sacrifice quality — we think hybrids can make delicious, accessible, affordable, and distinctively New York wines.
Q, What’s the most fun of this venture, and right now the biggest challenge? You sort of referred to the latter in your answer last week?
A, As cheesy as it sounds, I think the most fun we have is when we get to do vineyard work together. I have a full-time job as the winemaker at another winery up the road [Buttonwood Grove Winery], which means Alex is generally on his own in the vineyard during the growing season. On weekends, we usually try to divide and conquer, meaning one of us is working in our tasting space and the other is in the vineyard. It’s rare that we get to spend a few hours in the vineyard together. So much handwork in the vineyard is tedious, or tiring, or just plain boring, so doing it together makes the job go easier, but we get some good time together focusing on our farm. While it’s not the most fun job, hauling out fruit after it’s been picked is definitely the best feeling — the major work of the year is done, and we can stop worrying about the weather (for a little bit.)
Apart from farming grapes in a completely unpredictable, often times extreme, rapidly changing climate — which is no small feat! — I think finding time to get out and sell wine is our biggest challenge right now. We both have backgrounds in restaurants and selling wine, so it comes relatively easily for us, but between my day job, vineyard work, and cellar work (not to mention having some down time for our personal lives) we don’t get to do it as much as we’d like. A lot of our wines are made from obscure hybrids that we don’t list on the label, so they don’t exactly sell themselves (but we also like telling people the story behind the wines.) Our tasting space has been doing well this year, so we’re looking forward to hopefully expanding our hours a bit next year.
Q, What led you to produce the crackling wine? I had never heard of that before.
A, The crackling wine came about as sort of a failed experiment. In 2023 we made a wine that was a blend of Chancellor, Verdelet, and Cayuga White. We fermented and aged the three varieties separately, did a few blend trials, and came up with a version that we liked. After we actually blended it we both found it a bit ... boring. We thought it would be more fun as a sparkling wine, but at that point the wine was dry and finished. We love old school Lambrusco, which is often made in the “rifermentato” style in which you pitch the fermenting must of the current year and add it to a base wine from the previous year. So we did that process but with an incredibly aromatic variety, Diamond (a relative of Concord.) The idea evolved into a “what if we made a Lambrusco style wine, all with hybrids?” We wanted to lean into the grapey, musky side of Diamond. It’s been a hit! “Crackling wine” is just another term for a sparkling wine that has less pressure than Champagne, so this fits the bill AND we think it’s a much cooler sounding name than plain ol’ “sparkling wine.”
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Love what Julia and Alex are doing at Usonia. The New Suns Cabernet Franc is always a favourite.