If you drove up Italy Hill Road looking for the Harvest Festival last October, you found the gravel lot empty and the tasting room dark. That's not a scheduling hiccup. Hunt Country Vineyards, the winery that opened the west branch of Keuka Lake to seven generations of grape growing, stopped pouring wine at the end of 2025.
The land is still there. The barns are still standing. Nobody sold the farm or bulldozed the vines. What disappeared was the business built on top of the farm, and the fixed October Saturday that came with it. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, because it changes what you're actually looking for when you go looking for it.
What Closed, and What Didn't
Art and Joyce Hunt built the winery in 1981, after the family had spent generations farming grapes west of Branchport. Their own account of the decision traces the winery's origin to a grape market that had collapsed by the late 1970s, leaving them with fruit and no reliable buyer, so they learned to make a little wine themselves rather than let the crop go to waste. That improvisation grew into one of the founding names on the Keuka Lake Wine Trail. In 1988, Hunt Country became the first winery in the country to produce commercial quantities of genuine ice wine. In 2020, it was the first Finger Lakes winery to receive the New York Wine & Grape Foundation's sustainability award, the result of a farm that had all but eliminated fossil fuel use for heating, cooling, and electricity through geothermal and solar systems.
In March 2025, the Hunts announced that 2025 would be their final year as a wine producer and tasting room. They called it 44 years in the wine business, and after that, they were retiring. Their daughter, Suzanne Hunt, and her husband, Matt Kelly, who had already spent a decade working the farm alongside them, took over what comes next. According to the family's own account of the transition, that means the acreage keeps growing select grape varieties and hay for other buyers, and the farm keeps hosting the kind of workshops and events that had already become part of Hunt Country's identity. It does not mean a public tasting room, and it does not mean wine sold under the Hunt Country label. WXXI News covered the closure in April 2025, calling it one of the first of what will likely be several similar decisions across the region as longtime winery owners age out of the physical demands of the work.
The Saturday That Used to Be Fixed
For 37 years, the Harvest Festival gave the west branch a specific date every fall, and it was never a quiet one. A typical year, based on the farm's own event listings, included:
- Grape stomping, the festival's longest-running tradition
- A guided trolley tour through the vineyard led by Art Hunt, who told the family's history along the way
- A sustainability tour led by Suzanne Hunt, walking guests through the geothermal system, the solar array, composting, and organic practices
- Ax throwing and a rustic furniture-building demonstration, both run by a local craftsman known around the farm as DJ Kitzel
- A raptor presentation, handled in later years by Braddock Bay Raptor Research
- A wine bar pouring local beer from Climbing Bines Hop Farm & Brewery and LyonSmith Brewing Company alongside the Hunt wines
- Anita Pizza's food truck, plus picnic spreads from the tasting room built around Blue Heron Bakery bread and local cheese
The 37th and final Harvest Festival ran Saturday, October 4, 2025, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A travel feature covering that last event described it as the close of an era, and it read that way to anyone who had been going for a decade or two. Families built entire weekends around that one Saturday. It wasn't a stop you added to a wine trail loop. For a lot of west branch households, it was the loop.
First winery in the country to produce commercial ice wine, in 1988. First in the region to win a state sustainability award, in 2020. Forty-four years pouring on the same gravel lot below Italy Hill Road.
Where the West Branch Habit Lands Now
Hunt Country sat at the far end of a specific stretch of the wine trail, the loop that runs up the west side toward Branchport before curling back down. Its closing doesn't erase the trail. Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery, Keuka Spring Vineyards, McGregor Vineyard, Rooster Hill Vineyards, and Weis Vineyards are all still open, still pouring, still clustered around the same lake and the same wine trail network Hunt Country helped establish. What's gone is the anchor that made the west branch worth driving up for on its own, rather than as a detour off a loop centered elsewhere on the lake.
The bigger shift, though, has less to do with any single winery and more to do with where people default when a fixed calendar date disappears. That default, for a lot of Keuka households, has become The Windmill Farm & Craft Market on Route 14A in Penn Yan, sitting on 44 tree-lined acres between Keuka and Seneca. It runs every Saturday from the third Saturday in April through the last Saturday in November, with extra open days added for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Black Friday. Where Hunt Country's festival was one date on one farm, the Windmill spreads the same instinct across more than 175 vendors, six wineries, a brewery, and a distillery under one roof, plus Amish and Mennonite baked goods, a grilled-sandwich stand called Toasted Shenanigans, and its own Fall Car Show each autumn. Nobody has to plan around a single family's staffing or a single farm's harvest calendar. The market just opens again next Saturday.
That's not a like-for-like replacement. Nobody was watching Art Hunt's trolley history tour and thinking it was interchangeable with a craft market. But it explains why the market has kept expanding while individual family wineries have started making the kind of decision the Hunts made. A weekend habit tied to one family's capacity is fragile in a way a distributed Saturday market isn't.
The Next Chapter, Still Being Written
What Suzanne Hunt and Matt Kelly actually build on that farm going forward is still an open question, even to people who've been asking around. The family's own statements point toward continued grape and hay production sold to others, plus workshops and events that grow out of what already existed on the property, without the tasting room that used to anchor all of it. Nobody's promised a scaled-down Harvest Festival returns in some other form. Nobody's ruled it out either.
For now, the honest answer for anyone who used to build an October Saturday around Italy Hill Road is that the date is gone and the habit has to go somewhere else. Some of it is spreading across the wine trail's other stops. A good share of it is landing at the Windmill instead, simply because the Windmill opens every Saturday whether or not any one family is ready to host that week. And some of it is just waiting to see what the next generation on Italy Hill Road decides to do with land the Hunt family has farmed for seven generations.
If you're curious what else has shifted around Keuka Lake this year, or you want a longer look at the lake's character beyond a single closed tasting room, the Keuka Lake page on our site is a good next stop. And if you're thinking about property on this stretch of the lake, whether that's a family cottage near Branchport or something further down toward Penn Yan, Nick Davoli has spent two decades watching exactly this kind of local shift play out, one Saturday at a time. Let's connect.
