#58 Chowder for 3,000: The Right Thing to Do.

And chowder also pairs nicely with Gewürztraminer.

Starting Friday, through the end of the day today, we will have served 1,500 people a 3-oz. cup of corn chowder along with a sample of Medium-Dry Gewürztraminer wine. Each of these people will have purchased a ticket to a holiday event called “Deck-the-Halls.”

And we will do the same thing again for 1,500 people two weeks from now.

That is 9,000 ozs. for 3,000 people, from a recipe that we have tested, sourced and prepped in our small kitchen.

We like to cook, and we believe food and wine go together. But we only attempt something on this scale once a year, and only for this particular event.

The Seneca Lake Wine Trail launched Deck-the-Halls 30 years ago as a way to raise money to promote wineries around the lake. For one flat-fee, ticket buyers could spend three days eating and drinking their way through a growing list of wineries.

Over the years, the event became more popular than anyone expected. At one time, ticket-buyers could visit 35 wineries on a weekend all for one price.

And eventually, it became a full-scale pub-crawl, and it also raised tens of thousands of dollars for the Wine Trail.

Only *some* of the people who attend Deck-the-Halls actually care about the quality of the wine. They are with a group of friends for a weekend away, that happens to include wine a snack.

Not every winery likes to cater to this audience that doesn’t pay much attention to the wine. It is expensive to feed and pour wine for this crowd. So not every winery on Seneca Lake takes part in this event. They watch from the sidelines.

Our primary focus is wine. But we take part in Deck-the-Halls knowing that the majority of ticket-buyers are not likely to buy wine from us on either of these two weekends, or any other weekends during the years.

We take part, because there were only a handful of wineries that started this event 30 years ago to promote the region. And if they had not done that, the region might not have grown the way it has. It grew enough to make it possible for businesses like ours to start and then prosper.

So we pour wine and serve corn chowder to people who may not pay too much attention to the wine in the glass we just poured. That is okay. We are not just pouring for them We are pouring for wineries that will come after ours, just like the wineries that poured their wines and served their chowder 30 years ago poured for us. This is a way of paying-it-forward.

And, with all hands on deck, if put yourself in the right spirit, it can also be fun.