For more than four decades, Bill Semelka has farmed the same Lake Erie hillside his father, William, worked before him — a thin bench of glacial soil above the cold, deep water of Lake Erie. The Lake Erie AVA, sprawling across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and western New York, is one of the largest grape-growing regions in the United States, and for most of its history it was better known for Concord and Niagara juice grapes than for wine. Bill grew up in that tradition. He learned to read the morning fog off the lake, the long warm afternoons of September, and the rumble of harvest crews moving through the rows in October. When he began planting Riesling, Pinot Gris, and hybrids like Frontenac and Itasca alongside the family's Concords and Niagaras, neighbors thought he was getting ahead of himself. The growing conditions, it turned out, were better than anyone gave them credit for.