Saturday will provide the best kind of educational experience: a tasty one.

Each of the 15 wineries that take advantage of the air flow over Cayuga Lake's slopes to cultivate superb grapes will have special tastings with their winemaking staff. The wineries will be joined by a cidery. Bellwether Hard Cider will accompany those tastings with presentations every half hour and time for questions.

All of the talks are designed to demystify the winemaking and cider-making process and to answer both the questions of the eager to learn and the old wine gourmet seeking deeper knowledge.

For red wine fans, Gary Barletta, one of the owners of Aurora's Long Point Winery, will teach how red wines age through the years and how each year's differing seasons affect each year's vintage. Barletta will guide visitors through a vertical tasting of the winery's Cabernet Sauvignon bottled from 1999 to 2002. With each tasting, they will be able to sample the differences of the same wine of different ages.

“His passion are his red wines,” said Russ Nalley, a tasting room sales associate. “That's one of the biggest questions: how long, how well, do they age? What are the advantages of aging some of the red wines versus drinking them right away?”

Assistant winemaker Darren Bowker will do a similar tasting at Goosewatch Winery in Romulus with that winery's bottled Cabernet Sauvignon vintages from 2002 and 2003, as well the 2004 Cab that is being readied to be bottled and a barrel sample of the Cab from 2005 that is a year away from being bottled.

Dick Peterson, one of the owners of Goosewatch, will be at its sister winery, Swedish Hill, to illuminate the newest grape varieties developed at Cornell University.

These grapes are so new that there are no colloquial names for them yet. Only numbers identify them, but Peterson has made enough wine from them in the last two years to be able to bottle and sell it.

Peterson believes that his wineries may be the first to make and market bottles from the new grape varieties.

This lecture's tasting will involve a barrel sample from 2005 that is not yet bottled and a sample from an older bottled vintage.

Rich Iddings, the cellar master at Knapp Winery in Romulus, will demonstrate the workings of the winery's Portuguese-made pot stove still.

The still boils wine to pull out alcohol, which is used to fortify the alcoholic content of its ports, brandies and limoncello, an Italian beverage sipped in between meals to cleanse the palate. Knapp recommends mixing the limoncello with a lemon-lime soft drink to make a margarita-type mix.

Over two days of distilling, Knapp can run out 132 gallons of wine that have gone bad or wine from low-quality grapes to secure about 30 gallons of alcohol.

The alcohol does not carry over the wine's bad qualities and puts to use a wine that won't be put on the shelves of liquor stores or a winery's tasting room.

“The still is actually kind of like the stills moonshiners used. It's the same kind of principal they used to make moonshine,” Iddings said with a laugh. “But we're licensed ... to make our products.”

Swedish Hill, Goosewatch and Knapp are some of the wineries closest to wine trailers starting at the northern end of Route 89, while Cayuga County's two largest wineries, Long Point Winery and King Ferry Winery, sit at the very beginning of the southern end of the wine trail.

If you go

What: Meet the Winemaker Event

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday

Where: Cayuga Wine Trail

Cost: Free

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net