In Good Spirit
How Northern California wine industry veterans Ria D'Aversa and Michael Penn found their voice in the Finger Lakes with Ria's Wines
Note: An earlier version of this profile appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of FLX Libations.
On January 30, 2025, a small group of Finger Lakes Wine Industry personnel gathered at the tasting room of Ria’s Wines in Valois, New York. The likes of Ben Riccardi of Osmote, Alex Alvarez-Perez from Usonia, Bob Madill, Canadian-born former co-owner of Sheldrake Point Winery in Ovid and current Wine Director at the Geneva Restaurant Kindred Fare; Jenna Coppola, Sales Manager at Six Eighty Cellars, Ria’s Wines Winemaker and Co-Owner Michael Penn, and Red Newt Winemaker Christina Zapel joining via Zoom to listen to a presentation by Canadian Brothers Nico and Luca Cymbalist unveil their plans for a wind-powered cargo vessel to carry pallets of wine down the Erie Canal to the port of Oswego, and eventually, the LCBO headquarters in Toronto. The start-up was called Clippership, and they run cargo vessels all over North America. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 greatly reduced the time and cost of transporting cargo and people across New York State, and Clippership was aiming to do the same with wine.
Over the course of an hour, they laid out their plan to transport wines cost-effectively with low carbon emissions to make them available in Canadian Markets for wineries licensed to sell wines in Canada (wines are usually transported through North America by Truck), and explained that they chose wine because wine is pallet-friendly (a component of the vessel). Attendees were encouraged to ask questions, and did so throughout the presentation, and the Cymbalists answered them diligently. I came as a casual observer, but toward the end of their presentation, I made the suggestion that they check out Arch Merrill’s 1945 book The Towpath, which details the history of the Erie Canal. Penn, who resides in Geneva, seemed intrigued by the suggestion and told me that he was a fan of local history. The most interesting part of their proposal was the utilization of the Erie Canal for its original purpose—transporting goods and freight—and that Nico was a former Tesla and Space X employee. I wondered what would’ve drawn people like the Cymbalists to our humble wine region.
Penn had heard about Clippership through a close friend who works in Silicon Valley, and was intrigued by the possibility of shipping their wines using a method free of carbon emissions. He reached out to them and had a conversation about the startup, which led to the presentation. “Growing grapes is extremely dependent on a predictable and steady climate for our survival as a business and a farm, so to be able to sell our wines and transport them to a new market without carbon emissions seems like both a great marketing opportunity as well as expressing our values through action,” Penn explained to me later. According to Penn, the Cymbalists grew up on Lake Ontario and spent a lot of time sailing on its waters. “They thought that a route from the Finger Lakes, or Oswego, to Toronto would be a great initial route for proof of concept.” Unfortunately, less than a week after the Cymbalists’ presentation, the Trump Administration put tariffs on Canada. Canada responded by removing American alcohol products from their shelves, effectively ending Clippership’s plans.1
2020 was a banner year for the Finger Lakes Wine Industry, with low disease pressure giving way to a pristine harvest, but Northern California wasn’t so lucky. Wildfires during harvest season forced wine growers there to harvest from a minimal crop, and in some cases, abandoned the crop all together due to smoke taint. For Ria D’Aversa and Michael Penn, the 2020 wildfires proved to be the final straw. Making the decision to move east, they found their way to the Finger Lakes and established Ria’s Wines. Back in California, with its competitive wine industry, winery ownership would’ve been a pipe dream for D’Aversa and Penn. But in the Finger Lakes, it became a dream realized. “The people we saw succeed in California were really the loudest. And that’s not really us,” says Penn.
D’Aversa grew up in New Jersey and studied Botany at The University of Vermont. After graduating in 2006, she worked at the New York Botanical Garden until she found herself furloughed during the 2008 recession. “I didn’t have a lot of things keeping me there, so I thought, ‘Why not explore?’” She took the opportunity to go to Italy and study Pastry Arts, but when she got there, she found herself gravitating toward the wine classes and eventually worked in a vineyard. She saw winegrowing as an an extension and continuation of her background in botany. She eventually returned to the Botanic Garden, but by then, the wine bug had its hold on her. At the suggestion of a co-worker, applied for the Viticulture and Enology program at the UC-Davis and was accepted.
Michael Penn grew up in Bainbridge Island, located in Washington State’s Puget Sound region. He studied Physics and Philosophy at Colorado College, and first became enamored of the wine industry while visiting his Grandfather, a Cattle Rancher, in Australia in 2004. He signed on for a vineyard internship through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) in Australia, then followed it up with a six-month internship at a Winery in California’s Sierra Foothills. After a brief stint at a winery in the Puget Sound, he worked at a nearby brewery for two years. “That’s where I learned my cellar skills,” says Penn. Brewery life become too rote, and Penn reentered the wine industry doing more internships around the world and taking viticulture classes at Walla Walla Community College in between harvests. A professor encouraged Penn to consider the graduate program at UC Davis, and Penn began taking the requisite courses in order to apply. In 2012, Penn returned to California and worked as a Quality Control Technician at Kendall Jackson. For Penn, it was a crash course in the corporate wine world: “I learned a lot of lab skills. I learned a lot about large wineries, how they communicate with you, the communication protocols, the chain of command, how responsibility is shared, and how much stakes are prevented.”
That same year, Penn enrolled at UC Davis, as did D’Aversa, and the two met while enrolled in a viticulture class. Following the completion of their degrees, they remained in California, working together at Ridge Vineyards, and D’Aversa working at McEvoy Ranch in Petaluma, CA, and Constellation Brands, and Penn working at Green and Red Vineyards in St. Helena. D’Aversa, under the tutelage of her boss at McEvoy Ranch, also became a consultant for vineyards, helping farmers transition their vineyards from conventional to organic farming techniques. After they got married in 2017, they launched their own label, Pennrose, which Penn described as one of the perks of working for Green and Red; they worked with grapes that D’Aversa worked with as well as other smaller vineyards. During this time, D’Aversa also taught courses in Viticulture at Santa Rosa Junior College. “As I kind of went up the hierarchy of jobs, you know, you get promoted and on, you don’t work with as many interns. You don’t get to mentor as much. So I was like, ‘I really wanna be still part of the community and get to know people’.”
2020 marked a turning point for the couple. In addition to a worldwide pandemic, Northern California was experiencing serious wildfires that left them questioning their future in the California Wine Industry. “The grape harvest coincides with the wildfire smoke season,” says D’Aversa. “The days where we were picking, we had to wear N95 masks.” They dealt with constant evacuations, and at times, roads in Napa were closed because the mountains were on fire. Grapes were often left on the vines that year, and having also given birth to their daughter the previous year, the smoke prevented her from being able to play outside. “It just felt like, ‘This place is beautiful, I have a great job, but I’m not sure if this is right for me.” For Penn, proximity to at least one set of grandparents was another factor: “Living in California involved two flights to go visit our parents, whereas living close to one of them meant that we could fly to see one and drive to the other.”
Although they considered Penn’s native Washington State, they landed in New York when D’Aversa landed a job at McCall Wines on Long Island at the end of 2020. But they liked the Finger Lakes more, and their young family relocated to Geneva not too long after, citing the number of winemakers who reside there as the reason for their choice. It didn’t hurt that D’Aversa’s parents had relocated to Albany, a 3-4 hour drive from Geneva, depending on which roads or highways you take. Upon their arrival, they began to better acquaint themselves with New York Wines, purchasing wines from Bloomer Creek, Hermann Wiemer, and Forge. “We felt like we needed to get our New York palate going,” recalls D’Aversa. “We wanted to understand what people were making and what the identity was.” D’Aversa got hired to oversee the nursery at Hermann Wiemer, and Penn was hired into a faculty position at Finger Lakes Community College, which helped them both network: “I got to meet a lot of people through that job and I got to see the vineyard sites, and got oriented to the region.” During his stint at FLCC, he developed the course “Wines of the World”, citing that “That was an obvious piece that the program was missing.”
Following the birth of their second child in 2022, D’Aversa moved onto a faculty position at Cornell University, an opportunity she found out about at the hospital after giving birth. That same year, they produced their first vintage, crushing the grapes at FLCC’s Production Facility before moving the rest of production to Hunt Country Vineyards in Branchport. “He was very generous in letting us make wine there,” D’Aversa said of Derek Wilber, who was serving as a consulting winemaker for the facility. Finally in 2024, with the help of a farming loan from the USDA, a small bank loan, and a few investors, D’Aversa and Penn purchased the former Bailey’s Poplar Ridge Vineyards in Valois. Bagley’s Poplar Ridge was founded by Dave Bagley in 1980, and his daughter Brittany took over the winery at the tender age of 19 after his sudden death in 2008. A primary pull was the property’s mature vines. “40-year-old Riesling vines is not something you can just make up,” says Penn. They closed on the property that May, and after a quick remodel, they opened the tasting room in July 2024. D’Aversa and Penn consider 2024 their first full vintage year, or as D’Aversa puts it, “It was our first solo vintage where we grew the grapes and made the wine all under one roof.”
Adapting her West Coast Organic Viticulture skills to the Finger Lakes provided quite the curveball for D’Aversa. Northern California has a longer growing season, generally starting in March in contrast to May in the Finger Lakes. In California, spraying usually ends in late July. In the past, D’Aversa would use that time between the end of spraying and harvest to visit her family in Cape Cod. Northeastern grape farming presents more tasks in less time. “When we have bloom and flowering in June and the buds, we’re also thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, we have to remove tons of leaves! We have to get our chemicals out, we have to spray!’” Since buying their property, they have eliminated the usage of herbicides and insecticides and will use regenrative farming practices in their place, utilizing organic fungicides such as Regalia, which helps curb powdery mildew; LifeGard, which also protects grapes from powdery mildew as well as downy mildew and blight; Stylet Oil, which functions as an insecticide as well as a treatment for botrytis. She has applied what she’s learned as she has carried her consulting practice to Northeastern climates.
They have also opened up the tasting room for other upstart wineries to use. “Ria came to me with the idea. She said she wanted to close the tasting room on Sundays just for the month of January and asked if I wanted to use the space,” says Alexandra Bond of Vagabond Wines. “It was incredibly kind and community oriented and I think for them it provided an enhanced opportunity to get locals back in the building to see what they created there in the time since purchasing it from Bagley’s. We saw it as a chance to sort of sublet a winery since we don’t have one of our own.” For Bond, D’Aversa’s gesture also held sentimental value: Jim Bond’s father helped build the tasting and production facility that Ria’s Wines is now housed in, and Jim Bond’s first job in the wine industry was at Bagley’s at just 18 years old. “We also used to go there a lot when we first started dating, for a glass of bubbly in front of the fireplace. So it felt full circle and incredibly special to be in that space.”
For Penn, it’s also about building community. “We’re here because we think this is a great region to grow grapes. We really want to just ground ourselves and connect. It’s so much fun, and I love to meet like-minded winemakers who share our perspective and values.” Adds D’Aversa: “We were always searching out West, like, ‘Where should we live? Should we get a new job?’ We feel really good about being business owners and being farmers here, and this place has helped solidify that.”
As I was finalizing this profile, the Trump Administration’s emergency tariffs were overturned by the Supreme Court. According to Penn, they are waiting for the Premiers of Quebec and Ontario to overturn their bans on American alcohol sales. If that happens, they will need to re-establish relationships with Canadian importers and distributors. Until then, Clippership’s Lake Ontario route remains on hold.