Vinifera Wine Cellars a New York Success : Vintners: Improving on his father’s start, Willy Frank helps change image of Finger Lakes wineries from cheap and sweet to high quality vintages.

When it came time to take charge of his father’s celebrated winery high above Keuka Lake, Willy Frank knew he’d have to make decisive changes, even if it caused the old man much heartache.

It was the spring of 1984, and Frank had been waiting in the wings for 22 years, commuting from New York City on weekends to help with planting and harvesting and repairs.

“My father was losing his eyesight and his palate,” he said. “He was at the bottom and he realized it.”

At 85, Dr. Konstantine Frank was probably New York’s most famous winemaker. A war refugee from Ukraine, he had hauled the Finger Lakes wine region into the modern era by proving that delicate European vinifera grapes, considered among the world’s finest, could be grown in the eastern United States.

His scientific genius in the vineyard was undisputed. His chardonnays and Rieslings had often vanquished the French in blind tastings. As a business, though, his winery was being run into the ground.

But Willy Frank had to wait a few years more than he expected before his father, single-minded and proud, picked up the phone and asked him to take over.

“I knew it was going to be a hard job,” he said. “He was a tough man, a perfectionist.”

Quitting a career as a manufacturer’s representative at age 59, Frank quickly set about transforming Vinifera Wine Cellars from an experimental station into a profitable winery--one he could pass down to his children.

The objective would be no different: Create wines that duplicate, if not surpass, the finest vintages of France and California. And, along the way, Frank would do some trailblazing of his own, turning out gold-medal red and sparkling wines every bit as exquisite as his father’s still whites.

First, he needed to put the house in order.

He hired the best winemaker he could afford. He reorganized distribution. He quietly sold off, in bulk, more than 20,000 gallons of vintage that had aged past its prime in the tanks because his father was too busy in his laboratory to worry about marketing and sales.

“He never considered this a business,” Frank said. “I said, ‘Papa, even the Catholic Church is a business--if there is no income, there is no church!’

“His wines were excellent but spotty. They were good enough to wind up in the White House, but his heart was in the vineyard.”

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One change that hurt was the son’s insistence on French oak barrels. Dr. Frank had a passionate belief in all things American. But the younger Frank believed the French barrels were far superior, justifying the $600 apiece they cost today.

Frank postponed the most painful task of all. Only after his father died in September 1985 did he begin to uproot all but a dozen of the 60 vinifera varieties that, against all predictions, had flourished in a region where winter temperatures commonly drop to 15 below zero.

“You cannot make 60 different wines to perfection. We kept what we felt were the best,” said Frank, surveying the autumn-hued slopes rising above the narrow, sun-sparkling lake. “The goal here is quality.”

After a textbook-perfect summer, New York wineries expect 1995 will yield top-notch vintages, bringing more accolades to an old and still underrated wine country where the viticultural revolution is in full swing.

Of the state’s 100 wineries, 26 grow only viniferas and another 36 have begun to replace the native labrusca and French American hybrids that, for a century, branded the region as a producer of cheap, simple, sweet wines.

“There is going to be a weeding out,” Frank said. “Excellent wines will flourish and the rest will not make it. Worldwide consumption of cheap wines is going down rapidly.”

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Frank sells up to 200,000 bottles each year, 60% of them in the Northeast, Canada and Japan. The rest is carted away by tourists, many arriving by the coach load from as far off as Minnesota and Florida.

“Willy has turned his father’s great grapes into some absolutely great wines,” said James Trezise, president of the New York Wine & Grape Foundation. “If he had not brought the operation to the next level, Dr. Frank would have been just a historical footnote.”

An agricultural engineer, Dr. Frank ran the Soviet Union’s post-revolutionary vineyards until forced to flee the invading German Army in 1941. He arrived penniless in America with his wife and three children in 1951, and his poor English consigned him to a succession of menial jobs.

In 1953, he finally convinced a winemaker, the French-born Charles Fournier, that vinifera shoots could be grafted onto hardy North American root stalks--and survive. Hadn’t he already grown vinifera grapes along Ukraine’s Dnieper River, where temperatures plunge to 40 below zero?

Fournier hired him, and the rest is history. Dr. Frank’s success snapped 200 years of failure, dating to Thomas Jefferson.

“My father was a real teacher and a pioneer,” Frank said. “I probably am a little bit of the same cloth.”

Now 70, Frank still works an 18-hour day during crush, which runs through October. But since his own son came aboard in 1993 after 13 years with a Long Island winery, he’s found more time to concentrate on sparkling wine, made with classic champagne grapes he planted himself, and research a Siberian grape variety that appears to be almost 100% immune to fungus.

“Just imagine, years in the future, a quality species that is resistant to disease and severe cold!” he said, excitedly.

His children, Fred and Barbara, have brought in their own ideas about running the business.

“I have an open mind,” Frank said. “The worst thing to do is insist on the status quo.”