By rights, no one should grow wine grapes in upstate New York. The winters are long and savage, cold enough to kill a vine outright. And yet, on the slopes above a handful of long, deep lakes, vinifera not only survives, it makes some of the most precise dry Riesling in the world. The reason is the water.

The Finger Lakes are exactly that: a row of narrow lakes scored into the land by glaciers, some of them hundreds of feet deep. Water that deep holds its temperature, and that stored warmth changes everything on the slopes around it. In autumn the lakes give back their heat and hold off the first frost. In winter they temper the worst of the cold. Through the growing season they steady the swings. It is just enough moderation to carry the vines through a winter that would otherwise end them. The grapes that survive grow on steep banks of shale and slate, free-draining and stony, the kind of ground that makes a vine struggle and concentrate.

Now think about what a cold, marginal place does to a grape. It ripens slowly and never fully softens. The sugar stays modest, the acid stays high, and the fruit comes in lean rather than lush. For Riesling, that produces something startling: a wine that is bone-dry, with no sweetness at all, all lime and green apple and underripe peach laid over a cold, wet-stone minerality, with an acidity that races down the middle of the tongue. This is the spiritual home of American dry Riesling, and it tastes like the place it comes from: cold water, grey shale, a short hard summer.

If you tasted the Washington Riesling a couple of weeks ago, you met the off-dry version of this grape: riper, rounder, a kiss of sweetness. The Finger Lakes is the same grape with the sweetness stripped out and the acid turned up. Same variety, colder place, completely different wine. We will put the two side by side on Tuesday.

Three steps in, by place rather than label:

• Affordable: a broad Finger Lakes Riesling, bright with lime and green apple, dry and easy.
• Better: a single-lake dry Riesling from a shale slope above Seneca or Cayuga. More wet-stone minerality, racing acid, real cut.
• Luxury: a single-vineyard wine from a steep, cool slope, bone-dry and built to age, the kind that trades its youthful lime for lime oil, wet slate and a flinty note over years.

Place comes before packaging, always. Before the grape, before the producer, there is a deep cold lake, a shale slope, and a winter the water just barely holds back. Taste that, and the wine makes sense.