You turn off Route 14 onto Chase Road and the scale changes immediately. The road narrows, the shoulder goes to dirt, and the landscape stops being the wine-trail cliché of trimmed vineyards and repaved parking lots and becomes a working dairy landscape — a barn set back from the road, silos against the skyline, a pasture with maybe sixty cows in it on any given day. Shtayburne Farm sits at the top of a rise with a view, and you can see the lake from the edge of the parking lot on a clear morning. This is the part of the Finger Lakes that pre-existed the wine boom by a hundred years and that still, in places, quietly operates on a different set of priorities.
The farm has been in the same family for generations. The name is Dutch in origin, and the farm has been working its current acreage for long enough that the family lineage is a real thing rather than a marketing anecdote. We are not going to guess at the current generation's first names and get them wrong in print. What we can say is that the operation is multigenerational, hands-on, and structurally the kind of small New York dairy that has been disappearing from the state for thirty years — except that this one has survived, and thrived, by building a vertical operation that does all three of the things most dairies long ago stopped doing on their own soil: milk the herd, make the cheese, make the ice cream. Cow to cone, in the literal sense. You can watch the cows through the fence and then walk across a gravel driveway and buy a cone of ice cream made from the milk those cows produced.
The cheeses are the part of the operation that has pulled the farm into a wider conversation. Shtayburne makes a short list of cheeses — aged Gouda, flavored Goudas, a cheddar, a soft fresh cheese, seasonal limited runs — and has been picking up recognition on the Finger Lakes Cheese Trail and, in various years, at regional and state cheese competitions for work that has held up against producers from much bigger cheesemaking regions. The Gouda is the one we point guests to. Aged six or twelve or sometimes longer months depending on the wheel, it is a serious cheese in the Old World sense — butterscotch and caramel notes, crystalline texture in the older wheels, a rind you can smell on the other side of the shop. The flavored Goudas (garlic, herb, smoked, and seasonal variations) are, we think, slightly less interesting than the plain aged version, but they are also exactly the cheese some guests will want, and the farm makes them well.
The ice cream is the other half of the operation and, on a summer day, the half that runs the line. The flavors rotate through the season. Strawberry when the strawberry crop is in, in June. Peach in late July. Black raspberry in August. Maple walnut and cinnamon-cayenne in the fall. A chocolate that uses the farm's own milk base and a reliable butter pecan that has been on the board as long as we have been visiting. The texture of the ice cream is the thing to note. It is the dense, slightly chewy, slow-frozen texture of ice cream made in small batches from high-fat milk, which is what you get when the creamery is a hundred feet from the cows and the operator has decided not to cut the base with air or stabilizers for shelf stability. It tastes, as it should, like the dairy it came from.
The farm store runs out of a small building adjacent to the creamery. Inside: the cheeses, in a refrigerated case; a small selection of ice-cream pints for take-home; milk, cream, butter, and occasionally eggs; whatever secondary products the farm has been working on that season. Outside, around to the side, is the ice-cream window, which is where most of the summer traffic ends up. A picnic table or two. A view down the hill toward the lake. The pace in line is appropriate to the product. You wait a few minutes, sometimes longer on a Saturday in July, you order two scoops, you pay in cash or tap a card, you walk off with a cone and stand in the driveway eating it while the dogs in the parking lot bark at nothing. This is the ritual the farm is set up for.
We send guests here for a specific reason that is not actually about the cheese or the ice cream, though both are good. The reason is that the farm is the clearest example, within a fifteen-minute drive of our property, of the pre-wine economy of this stretch of Seneca Lake. The region was a dairy region before it was a wine region, and it remains a dairy region in the parts of the county where the topography didn't lend itself to vineyards. Most of what the visitor sees, driving the wine trail, is the post-1990s reshaping of the landscape. Shtayburne is what the landscape was doing before, and still does. Pulling a guest off the trail for forty-five minutes at Shtayburne reframes the rest of the weekend. The wineries are part of a story that is two generations old. The dairy is part of a story that is a hundred.
Our preferred routing is to work Shtayburne into the drive home from an eastern-shore winery day — you are coming back down Route 14 from Lodi or Lamoreaux, you turn off at Chase Road, you spend twenty minutes at the farm store and the ice-cream window, and you drive back to Burdett with a wheel of aged Gouda and a pint of something for the freezer at the property. The wheel of Gouda ends up on a cheese board that night, with a bottle from whichever winery you stopped at last. The pairing is correct in a way that should be obvious but that most visitors never assemble: the cheese you are eating came from a herd that lives five miles from the vineyard the wine came from. The two products share soil and water and weather. This is what provincial cheese and provincial wine are supposed to do, and they have not often been able to do it at this scale in the United States. Shtayburne and the better Seneca producers are, between them, a small demonstration of what the region is actually capable of.
One hedge. The farm's hours shift with the season. Summer is long — the ice-cream window open late afternoons through early evenings, the farm store open most days. Winter is narrower. If you are driving in October or April or March, call ahead or check the farm's hours for that specific week, because the drive up Chase Road to find the place closed is a genuinely deflating way to spend forty minutes. In season, this is not a problem. Out of season, it is the thing to watch.
Why it matters, to us, to the list: because the Finger Lakes are more than the wineries, and because the operations that keep the rest of the landscape intact — the dairies, the small orchards, the grain projects, the cheesemakers — are the ones doing the quieter work that will matter longer. Shtayburne is one of them. A weekend here that includes a stop at the farm is a weekend that has absorbed the larger geography of the place, not just the trail version. We want our guests to leave with both.
What we tell our guests to order
- A wedge of the aged Gouda — the twelve-month wheel when it's cut - A scoop of the strawberry ice cream at the window, in June - A pint of chocolate or butter pecan for the drive back and the freezer at the house
How to plan the visit
Summer hours are generous; off-season, call or check the farm's site the day before you drive. The ice-cream window fills up on summer weekends after four — go earlier or later. Ten to fifteen minutes from the Landing, depending on route.