Discerning wine drinkers looking for new areas to explore should head to the southern shore of Lake Erie. Lake Erie, one of the five Great Lakes, has long been the backyard of U.S. grape juice production. The wine produced around the quintessential Rust Belt city of Erie, Pennsylvania, in what is called Lake Erie Wine Country, part of the much bigger Lake Erie AVA, is lesser-known. Wine With 23 wineries and around 30,000 acres of vineyard split across the border between Pennsylvania and New York—about halfway between Buffalo and Cleveland—there are plenty of chardonnays, cabernet francs, pinot noirs, and merlots. Besides vitis vinifera grapes, many labels also sell sweeter wines produced using vitis labrusca, as native North American grapes are called. There are also hybrid grapes. Some of the wineries are vineyards and only produce from estate-grown grapes. Others source from across the Lake Erie AVA and, in some cases, …