BRANCHPORT, N.Y. — A half-century ago, Vince Bedient spent his days chopping down trees for his father’s sawmill, stealing time during harvest to haul farmers’ grapes to a Welch’s juice factory.

Now 78, Mr. Bedient can attest to the multiple charms and challenges of a vineyardist’s life during a springtime ramble around his 220-acre farm on a mile-long slope above Keuka’s northwest corner.

Growing the right varieties to suit ever-changing tastes is a perpetual juggle. But over the past five years, Mr. Bedient and his son, Jim, have taken a sharp turn away from the native labrusca vines long favored in west-central New York’s Finger Lakes, one of America’s oldest wine-and-grape regions.

Mainstays such as Concord and Niagara, used in juices, jellies, and inexpensive wines, fetch between $200 and $350 a ton versus between $500 and $800 for French-American hybrids like Vignoles and Seyval Blanc. And premium European vinifera grapes — chardonnay, pinor noir, merlot — pull in anywhere from between $1,100 and $2,000 a ton.

Rooting out gnarly vines and planting new ones that take three years to bear fruit is not cheap: between $10,000 and $20,000 an acre.

The fabled microclimate that has drawn a global reputation for rieslings grown along nearby Seneca and Cayuga Lakes isn’t as near-perfect on Keuka’s higher-elevation hillsides.

But nature gave Finger Lakes growers a nudge. Harsh winters in 2004 and 2005 wiped out swaths of vineyards ringing the four biggest of the 11 fiordlike lakes — glacial gouges that ordinarily temper harmful tilts in the climate.

When it came time to replant, vinifera’s star rose ever higher.

“A lot of the challenge when looking at new varieties is rolling the dice a little bit, based on what I know about my vineyard, how cold it gets, what can I afford to try to grow? And sometimes you guess wrong,” a viticulturist with Cornell University’s cooperative extension program, Hans Walter-Peterson, said.

On the plus side, “you go from maybe breaking even, if that, to certainly making a profit.”

Vinifera plantings in New York’s wine country, which hops from Long Island and the Hudson Valley across to the Lake Erie shore, have swelled from 324 acres in 1980 to 5,200 acres in 2006. In the 9,200-acre Finger Lakes, they’ve climbed 40% in the last seven years to an estimated 1,650 acres today.

Native grapes remain by far the biggest category statewide, but their footprint in the Finger Lakes shrank 10% to 4,920 acres between 2001 and 2006. Driving this march toward better quality vines is a relentless rise of wineries, many supplied by the state’s 1,000-plus grape farms.

While California towers over the $162 billion-a-year wine-and-grape industry, New York is fourth in the nation with 243 wineries, nearly twice as many as a decade ago. The Finger Lakes boasts 98 wineries, compared with 61 in 2000 and a mere handful 30 years ago.