JUDGE ST — New York State Senator Peter Oberacker has been busy this summer on the campaign trail for his congressional bid.
Too busy, it appears, to do any paperwork.
The Republican running to unseat freshman Congressman Josh Riley in New York’s 19th congressional district is more than a month delinquent on filing his personal financial disclosure.
It’s not the first time—the last one Oberacker filed in January was more than two months overdue.
When he’s not working in politics, Oberacker is tending his grapes at Sparrow Hawk Vineyards, which he owns and operates in the hamlet of Schenevus in Otsego County. During the pandemic, he began working with a new hybrid grape called La Crossaint with the hope of making a wine similar to a semi-dry Riesling.
Oberacker entered the State Senate in January 2021. He did not disclose any involvement in the winery across five separate financial disclosures from 2020 to 2024, according to public records reviewed by the Judge Street Journal.
All the while, he was developing the vineyard—registering an LLC in November 2021 and posting photos on Facebook of construction updates in May 2022.
Later that year, Oberacker received a stop-work order on his project because the county did not have any record of a building permit, as reported in the Daily Star.
They violated the order repeatedly, according to Letters to the Editor in the Freeman’s Journal. Oberacker then filed a defamation suit against the Freeman’s Journal for publishing the letters.
He finally got a special-use permit approved for the “production of wines, tastings + events,” in summer 2024.
It was not until 2026 that Oberacker reported a connection to Sparrow Hawk—first on the delinquent financial disclosure for his congressional campaign, and then on a subsequent form for the State Senate.
A spokesperson for Oberacker did not respond to a request for comment.
In a past life, Oberacker worked as a food scientist, according to his campaign website, leading the team that developed Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich.
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