A Miscellany of Mature Red and White Wines

Diane and I are in the process of bringing home the wines that we have stored off-premises for many years. Just having those goodies nearby has prompted me to – shall we say? — look into them, just to see how they’re doing. So far I have been very happy with the results, so here is a kind of interim report on some of the cellar gems whose corks I’ve pulled recently.
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Luis Pato Quinto do Moinho 2000
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This is a big, big, big wine! Coffee and currants in the aroma were followed by a rush of semi-soft tannins, black currants, berries, and coffee in the mouth. This single-vineyard Baga feels strikingly larger than its modest 12.5% alcohol would indicate. It’s not hot, but mouth-filling and complex, with a lingering coffee/berry finish – in all, a fine, distinctive wine. It went nicely with a risotto of mushrooms, onions, and Spanish chorizo. The cheese course (Pont l’Eveque and Taleggio) brought up all the wine’s sweet fruit.

Vinified from 100% Baga, an indigenous Portuguese grape, and by one of Portugal’s most renowned winemakers, Luis Pato, it seems to have decades yet in front of it. It strikes me as a great wine in all respects, and markedly different in flavor and accent from Spanish, French, or Italian reds: A strong reminder that I must pay more attention to the wines of Portugal.
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Col d’Orcia Brunello di Montalcino 2006
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As its name implies, Col d’Orcia sits above the Orcia river, in the extreme southwest corner of the Brunello zone. Its 108 hectares of Sangiovese grosso vines consistently yield one of the best Brunellos of the zone, and this one is no exception. It opened with a rich, vinous, cherry-and-earth nose. On the palate it felt big but soft and tasted of black cherry and tar/tobacco, very deep, with a long finish.

This was an excellent wine, very elegant and balanced, as I’ve come to expect from Col d’Orcia. Its fruit was very rich, almost sweet, combining youthful zest with mature depth. Clearly, a wine to enjoy now and for at least the next ten years: Col d’Orcia just seems to go from strength to strength.
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Sartori Amarone Corte Bra 2004
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Sartori is a third-generation, family-run winery. Its vineyards are in the heart of the Valpolicella zone, and it handles its vines and grapes in a very traditional manner, resulting in Amarones of great character. This one had an almost-Port-like aroma, big with dried fruits. On the palate, it showed soft and velvety, with fully mature and deep fruit flavors. Concentrated black plums predominated, but different layers showed as it opened in the glass or followed a bite of braised duck or vegetable.

True to Amarone style, this was a huge wine, but well-mannered. As it grew and grew in the glass, I found my wine-speak failing me, and all I could think of to say was “What an incredibly winey wine!”  When I lose language, you know the wine is amazing.
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Three great red wines. Now, I realize that August isn’t the ideal time to be writing about serious red wines. But as a concession to the season, I also opened some older bottles of white wine – including one you probably wouldn’t expect.
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Fontana Candida Frascati Luna Mater 2012
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This was lovely, fully live and fully mature: no primary fruit flavors, but plenty of mature ones — guava, spiced pear, mace, and more. It showed wonderful balance and smooth, mouth-filling flavor, plus a long, sapid, refreshingly acid finish of dried white fruits. As fine a mature white wine as one can imagine, it was delightful with olive bread and big cheeses.

Who knew Frascati was capable of this?  I at least should have: I’ve been preaching the gospel of the quality and longevity of Italian white wines for a long time, and I should have realized that the grapes that go into Frascati – Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia – undistinguished as those may seem to be, are just as capable of yielding top-flight, long-lived wines as any other Italian white grape, when they are selected and treated with respect and care. A bottle like this one is certainly proof of that.
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Paumanok Minimalist Chenin Blanc 2014
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I had wrongly listed this wine in my storage sheets as Paumanok’s basic Chenin Blanc 2019, and so, without looking very closely at the bottle, I chilled it and served it with a very simple meal – which it totally blew away. I hope this was just my ordinary befuddlement and not the first sign of senile dementia.

On behalf of the soundness of my senses, I can say that from the first sip I realized this was a special wine – as, at last, an attentive look at the label quickly confirmed. Paumanok Vineyard’s Minimalist wines are vinified from specially selected lots of grapes, often left a little longer on the vines to attain complete ripeness, and then handled minimally in the cellar so that in the bottle they show the grapes and the soil, not the winemaking.

This bottle was maturing beautifully but still quite fresh, with classic Chenin fruit, dry and chalky yet still floral and hinting variously of apple and especially pear: a wonderful wine from Long Island’s North Fork, which perfectly captures the essence of Chenin Blanc. I’d guess it has years of life still before it. In my opinion, with Chenin Blanc, Paumanok does as well as or better than any American winery on either coast. My erroneous listing betrayed me into an unexpected treat. Would that all my mistakes were so lucky.
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Benanti Etna Bianco Superiore Pietra Marina 2012
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Benanti is a leader in fine Etna wines. The family firm has been totally committed to quality production on Etna for decades now, from long before Etna became celebrated and fashionable. For many of those years, Benanti’s winemaker was the now universally acclaimed Salvo Foti, and he consistently drew the best from the fine properties that Benanti farmed.

Pietra Marina is one of the most important of those. 800 meters up the eastern slope of Etna, planted entirely to Carricante, the indigenous white grape of the volcanic zone, Pietra Marina’s grapes yield juice of delicious concentration, capable of long life and steady maturation. This exemplary bottle was just plain lovely, mineral and fresh and bracing. It started with a beautiful aroma of dried pears and little hints of apricot. That followed through on the palate with some apple joining the fruit chorus, all buttressed by a tingling minerality, and all held in a wonderful balance of fruit and acid. For all the richness of its flavors, it was a restrained wine, not at all aggressive or assertive, but completely welcoming. I kept thinking as I drank it that I would really like to taste it alongside a grilled fresh porcini cap – hard to find here in New York, but maybe worth the flight to Sicily for.

Just for the record: Pietra Marina is capable of much greater aging than this 11-year-old. I’ve been lucky enough, during several visits to Benanti, to taste 20- and 23-year-olds that were totally fresh and live and as lovely as this bottle. Great terroir, great variety, great care, and great talent: it all makes a very great wine.

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On the Fourth of July, We Drank America Great

This year’s Fourth of July frolic made a bit of a challenge for me. I’m happy to say that I – and the wine resources of the USA – rose to it.

Diane’s blog has already recounted the saga of the all-American dinner that we put together for the good friends who guided us around Venice. My role in the festivities was to arrange wines to match with those dishes: not a simple task, especially for one whose palate and whose cellar (I use the word loosely) run more in the direction of Europe than toward the great continent that lies just across the Hudson. That’s right: I don’t even live in continental United States, so you can see the depth of the challenge.

What solved the problem for me and made our Fourth of July drinking great was, once I realized it, quite simple: immigration. Just about every single wine grape in the United States is an immigrant, naturalized against the native plagues of this continent by being grafted onto the roots of indigenous American varieties. And many of the people who convert those once-foreign grapes into American wine are immigrants too, first- and second-generation citizens adapting an Old World skill set to American circumstances, producing wines with discernible European ancestries and unmistakable American accents. Is that a fable for our times?  You tell me.
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We started with a wine that is a Champagne in everything but name: Gruet Brut, a lovely sparkler made in New Mexico (yes!) from the traditional Champagne varieties – Chardonnay, Pinot noir, Pinot meunier – by the traditional méthode champenoise. Gruet is a family-owned and -operated winery, founded in 1983 by the late Gilbert Gruet, whose family made Champagne in his native France. The original vineyard (it has since been joined by two others, all now run by Gilbert’s son and daughter) lay over 4,000 feet up in the windy hills near Elephant Butte Reservoir.

All the Gruet wines show the classic Champagne characteristics, so this is the wine to use if you want to have some fun with a know-it-all friend. The one we drank with hors d’oeuvres launched our evening perfectly – cool, brisk, elegant, and refreshing on a warm and humid July Fourth evening. The thing that will really astound your know-it-all friend is that all the Gruet sparklers, even their brilliant Blanc de Noirs, retail for about $20.
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With a delicious and almost stultifyingly rich Crabmeat Maison, we drank a wine a bit more local (and not from mainland America either), the 2016 Minimalist Chenin blanc from Paumanok Vineyards, on Long Island’s North Fork. Also founded in 1983, and family-owned by Ursula and Charles Massoud, Paumanok specializes in several French varieties. Long Island has no hills to speak of, but it does have breezes from both ocean and sound, and those, combined with dense plantings of 1,100 to 1,400 vines per acre, give Paumanok’s wines all the concentration and character they need.

For my palate, its greatest successes are two Loire valley varieties, the red Cabernet franc and the white Chenin blanc. In France, the latter grape makes Vouvray and the great Savennières, which the chalky minerality of Paumanok’s Minimalist Chenin suggests to me. This is a lovely wine – made, alas, in limited quantities – that worked wonderfully with the crabmeat, its complex leanness playing beautifully against the sweetness of the crab.
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With our lordly rib roast and profusion of farm-fresh salads, we turned to the west coast and Ridge Vineyards, perched 2,300 feet up in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. By American winemaking standards, Ridge is practically an old-timer:  It got started in the 1960s, and from 1969 onwards, for more than 40 years, its winemaker was the masterly Paul Draper, a genius of what Ridge now proudly calls “pre-industrial winemaking.”

Ridge is famous for its great Monte Bello Cabernet, but what it does with Zinfandel and other less regarded varieties is equally remarkable. Our 2010 Petite sirah (actually probably Durif, a variety now not much grown in California and almost entirely neglected in its native France) showed amazing complexity and subtlety, with many different elements emerging from its basso profundo of bitter chocolate to mesh with the varying flavors of our main course.
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With four very distinctive cheeses, we drank a 2010 Ridge Geyserville – a blended wine named for its vineyard because no one of its several varieties is present in sufficient quantity to justify a varietal name under California law. This lovely bottle contained 64% Zinfandel, 20% Carignane, 12% Petite sirah, 2% Alicante Bouschet, and 2% Mataro (as Mourvèdre is commonly called in California).

This was a big wine – 14.3% alcohol – but nevertheless supple and elegant. It played wonderfully with the cheeses, which differed widely in texture, flavor, and intensity, adapting itself quite comfortably to each. I’ve always loved Ridge’s Zinfandels, and I prefer to drink them at around ten years of age. This gorgeous example was a perfect illustration of why.

Zinfandel has become so established in California that many people think of it as a native American grape. This capstone wine of our Fourth of July feast is a perfect example of an Old World variety (it’s closely related to Italian Primitivo and allied Croatian and Slovenian grapes) transformed into a classic New World wine. Happy Fourth of July indeed! Thomas Jefferson would have enthusiastically approved.

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A Cabernet Franc Face-off

When it comes to scenery, Long Island is no match for the Loire Valley. The flat former potato fields of the North Fork bear no resemblance to the steep vineyards and castellated towns that punctuate the shores of the Loire and its tributaries. Moreover, the soils of Long Island’s vineyards differ greatly from those of the middle Loire, home territory of Chenin blanc and Cabernet franc: If anything, the North Fork soils come closest to the low-lying, sandy gravels and clays of Bordeaux, where Cabernet sauvignon is king..

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Loire Vineyard

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Paumanok Vineyard

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But despite all those differences, Loire grapes do very well on the North Fork. White varieties particularly thrive: Almost every grower on Long Island cultivates Sauvignon blanc, the star of the upper Loire, and Paumanok Vineyards particularly has had startling success with Chenin blanc, the prized white grape of the middle Loire.

Given that, I wondered how well Cabernet franc, the chief red grape of the middle Loire, which makes such charming dinner wines as Chinon and Bourgueil, would fare on the North Fork. To find out, I decided to taste a representative Loire Cab franc from a classic appellation against Paumanok’s Cab franc – Paumanok because of its achievement with the middle Loire’s Chenin – and check out the similarities and differences. Easy and fun: my ideal combination for all chores. And made all the more fun when Beloved Spouse opted to make a classic Loire dish for us to taste the wines with: the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday, eating and drinking our own personal sunshine.

For this experiment I had on hand a 2016 Domaine de la Haute Olive Chinon and a 2014 Paumanok. It turned out to be just as interesting and enjoyable as I had hoped. Both wines smelled and tasted authentically of the variety – light fruit aromas, perhaps a little raspberry, with earthy, herbaceous notes and even a hint of smoke, soft on the palate, with moderate acidity and subdued black fruit: not powerhouses but charmers. Those are classic Cabernet franc characteristics.

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Tasted by themselves, in the sort of isolation that so often marks professional tastings and judgings, they seemed unexciting, but sound and well made. A hint of what they were capable of as dinner wines showed in the way both got the digestive juices flowing. They wanted food, and made the tasters want it too.

As a textbook illustration of everything that’s wrong with formal wine tastings and their resulting scores, these wines changed dramatically when dinner appeared: Both just blossomed, opening complex, soft flavors that interplayed differently and beautifully with each dish. Their differences from each other, almost invisible in the formal tasting, showed more clearly with food, the Chinon slightly lighter bodied and more elegant, the Paumanok fuller, earthier – but both interacted splendidly with the dinner. (You can read about our dinner dishes on Diane’s blog, here.) It’s no wonder Rabelais loved the wines of Chinon: They played his game.
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It was abundantly clear from this little experiment that Paumanok Vineyards has gotten Cabernet franc right, verifying in my mind that it has a vocation for Loire grapes. The question it raises for me is, how much of the North Fork shares that vocation? The predominant red grapes planted there are, unsurprisingly, Cabernet sauvignon and Merlot, just as in California. The prestige of Bordeaux wines has largely straightjacketed American winemaking since the 1960s, and the small amount of Cabernet franc grown here is almost always used only in Meritage wines and other replications of the orthodox Médoc blend – so Paumanok deserves praise for having the courage to bottle a monovarietal Cab franc, and even more praise for getting it so right.

The Cabernet franc red wines of the middle Loire make wonderful drinking, without being overly expensive: Sunday dinner wines you could call them, if families still made Sunday dinner a weekly special occasion. They don’t demand long aging, though they can take it, and they don’t require reverence or ceremony in their consumption. Though, come to think of it, they can probably take that too: I am just remembering that humble Cabernet franc constitutes about two-thirds of the blend of the fabled Cheval Blanc, one of Bordeaux’s greatest red wines. I do hope some Long Island grape growers will also remember that.

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Paumanok Vineyards’ Chenin Blanc

Every now and again, a wine comes out of left field and just bowls me over. This happened last week when I opened a bottle of Paumanok Vineyards’ Minimalist Chenin Blanc. To say the wine impressed me understates the case: I thought it was gorgeous. The dry and sweet white wines of the middle Loire are pretty much the gold standard for Chenin. This Long Island wine tasted fuller and richer than most dry Vouvray, less austere and almost as structured as Savennieres – which, god knows, is about as good as Old World Chenin gets. An eye-opener, an attention-getter of a wine. So I decided to look further into it.

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Paumanok Vineyards got started in 1983, which makes it an old-timer among Long Island wineries. There were only a few of them then, pioneers excited by the possibilities of the North Fork’s long growing season and well-drained soils, as well as a loose similarity to the climate and terroir of France’s prized Médoc. The basic agriculture that had sustained the region – acres and acres of potatoes, cabbages, and corn – was fading, and land was available. If wine-growing did nothing else for the region, it scored a major triumph in saving the North Fork from developers and their battalions of boxes.

Kareem Massoud

The Massoud family, owners of Paumanok, has roots in Lebanon and Germany, but from the start they planted French varieties: Cabernet sauvignon, Cabernet franc, Merlot, Chardonnay, Riesling, Sauvignon blanc, even Petit verdot. Kareem Massoud, son of the founder and now winemaker, says that there is nothing distinctive about the terroir of the Chenin vineyards, but that all the Loire varieties – especially Sauvignon blanc and Cabernet franc – seem to do well on Long Island. Chenin blanc, he says, they found growing on a plot they acquired in the late Eighties – and they almost ripped it out, until they realized how well it was doing.

I lived on Long Island way back when, and find it hard to imagine how Chenin blanc had ever found its way there among the potatoes and pumpkins, but a wonderfully serendipitous find it was. Paumanok’s Chenin blanc every year ranks among the best in the US – and yet it remains the only one made on Long Island. Hello? How can that happen?  Do all the other producers hate Vouvray?

Paumanok’s Minimalist Chenin blanc stands a whole level higher, in my estimation, than the very fine “ordinary” Chenin, which wins the prizes. The back label of my 2014 bottle tells its story concisely:

This wine was produced using minimalist winemaking techniques. The fruit comes from our vineyard planted in 1982. Select clusters of unblemished Chenin Blanc that had attained total ripeness were carefully hand harvested and whole cluster pressed. The juice was transferred into stainless steel barrels where alcoholic fermentation spontaneously occurred. Only 84 cases were bottled.

As Kareem pointed out to me, this is a purely variety- and terroir-powered wine: Nothing intervenes to modify the expression of the grape and the soil. That purity comes through on the palate with lovely intensity.

Diane and I drank this Minimalist Chenin with some Scotch smoked salmon, followed by simply sauteed filets of John Dory, and it made a wonderful match with both. Its fruit was rich and dry, but hard to pin down: The closest I can come to an accurate descriptor would be half-ripe white figs with an amazing underlayer of minerality and structured by vivid acidity. I would guess that, like many Loire Chenins, this wine could age very well – but I can honestly say that I would be hard put not to drink it all before it had any chance to mature. For me, this is a masterly American wine. I wish there were more of it, and I hope there will be, eventually.

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Italian-American Relations

For a dinner at home, we recently had the pleasure of entertaining Valter Fissore, the winemaker at Elvio Cogno, and his public relations rep, our good friend Marta Sobrino from the Wellcom agency in Alba. At Marta’s request – this was only her second time in NY and the States – Diane prepared una cena vera Americana, a real American meal. We kept it as local and seasonal as possible (you can read the whole account of it on Diane’s blog) and I sought out good American wines to match the foods – but not too many, because I expected (rightly) that Valter would have some of his own beautiful bottles for us to taste.

We began over hors d’oeuvre with Gruet New Mexico sparkling wine. The Gruet family are the real thing, champagne makers from France, and they have very successfully transplanted their expertise. They can’t, by law, call any of their wines Champagne, but they make all of them by the traditional Champagne method, and the results are as authentic-tasting as any sparkling wine from anywhere. We drank their Blanc des Noirs, which I like because of its fine body and excellent, bone-dry fruit. Not to mention its versatility: it partnered very well with very diverse tidbits. Not entirely by the way, it is also very reasonably priced, which makes it very well worth seeking out.

The next wine, served with the fish course, was Castello di Borghese Chardonnay 2009. This wine originates on the North Fork of Long Island: The vineyards are those of the original Hargrave estate, the first of Long Island’s serious wine producers. This Chardonnay had never been in wood; that was one of my requirements, and you cannot imagine how difficult it is in New York City to find an unoaked domestic Chardonnay. I didn’t have time run out to the North Fork and visit the wineries to look for one – though given the time it took me to find one in town, perhaps I should have. In any case, I came up with this Borghese wine, American-made and Italian-named, and hoped this was a portent that it would be the perfect wine for my occasion.

Well, not really, though it certainly was interesting. It struck everybody with its huge, forward fruit, all of it tropical: pineapple and lichee flooding out of the glass in the nose and on the palate. No evident wood, and decent acidity – Long Island does that – made it more companionable with the fish than I at first feared it would be. Valter seemed fascinated by it, though I wasn’t sure whether that was from pleasure at something so different from the white wine he normally gets or from the strangeness of it. It’s not really my kind of Chardonnay – I like more restraint and more structure – but I can readily see that many people would find it very attractive. And it was certainly genuinely American.

When we moved on to meat, we switched to red. I tried a Ridge Zinfandel I’d never come across before – Buchignani Ranch 2007. Normally I’m very fond of Ridge Zinfandels. I like to drink them when they’re ten years old or so, by which point all the California and Primitivo-kin exuberance of the wine has calmed down and come into balance. They usually remind me, at that stage, of classic clarets – very harmonious and deep, even serene. Well, this one wasn’t serene. It was all forward fruit and tannins, a big push in the face of not-yet-integrated flavors. Like the Chardonnay, it wasn’t exactly what I’d been looking for, but it was unquestionably American – and I think a bit of a shock to Italian palates.

Which were quickly soothed – as was my own – by the wines Valter had brought. From meat through cheeses (yes, they were American too, and excellent), we drank Cogno Barolo Ravera 2008 and Marcarini Barolo Brunate 1986. These were two lovely, very different wines.

The ’08 Ravera, as Valter pointed out and everyone’s tasting confirmed, showed the affinity of Nebbiolo and Pinot Noir. It had definite Pinot Noir flavors and some of the middle-weight suppleness of that variety. It was surprisingly easy to drink for a young Barolo, with clean outlines and beautifully soft, welcoming tannins. For all its readiness to drink, however, it still shows every sign of ageability: it will be a keeper, I think. This is a great wine for anyone coming to Barolo for the first time, particularly for someone making the transition from French to Italian wines.

About the ’86 Brunate, it’s hard to say anything beyond Wow! This was an absolutely classic mature Barolo, elegant, long, totally composed. It had dark, mushroomy/earthy aromas, dark flavors – leather/tobacco/dry black fruits – on the palate, all offering themselves willingly but not brashly: accessible yet restrained, full-flavored yet light on the palate – a short course in what Barolo is all about. This was a wine made by Valter’s father-in-law Elvio Cogno, when he was winemaker at Marcarini before he left to produce his own wines, and it was both an honor and a pleasure to drink it.

After all that intense palatal play, the evening ended diminuendo – coffee, grappa, and good night. Which it was.

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Starting from Paumanok

When you reach the end of the Long Island Expressway, a journey more often measured in time and endurance than in miles, you’ve reached the point where the tail of what Walt Whitman accurately described as “fish-shape Paumanok” begins. South and east of Riverhead sprawl the Hamptons, the domain of ocean beaches and oceans of suntan lotion. North and east of Riverhead you enter the heartland of Long Island wine. Yes, there are a handful of vineyards on the South Fork – but the North Fork shelters some three to four dozen of them, dotted among the golf courses and surviving farms from Aquebogue almost out to the Marion Causeway.

Winery map from Long Island Wines website

It isn’t Napa, and there’s no Wine Train – actually, there’s no train of any kind – but it is still, as the Michelin Guide would say, worth the journey.

We like to make a day of it – a little birding; stops at farm stands for local corn and tomatoes and especially, late in the season, Green Mountain potatoes; lunch somewhere (maybe Claudio’s in Greenport for the terrific fresh clams); and many stops at wineries to taste and buy. It’s best before Memorial Day or after Labor Day, when the roads hold only locals and you can putter along at a tourist’s or birdwatcher’s pace, but even the summer traffic on the local roads can be bearable if you avoid weekends.

I have to admit that even long acquaintance with the North Fork hasn’t gotten me to all of the wineries – a situation long overdue for correction, but which force of habit and inborn sloth keep postponing. Long Island growers long ago impressed me with their ability to coax first-class vinifera grapes out of Long Island’s flat fields.

Thriving vines at Paumanok Vineyards

But about the same time, I formed the conviction (maybe now outdated, and another reason for me to get serious about the North Fork) that they hadn’t yet had that charismatic winemaker who would set the mark for their wines at a commensurately high level. I always find a lot to like in Long Island wines, but I haven’t yet found anything that stops me dead in my tracks and makes me think I’m tasting a world-class wine. Hope springs eternal: I believe the region is capable of that, and I’m taking a resolution here and now to pay more attention, more often.

Meanwhile, a ghastly New York City July pushed me to pure escapism: we – Diane, myself, and two equally heat-beaten friends – hopped into our wonderfully air-conditioned car (always cooler than our apartment, and Con Ed can’t charge us for it), slogged through the Midtown Tunnel, and then violated a few speed limits to reach the comfortable breezy, tree-lined North Fork Boulevards des Vins: Sound Avenue and Main Road, aka Route 25. We spent a comfortable day dropping into whichever wineries looked less crowded (admittedly not the soundest method of exploring a wine region), searching in a very limited range for inexpensive, preferably totally unoaked white wines to sustain us through the seemingly unending heat wave.

Tasting room at Osprey's Dominion

You can judge something of the diversity of Long Island winemaking just by the names of some of the wineries: at one end of the spectrum, Osprey’s Dominion, Duck Walk North, and One Woman Vineyards; at the other, Comtesse Thérèse and Castello di Borghese Vineyard and Winery. People grow everything out here: among the red varieties, mostly Merlot (the most successful red wine for my palate), Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Pinot Noir, though I know there is a little Gamay and Refosco and Sangiovese and Syrah planted as well; among the whites (for me the most interesting of Long Island’s range of wines) Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Grigio, Tocai Friulano, Riesling, Sauvignon, and Viognier, and probably some other varieties that I haven’t encountered yet. (I pass over in silence the various fruit wines on offer. Yes, I’m a snob.)

Part of the North Fork’s problem, I think, is exactly that “people grow everything out here.” Its terroirs and microclimates aren’t very varied: Essentially, there’s one of each. Overall, the soils and growing conditions at least loosely resemble those of Bordeaux – which is good, I guess – but that doesn’t mean that any grape variety that will grow here will necessarily give you a great wine. Individual growers and the region as a whole have got to find out what varieties really reward attention, and that is a process that takes a lot of time and patience and experimentation.

Abundant choices at Martha Clara Vineyards

For instance: I was impressed by Martha Clara Vineyard’s Viognier, a pleasing, minerally wine from a Rhone Valley variety that seems to like Long Island’s hot summers, and I was very impressed by Paumanok Vineyard’s Chenin Blanc, a really lovely dry wine that recalled Savennières without imitating it. And several wineries – e.g., Lieb, Osprey’s Dominion – were offering charming, simple, refreshing unoaked Chardonnays at prices considerably below those of their to-me-almost-undrinkable oaked Chardonnays. Particularly in the context of all that wonderfully fresh, wonderfully flavorful Long Island fish and shellfish, a coating of new oak vanilla is totally out of place on a dinner wine.

Lusty Long Island livestock? Or typical traffic on the LIE?

It’s a bit of a downer, after a fun day in the greenery, to slog back along the LIE to steamy New York City, but a trunkful of assorted goodies more than justifies the effort. Now, if only the Long Island Railroad would install a high-speed, luxury train to the North Fork…. Oh yes, and while we’re at it, world peace would be nice too.

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