THE romance of wine country is at an ebb in January. After the excitement of pumpkins and Christmas trees, the North Fork looks bleak and abandoned, with bare vines stretching into the distance under chilly gray skies. In high summer, the big wineries may have 10,000 visitors on a busy weekend; in mid-winter, they may get 10. This is the perfect time for a wine-tasting tour. Winemaking is an industry that actually attracts tourists. People don't flock to factories where jogging shoes are made, and they certainly don't want to see what goes into hot dogs or frozen chicken dinners. What's so special about wine? One reason is that unlike other industries, it is beautiful to look at. The wineries don't seem like factories at all, but more like elegant private estates. But the main reason for the popularity with visitors is that they offer free samples (unlike the Chrysler Corporation, or your local French restaurant). I have often wondered how the wineries cope with their flow of eager and (as the day goes on) increasingly merry clients. Wine is a complicated subject, and taste is impossible to describe or predict. How on earth do the vintners manage to get through the tasting day without fistfights, lawsuits and serious collateral damage? The answer is: with superhuman patience and a certain theatrical flair. Charles and Ursula Massoud invited me to observe the drama of the tasting room at their Paumanok Vineyard in Aquebogue. I arrived on a sunny Saturday morning to find the place empty except for two couples all the way from Wayne, N.J. They were full of questions. ''Where do you get the grapes for this?'' ''Why does this chardonnay taste different from the other one?'' ''Why do you call it barrel fermented?'' ''Where does the color come from?'' So I learned my first lesson about working in a tasting room: most questions are easy. If you are lazy, almost every query can be answered by invoking the weather (''It was wet in '96''), the grape variety or the fermentation technique. But every question was carefully answered by Ursula Massoud, who must have heard them all 10,000 times before. ''You have to love this job,'' she explained wryly. In summer, these tasting rooms are mobbed. In winter, the few visitors feel conspicuous. They enter the large tasting room warily and pretend to be fascinated by the view, or the displays of T-shirts and wine-stain remover. At last, they cautiously approach the tasting counter, muttering things like ''A bit early in the day'' or ''Maybe just one little sip.'' They are right to be wary. For the taster, the ritual is full of traps. How do you pronounce sauvignon blanc without losing your dentures? What do you say, once you have tasted? When I first started drinking wine, it was either red or white, nice or nasty. Now it may be crisp, lively, with a floral nose, fruity, smoky, with a long finish, lean, full-bodied, dramatic, muscular or alluring. It's hard going for those brought up on the Coke-or-Pepsi choice. All the North Fork wineries aim to make their product user friendly. They play down the mystique of viniferas and vintages. Each visitor gets a small medicinal dose, just enough to swirl around and pronounce judgment. Printed descriptions, laid out on the tasting counter, make it easier for customers to fake it. ''Not quite lively enough for my taste. Do you have something more muscular?'' Occasionally, a real connoiseur turns up. These people really know their stuff, and train like Olympic athletes. They toss our comments about pH balance and smooth tannins with supreme confidence, and must on no account be patronized. Only the expert vintner can tell if this is yet another imposter who just happened to read a wine book before setting out on the tour. As the day went on, small groups drifted into the tasting room. Four young tourists from Japan arrived, and tasted diligently. If wine language is difficult for us, how much more difficult must it be for them? How can a drink be ''dry'' if, when you spill it down your shirt, it is so obviously wet? How can it be ''smoky'' when it is not on fire? They smiled in a bemused way, and said ''Very good'' to everything. There is no other business quite like this. The tasting room ritual is social, almost like a party with a particularly knowledgeable host. But somewhere along the line, there needs to be an actual sale. A small winery can pour away a substantial proportion of its product in tastings. But the only pressure to buy is moral. As people prepare to go, they take on an uneasy, shifty look, and start checking prices. When the tasting room is almost empty, it is hard to leave without buying something, and most people do, even if it is only a bottle of wine-stain remover. As I stood behind the tasting table, I was overcome with feelings of inadequacy. It was like one of those bad dreams, when you are about to take an examination in an unknown subject after cutting classes all semester. Each time a customer approached, every last fragment of wine knowledge fled out of my brain, and I could not tell merlot from riesling. Ursula Massoud, or her charming son Kareem (who gave up a career in Wall Street to do this), stepped in to handle the questions. To tell the truth, I was having flashbacks to my own experiences as an amateur winemaker. In theory, making wine is easy. There are half a dozen small companies on the Island that sell the necessary equipment. You just mash up some grapes, add yeast, let the whole thing ferment, then bottle it. Although I read the books and tried to follow the instructions, the result was usually several dozen bottles full of vile, opaque vinegar. I used to invite my friends around for tastings of each new vintage. They would make choking noises, and a wounding comment like: ''How on earth did you get the cat to sit on the bottle?'' After one or two such tastings they would offer excuses: there was a death in the family, they were dead themselves, anything to avoid drinking my wine. That was how I learned that winemaking is more an art than a science. That was how I learned to be nervous about wine tastings. You may have better luck with winemaking than I did. But my advice is to treat it like nuclear physics or brain surgery, and leave it to the experts. If you must make wine at home, don't ask your friends to taste it. Take them out for a drive on the North Fork. It's really nice, in winter. DAVID BOUCHIER |