A Wine Region That's Aging Beautifully
MAP: Long Island,
N.Y.
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Business Week: November 22, 1999
Department: Letter From Long Island
Headline: A Wine Region That's Aging Beautifully
Byline: By Steve Hamm; Edited by Sandra Dallas
My father-in-law, Tony Mancuso, tells this marvelous story about winemaking
in New York. It's 1934. He's 8 years old. He descends into the dimly
lit cellar of an apartment building on Southern Avenue in the Bronx
with his grandfather, Sal Cassiano, who makes wine there. They discover
that one of the barrels has sprung a leak, and a few gallons of wine
have spilled onto the concrete floor. A masonry dike has contained
the juice, and Cassiano is loath to waste it, so he sops up most of
the wine with a towel and squeezes it into 2-gallon bottles. When
he's done, he leans down to his grandson and puts a finger to his
lips. ``Don't tell anyone,'' he whispers, in Italian. ``Nobody will
notice.''
New York wine has come a long way since then. Out on the eastern
tip of Long Island, a couple of hours' drive from where Cassiano brewed
his Chteau Le Bronx, the so-called North Fork wine region is emerging
from a 26-year-long infancy and at last gaining recognition as one
of the world's up-and-coming wine-producing hot spots. It's not the
match of California's Napa Valley--not yet, anyway. But the 21 wineries
on the North Fork, on land where potatoes grew for a century, now
produce merlots, cabernet sauvignons, and chardonnays that are often
ranked between 80 and 90 points--good to very good--by Wine Spectator
magazine.
Outsiders have begun to take notice. Earlier this year, a group
of Chilean investors bought a North Fork winery, Laurel Lake. Leslie
Alexander, owner of the Houston Rockets, is acquiring land and plans
to establish a winery. And in October, Alex and Louisa Hargrave, the
owners of Hargrave Vineyard, the first modern winery on Long Island,
sold their place to no less than an Italian prince, Marco Borghese,
who grew up on a 2,000-acre Tuscan estate and plans to experiment
with Italian nebbiolo and sangiovese grapes.
To local winemakers, the prince's arrival on the scene signals
the end of the mom-and-pop era. ``Now the big money comes in,'' says
Jerome Gristina, proprietor of Gristina Vineyards in the North Fork
village of Cutchogue and a Connecticut physician. For Gristina, this
is a good thing. It means the wines of the North Fork will get noticed
and their market will grow. But some locals--even Gristina's wife,
Mary Gail--worry about the potential Napafication of their pretty
little corner of the world. Will it become commercial and overcrowded
and lose its rural charm? ``I see a loss of innocence,'' she says.
``It's like going from the local hardware store to Home Depot.''
But right now, going to the North Fork is like traveling back in
time. I visited in early October on a two-day bicycling jaunt with
a friend, Tim Chegwidden, sales manager for Slocum & Sons, a Connecticut
wine distributor. The land is flat to slightly rolling, planted in
grapes, potatoes, sod, and fruit trees. Craggy oaks shade the villages
of Greenport, Southold, and Cutchogue, which are small and quaint,
with 200-year-old houses and 100-year-old churches and plaques to
show where the old Pilgrim stocks used to stand on the village green.
The water is never far away. Cycling along Route 25 on the south side
of the thin neck of land, we see men wading slowly in four feet of
Peconic Bay water, raking in clams.
On the weekend we visit, the North Fork is in its glory. Leaves
are beginning to blush red and orange. Pumpkin and fruit stands line
the byways. And the traffic jams caused by tourists out from New York
City and central Long Island in their BMWs and Camrys are menacing
to life and bike. In the winery tasting rooms, weekenders line up
four deep at the counter.
Before Tim and I taste, we work. A little bit, anyway. Jerry and
Mary Gail Gristina drive us out to the vineyards in their SUV to help
with the grape harvest. They're pulling in merlot--small, tight bunches
of blue-black grapes. The grapes have been trained to hang low under
the canopy of leaves, so harvesting is a matter of walking along the
rows, snipping them off with a pair of pinking shears, and dropping
them into plastic baskets. If you spot botrytis--fuzzy mold--you cut
it out. Back at the winery, as a reward, we sample merlot, cabernet,
and cabernet franc. The cab franc is the best of the lot, according
to Tim.
This is the beginning of my education in the fine art of wine talk.
John Perry, Gristina's general manager, describes the 1994 Andy's
Field cabernet as ``a chocolate, chewy wine--good with food.'' Later,
at the nearby Pellegrini Vineyards, Russell Hearn, the winemaker,
talks about the ``fatness'' of his wine. He means rich, voluptuous,
ripe--the result of waiting until the last minute to pick the grapes.
And Tim praises the Pellegrini 1995 cabernet franc. ``This wine has
freshness,'' he says. ``It dances a bit.''
CLASS ACT. Before we began our tour of local wineries, we devised
a test of character for our hosts. According to Tim, it is said that
in the renowned Italian wine village of Barbaresco, when you ask winemakers
who ferments the best wine in town, they rank themselves No. 1 but
grant Angelo Gaja the No. 2 spot. That's how you know Gaja is the
best winemaker in Barbaresco. Tellingly, when we asked North Fork
winemakers what was the best red wine ever made there, they all mentioned
one of their neighbors' wines first--before their own. These folks
have class. Some of the North Fork winemakers' top picks: Paumanok
Vineyard's 1995 cabernet and Lenz Winery's 1993 merlot. Pellegrini'
s Hearn says the best cabernet was probably Bedell Cellars' 1995 vintage-
-neck-and-neck with his own cab from that year.
On the North Fork, every winemaker seems to have a story. Mostly,
they're about dreams that have come true. Bedell proprietor Kip Bedell
seems an unlikely wine master. In the early 1970s, while running a
small fuel-oil delivery business in the Long Island town of West Hempstead,
he started making wine in his basement for family and friends. He
liked it so much that he decided to grow his own grapes. So he bought
50 acres on the North Fork in 1980 and bottled his first wine in 1985.
Last year, Wine Spectator proclaimed him the best maker of red wine
on Long Island.
Alex Hargrave learned to love French wines as a language student
in France in the 1960s. After getting a master's degree in Chinese,
he switched gears and used money inherited from a grandfather to
buy 66 acres in Cutchogue in 1973. His dream was to prove that French
varietals such as cabernet sauvignon and merlot could be grown on
the island. ``I was smitten by the romantic notion--the Virgilian
mode of having a small farm,'' Hargrave says. When he first scouted
the North Fork, he noticed that nearly every homestead had a grape
vine running from the farmhouse to the outhouse. That told him the
area was the right place for a winery.
Can the grapes grown here create great wine? Typically, North Fork
wines are acidic--making them good with local seafood. The region
hasn't been established long enough for a definitive style to emerge,
however. Greatness? It's too early to tell if that's possible, says
Thomas Matthews, executive editor of Wine Spectator. The North Fork
has the best climate and drainage for wine on the East Coast, but
it's not the Napa Valley. ``It's unclear if [conditions] will be enough
to produce great wine on a consistent basis,'' he says.
SMALL WORLD. Hargrave's vision has come to pass. There are now more
than 2,000 North Fork acres planted in wine grapes. The vinyards produce
about 400,000 cases that yield about $35 million in sales, double
the amount 10 years ago. That's still tiny by world standards, and
most winemakers on the island don't expect the place to ever gush
a sea of wine. In fact, they're interested in keeping things pretty
much the way they are--many participate in county and town programs
for preserving farmland by buying up development rights on agricultural
land.
But while size doesn't matter much to them, the North Fork's winemakers
want their reputation to improve. Already, their confidence is growing.
``We used to say we wanted to be like other wine regions. Now we say
we want to be like the North Fork. We're just who we are,'' says Charles
Massoud, owner of Paumanok
Vineyards.
Hargrave is content to leave the next challenges for the North
Fork wine region in the hands of others. His new dream is to get back
to the studies he left 26 years ago: trying to reconstruct an ancient
Chinese language. Meanwhile, Borghese hopes to shape the future of
Long Island wines. He's going to keep the Hargrave name on his labels,
but some of the new wines he produces may be branded Borghese--an
august Italian family. He'll plant more acres in vines, broaden distribution,
and expand his tasting room. If the current boom requires new roads
in the North Fork, so be it. ``This could be the coming of age. I
hope it is,'' he says.
``I'LL MISS IT.'' Whatever the fate of local winemaking, the North
Fork's era as a potato-growing capital is surely over. The acreage
planted in potatoes for all of Suffolk County has dropped from 45,
000 at its peak in 1952 to 6,000 now. This October, 81-year-old Michael
Kalosky harvested his last potato crop on a farm his parents established
in Cutchogue some 70 years ago. He first worked those fields behind
a horse-drawn plow. ``It was mostly bad years,'' Kalosky admits. But
his whole life has revolved around potatoes. Now his siblings have
persuaded him to sell the farm--which will be converted to grape vines.
``I'll miss it,'' Kalosky says, his voice growing husky.
I picked up one of Kalosky's last potatoes--a yellow spud he calls
a ``657.'' It was left in the field after Kalosky drove through on
his rickety old harvester, scooped the last crop into a 1946 Chevy
truck, and hauled it off to a storage shed. I carried the potato around
for two days, and when I got back home, I fried it with garlic and
olive oil and shared it with my 11-year-old son, Daniel. Old Kalosky'
s potato was amazingly fresh and sweet--with a satisfying earthy aftertaste
and a hint of pepper. May all the North Fork's wines someday taste
so good.
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Business Week: November 22, 1999
Department: Letter From Long Island
Headline: MAP: Long Island, N.Y.
Copyright 1999 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.