Category Archives: Vineyards

Viniculture in the Hudson River Region–background

Introduction

The entirety of the Northeast, including New York State, was once covered by Laurentide ice sheets up to nearly two miles thick during the Late Wisconsin Glacial Period, which receded about 11,000 years ago.[1]  As the ice sheet melted it reshaped the landscape beneath it that was to take on the features  that we know today, and it helped create the Hudson River Valley,  leaving behind a complex and varied topography, soil, and climate–the terroir–, much of it appropriate for vine cultivation or other fruit.

NY Wine Regions Map 11. Map from the Uncorked New York Web site.

The Hudson River Region AVA is the oldest continually-productive wine region in the United States.  Though most people refer to this wine region as the Hudson River Valley or the Hudson Valley, on July 6, 1982 the BATF—in its wisdom—granted the AVA but chose to call it by another name in order to avoid confusion with a winery that already bore the name, Hudson River Valley Winery (no longer in production).  If one were to look at different maps that depict the region, its geographical boundaries would not entirely clear, as the maps don’t all agree.  (The best one is shown above.)  Unfortunately, there is no official AVA map of the region, much less a map for its varied soils and climates.  However, it is clearly described verbally in print: its western boundary is the Shawangunk Ridge (a northerly extension of the Appalachians) in Orange and Ulster Counties.  It then follows the Delaware River to the New Jersey State line, from which it goes roughly east to its eastern boundary at the state lines with Connecticut and Massachusetts. It then extends north along those borders to the northeast corner of Columbia County, New York.  From there it extends west to the juncture of Columbia and Greene Counties in the Hudson River.[2]  It includes all or some of several counties:  Columbia, Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster, and Westchester.

HV Watershed land useIt doesn’t quite encompass all of the Hudson River Watershed, which extends even further north and includes the Mohawk River (see map at left).  From this it can be seen, by comparing it to the first map, that while it is primarily geographic, most of its boundaries are political, which is not unusual for AVAs all over the country; however, it also is not strictly based on a homogenous climate or soil types—the terroir—though many of the vineyards are planted on or near the slopes on either side of the Hudson River.

However, even today the true boundaries of the Valley are still in dispute, and the definition of the area of the AVA Region is questionable.  Carlo DeVito, a wine writer and winery owner, commented that “The AVA is old and obsolete….it only covered the existing wineries that were around at the time of the filing, and makes no sense. More than half the valley’s wineries in the region are not covered by it. Here’s my take on it:”  Where is the Hudson Valley?

Soil and Terroir

NY Soil Map

As can be made out from the soil map above, there is a range of soil that include “acid soils with neutral to acid frangipans” (pink color) that runs the length of the river valley, shifting to “medium to moderately coarse-textured acid soils with strongly acidic frangipans on glacial till from gray slate, sandstone, [and] slate” (red color).  Contiguous to this is also “deep and shallow soils associated with hilly areas” (dark red).  Along the mid to upper-length of the river we see “moderate to fine-textured soils on glacial lake or marine sediments” (pale blue).  At the southern limits we see “muck” (dark blue, highly fertile) and “moderately coarse textured, very strongly acid soils from glacial till from granite” (brown color).  As grapevines are not fond of acidic soils, this means that many if not most vineyards need alkaline additions such as lime to bring up the soil pH.

The most complete and accessible description of the soils and terrains of the Region may be that of the “New York Wine Course and Reference”, which is worth quoting at length:

This region crosses five [of the nine New York State] physiographic provinces and is composed of more distinct soil types than any other region. Moving north from Manhattan, the first province encountered is that of the Gneissic Highland Province, a hilly, complex region of highly metamorphosed ancient gneiss. This region encompasses the northern end of Manhattan Island and southern Rockland County, where it forms the Ramapo Mountains. The region continues across the Hudson, and the structure underlies Westchester, Putnam and a small part of southern Dutchess County. The hardness of the bedrock in this area and glacial action have resulted in shallow, rocky soils largely unsuitable for agriculture. Bordering the Gneiss Highland Province to the north is the Taconic Province, an area of lower elevation that extends from Orange County northward through southeastern Ulster County and across the Hudson River, encompassing Dutchess, Columbia, Rensselaer and Washington counties. The rocks in this province are largely shales, slates, schists and limestones, although the northern and eastern areas of Dutchess, Columbia and Rensselaer are underlain with hard metamorphic quartzite and gneiss. The topography of this province varies widely, starting as a valley in southern Orange County and progressing to rolling hills and valleys in the western portions of those counties on the east side of the Hudson, finally culminating the rugged highlands of the Berkshire Mountains in the easternmost section of the province. Given the wide variety of parent material and topography in this province, soil types and suitability to viticulture are extremely varied. Soils in the western portion of this province generally tend to have moisture problems and be low in fertility, although many good sites of limited acreage are under cultivation as orchards and vineyards. Soil conditions improve on the western side of the Hudson, with eastern Dutchess and Columbia Counties possessing the finest sites and consequently the greatest acreage of vineyards. Deep, well-drained soils with adequate moisture holding capacity and low to moderate fertility are present and available in large tracts of land, and offer the opportunity for the expansion of viticulture in the Hudson Valley.  Two other physiographic provinces can be included in the Hudson River Region: the Catskill Province which borders the Taconic Province along the dramatic Shawangunk Ridge; and the Mohawk Valley Province which enters the region north of Albany.  Neither has significant acreage in grapes, and discussion of the soils of these areas is not relevant to this subject.[3]

A further explanation makes even more clear just how complex the soil profiles of the Region comes from the USDA soil series page:

The Hudson series consists of very deep, moderately well drained soils formed in clayey and silty lacustrine sediments. They are nearly level through very steep soils on convex lake plains, on rolling through hilly moraines and on dissected lower valley side slopes. Saturated hydraulic conductivity is moderately high or high in the mineral surface and subsurface layers and low through moderately high in the lower part of the subsoil and substratum. Slope ranges from 0 through 60 percent. Mean annual temperature is 49 degrees F. and mean annual precipitation is 39 inches.[4]

The Region’s geographic setting is described as follows:

Hudson soils are nearly level to very steep on lake plains and lacustrine capped uplands and valley sides. Slope ranges from 0 through 60 percent. More sloping and dissected areas show evidence of slumping or mass slipping. Mean annual air temperature ranges from 46 degrees to 50 degrees F., mean annual precipitation ranges from 30 through 45 inches, and mean annual frost-free season ranges from 120 through 180 days. The elevation ranges from 50 through 800 feet above sea level.[5]

The Hudson River is one of the great waterways of North America, but it only runs 315 miles (507 km.) from its source, Lake Tear in the Clouds, located in Adirondack Park (elevation 1814 ft. (553 m.).  It is what is called a ‘drowned river’ in that the waters of the Atlantic Ocean flow upstream with the tide as far as Troy, NY (north of Albany) which means that it is a very long tidal estuary–in other words, a fjord.  For this reason it was known to the Lenape tribe that lived along its banks as Muhheakantuck (“river that flows two ways”).[6]

Hudson River panorama from_walkway_looking_northIndeed, it is the Hudson , with its moderating effect on climate, thanks to the tidal flow and winds that sweep upriver from the Atlantic as well as the so-called “lake effect” (or “river effect” in this case–except in the winter, if the river freezes and is covered with ice) of its wide, deep, flowing stream, that make it possible to grow grapes at all, as it would otherwise be too frigid for most varieties other than the native ones.  Its growing season is short:  180 to 195 days.  (By comparison, Long Island’s season lasts from 215 to 230 days, while the Niagara Escarpment enjoys 205 days, and the Finger Lakes AVA has 190 to 205 growing days.)  Its production is also small, at 585 tons a year (about 2.5 tons an acre), whereas the Niagara Escarpment, with only 6 vineyards and 883 acres produces 4,648 tons (about 5 tons an acre), though some of this is for table grapes, which have much higher yields than do wine grapes.[7]

The AVA covers an area that extends roughly within the confines of the river valley proper, encompassing as it does 224,000 acres (90,650 ha), but it has only 430 acres planted to wine grapes among 49 bonded wineries[8]—some with, some without, vineyards—some of which buy fruit from the Finger Lakes or Long Island to make wine from varieties that do not thrive here, and in some cases from California.  Many of the wineries produce fruit wine, such as raspberry, apple, strawberry, blueberry, and so on, along with grape wine.  After all, the Hudson Valley is famous for its fruit production, and once was one of the largest producers of apples in the world.[9]  However, as pointed out in an article by Carlo DeVito, “Where is the Hudson Valley?” on his blog, HudsonRiverWine, the boundaries of the AVA as currently drawn lead to confusion and are no longer relevant, given that they were drawn when there were far fewer wineries, and the number of wineries and vineyards in the Valley has not only grown exponentially, but many new ones are being established within the Valley but outside the AVA.

 Some History

Tradition has it that the first vinifera vines were planted by French Huguenots in 1677, at the time that they first settled New Paltz.  However, this is unlikely, because these Huguenots had come from Belgium and were more inclined to drink hard cider, brandy, and brews.  However, the earliest record of vinifera planting goes back to 1642, when the New Amsterdam patroon, Kiliean Van Rennselaer sent cuttings to his commisary in Fort Orange (Albany), which of course didn’t survive the winter.  Settlers then resorted to American varieties, but the wines made from these were likely not pleasing at all to the French or Dutch palates, but at least it was alcoholic.  The first commercially-successful vineyard was planted with Isabella and Catawba in 1827 by Robert Underhill at Croton Point, just above Tarrytown.  The oldest continuously-operated winery in the nation is Brotherhood Winery, originally established as Jaques Brothers’ Winery in 1839 at Little York (now Washingtonville, in Orange County) to make wine that was mostly sold to churches.  When the last of the Jaques family died in 1885, it was taken over by Jesse and Emerson, who promptly renamed it Brotherhood.  The earliest-planted continuously-used vineyard, going back to 1845, was planted by William Cornell in Ulster County.  His brother-in-law, Andrew Caywood became involved and began developing hybrid varieties that could better grow in the demanding climate; one of his efforts led to the Dutchess grape, still widely grown in the Northeast today.  That vineyard is today part of Benmarl Winery, in Marlboro.[10]

Farm Winery Act of 1976

Before Governor Hugh Carey signed the Farm Winery Act into law, there were only nineteen bonded wineries in all of New York State.  Thanks to the tireless work and advocacy of people like Benmarl Winery’s Mark Miller, the new Commissioner of Agriculture, John Dyson (owner of Millbrook Vineyards and Winery), and the support of wine writers like Frank Prial of the New York Times, the restrictive post-Prohibition laws that then prevailed were replaced by a new set of laws that made it much easier for farms (i.e., vineyards) to establish new wineries for a small fee.  The result was an explosion of winery growth in the State, and by 2008 there were about 255 across the State.[11]

Vineyards

The vineyards and wineries with vineyards in the Hudson River Region AVA (excluding cideries, meaderies, distilleries, and producers of fruit wine only), as of 2014, number thirty-one by my own count, and these are highlighted in bold type. Vine acreage is not always certain and in some cases little or no information is given  The Websites are rarely of any use in this regard.

A number of wineries purchase some or all of their grapes from other growers, both from within the Hudson River AVA as well as the Finger Lakes and Long Island.  There are any number of perfectly good reasons for this.  A winemaker may want to produce wine from a variety that he doesn’t grow.  Some vineyards are too new to produce commerciable fruit.  With a few exceptions, most of the wineries and/or vineyards are very small in scale–most are, after all, “farm wineries.”   In no case does this reflect on the quality of any of the wines so made.  The gamut of quality is there to be had.

(NOTE:  this article and the series on wineries that follow are only interested in wineries and vineyards that grow and/or produce grape wine.  This is not a prejudice, it is simply that the focus is on sustainable viniculture, or the growing of wine grapes, as well as on winemaking.  Wineries that have been reviewed on this blog are shown with a link):

Adair Vineyards*, New Paltz (West Bank, Ulster County; 37 acres, all hybrid)

Altamont Winery, Altamont (West Bank, Albany County; no information on acreage or planting)

Applewood Winery*, Warwick (West Bank, Orange County; ? acreage, both hybrid & vinifera)

Baldwin Vineyards*, Pine Bush (West Bank, Ulster County, 35 acres, both)

Basha Kill Vineyards*, Wurstboro (West Bank, Sullivan County, 1.5 acres, hybrid)

Benmarl Winery*, Marlboro (West Bank, Ulster County; 37 acres; both)

Brimstone Hill Vineyards, Pine Bush (West Bank, Ulster County; 13 acres, both)

Brookview Station Winery* [no vineyard, purchased grapes]

Brotherhood Winery*, Washingtonville (West Bank, Orange County; 40 acres, all vinifera?)

Capoccia Vineyards and Winery, Niskayuna (West Bank, Schenectady County, not AVA; no information)

Cascade Mountain Winery*,  [no vineyard, purchased grapes]

Cerghino Smith Winery, [no vineyard, purchased grapes]

Clearview Vineyard*, Warwick (West Bank, Orange County; 2 acres, both)

Clinton Vineyards*, Clinton Corners (East Bank, Dutchess County; 100? acres, hybrid)

Demarest Hill Vineyards, Warwick (West Bank, Orange County; 15 acres, hybrid)

El Paso Winery, [unused vineyard, purchased grapes]

Glorie Farm Winery*, Marlboro (West Bank, Ulster County; 7 acres, hybrid & vinifera)

Hudson-Chatham Winery*, Ghent (East Bank, Dutchess County; 5 acres, hybrid)

Magnanini Winery*, Wallkill (West Bank, Ulster County)

Millbrook Vineyards and Winery*, Millbrook (East Bank, Dutchess County;  all vinifera)

Oak Summit Vineyard*, Millbrook (East Bank, Dutchess County; 6 acres, all vinifera)

Palaia Vineyards,* Highland Mills (West Bank, Orange County; 10 acres, both)

Pazdar Winery [purchased grapes]

Prospero Winery [purchased grapes]

Robibero Family Winery*, Gardiner (West Bank, Ulster County; 1 acre, both)

Royal Kedem Winery*, Marlboro (West Bank, Ulster County; no information)

Stoutridge Vineyards*, Marlboro (West Bank, Ulster County; 11 acres, both)

The Winery at St. George [purchased wines]

Torne Valley Vineyards, Hillburn (West Bank, Rockland County; ? acres, both?)

Tousey Winery*, Germantown (East Bank, Dutchess County;15 acres, all vinifera)

Warwick Valley Winery & Distillery*, Warwick (West Bank, Ulster County)

Whitecliff Vineyard*, Gardiner (West Bank, Ulster County; 26 acres, both)

Windham Vineyard and Winery, Windham (West Bank, Greene County; no information)

*Twenty-two of the wineries are members of the Hudson Valley Wine & Grape Assoc., and owners and/or winemakers meet from time to time to compare notes and discuss issues that are common to the region.  The mission of the Assoc. is “to conduct educational programs to advance grape growing and winemaking in the Hudson Valley AVA.”

NOTE:  Winery Websites will not always tell about the varieties in the vineyards, nor will they necessarily indicate what varieties go into their blended wines, as they may use generic or invented names for their blends.  This doesn’t mean that one can’t ask in the tasting room.  The only dependable clue as to whether the wines are made from grapes blended from more than one AVA (e.g., Finger Lakes & Hudson River) will be found on the label:  if it says Hudson River Region, it may or may not be estate bottled but is from the Region; if it says New York State the wine is made from grapes from more than one region.  Caveat emptor, but only if these issues matters to the buyer.

Wine-grape Varieties

The varieties that do thrive in the AVA are mostly hybrids as well as some cool-climate V. viniferas (hybrid variety information is from Robinson, Jancis, Julia Harding, et al., Wine Grapes—listed alphabetically, so page number are not needed); Hudson AVA acreage information comes from the “NY Wine Course”, pp. 75-61 passim; data is for 2013):

Aurore or Aurora, aka Seibel 5279 (White, French-American hybrid; less than 10 acres)

Baco Noir (R, French-American hybrid, Folle Blanche x Grand Glabre [V. riparia]; <10 acres)

Cabernet Franc (R, vinifera; 7 acres)

Cabernet Sauvignon (R, vinifera; <20 acres)

Catawba (R, either V. labrusca or a natural hybrid, in any case American; <10 acres, in decline)

Cayuga White (complex American hybrid created in Geneva, NY; <10, decreased from 38 acres in 1996)

Chambourcin (Red, French-American hybrid; acreage not reported)

Chancellor, aka Seibel 7053 (R, French-American hybrid; acreage for the AVA not reported)

Chardonnay (W, vinifera; 32 acres)

Chelois (R, French-American hybrid; acreage for the AVA not reported)[12]

Concord (R, V. labrusca x unknown vinifera?, decidedly American; 168 acres)

De Chaunac or Dechaunac (R, French-Canadian hybrid, by Albert Seibel; named for the Canadian enologist, Adhemar DeChaunac; <15 acres)[13]

Delaware (V. labrusca x aestivalis var. bouriquiana x vinifera?, American hybrid; <10 acres)

Diamond, aka Moore’s Diamond (labrusca x vinifera American hybrid; acreage unreported)

Dutchess (complex hybrid by A. J. Caywood of Poughkeepsie, V. labrusca x aestivalis x vinifera; <10 acres)[14]

Elvira (complex American hybrid, V. labrusca x riparia x vinifera; <10 acres)[15]

Frontenac, aka MN 1047 (complex American hybrid from Minnesota; )[16]

Gamay Noir (R, vinifera, a specialty of Whitecliff Vineyards)

Gewürztraminer (W, vinifera; <10 acres)

Golden Muscat (W, American hybrid ex-Cornell, labrusca x vinifera; acreage unreported)

Lemberger, aka Blaufränkisch (R, vinifera; acreage unreported)

Léon Millot (R, complex French hybrid from Alsace; acreage unreported)

Marechal Foch (complex French-American hybrid from Alsace; <20 acres)

Marquette (American hybrid from Minnesota; acreage unreported)

Merlot (R, vinifera; <10 acres)

Niagara (American labrusca hybrid; <25 acres)[17]

Noiret (R, complex American hybrid created in Geneva, NY)

Pinot Blanc (W, vinifera, Alsace clone planted only at Stoutridge)

Pinot Gris (W, vinifera)

Pinot Noir (R, vinifera, almost unique to Oak Summit in the region; about 30 acres)

Refosco (vinifera, planted only at Stoutridge)

Riesling (W, vinifera; <10 acres)

St Pepin (complex American hybrid by Elmer Swenson in Wisconsin)[18]

Sangiovese (R, vinifera, planted only at Stoutridge)

Seyval Blanc/Seyve-Villard 5-276 (W, French hybrid, vinifera x rupestris x lincecumii; 73 acres)

Teroldego (vinifera, planted only at Stoutridge)

Tocai Friulano (W, vinifera, planted only at Millbrook Vineyards)

Traminette (W, complex American hybrid based on Gewürztraminer)[19]

Vidal Blanc/Vidal 256 (W, French hybrid, Ugni Blanc x Seibel 4986; <10 acres)[20]

Vignoles/Ravat 51 (W, complex French hybrid, Pinot Noir? x Subéreux?; <10 acres)

As can be seen from the list, most of the wine varieties are hybrids, developed specifically for traits that would enable the vines to survive the extreme cold, humidity, and diseases.  The French hybrids were often developed to produce vines based on V. vinifera that were resistant to phylloxera, as the original intention was to plant them in European vineyards.  Once it was realized that grafting American rootstock to vinifera shoots would adequately protect against phylloxera, interest in hybrids dropped in Europe, but many of the hybrids have been successfully introduced to the United States.   American (esp. New York hybrids) were often developed to thrive in American vineyards with their attendant cold-climate challenges and the diseases that are endemic to the region.

Bibliography and other References

Unfortunately, there is a serious paucity of books devoted exclusively to the entire Hudson River Region AVA.  The only one still available, by Martell and Long, is out of print but can still be ordered.

De Vito, Carlo.  East Coast Wineries:  A Complete Guide from Maine to Virginia.  Rutgers U. Press:  New Brunswick, NJ, 2004.  An excellent guide to the wineries of the region, though having been published ten years ago, it doesn’t even include the author’s own winery:  Hudson-Chatham.

Figiel, Richard.  Circle of Vines:  The Story of New York State Wine.  Excelsior Editions, Albany, NY, 2014. Written by the once-owner of a Finger Lakes winery, this is a well-written account of the story of New York wine, with a chapter devoted to the Hudson Valley and additional related material in two others.  The entire book, a sweep of history going back to the Ice Ages and up to the present day, is a worthwhile read and the chapter on the Valley is especially complete and valuable.

Martell, Alan R. and Alton Long.  The Wines and Wineries of the Hudson River Valley.  The Countryman Press:  Woodstock, VT, 1993.  Given that it was published 21 years ago, it is seriously out of date, and at a scarce 48 amply-illustrated pages, it covers but 20 wineries and a meadery.  It is clearly meant for the general public.

New York Wine & Grape Foundation (text by James Tresize), “The New York Wine Course and Reference.pdf.”  2014. Available as an online download, it is an excellent and very complete research source, although it has a promotional slant.  It also includes very useful regional maps on the soils, temperatures, growing degree days, etc.  (Note:  It is curious that the AVA map in the Wine Course document  does not match the one on the Website: Fact and Figures, which is the version that I use at the beginning of this article; it is the one that I consider the most accurate.)  The Website is listed below.  In citations, it will be referred to as “NY Wine Course.”

A handful of others touch on the region here and there, but superficially.  For example:

Berger, Dan and Tony Aspler.  North American Wine Routes:  A Travel Guide to Wines & Vines from Napa to Nova Scotia.  Reader’s Digest Press:  Pleasantville, NY, 2010.  Very superficial, with no useful background and only four wineries listed on the two amply-illustrated pages about the Region.

Castell, Hudson.  Wines of Eastern North American:  From Prohibition to the Present:  From Prohibition to the Present – A History and Desk Reference.  Cornell U. Press, Ithaca, NY, 2014.  Its subject is rather broad so that the Hudson Valley is only touched upon here and there, but it is a fine work of scholarship and an important reference.

Morton, Lucie T.  Winegrowing in Eastern America:  An Illustrated Guide to Viniculture East of the Rockies.  Cornell U. Press: Ithaca, NY, 1985.  An important book but it only offers a very cursory coverage of the Valley.

Robinson, Jancis and Linda Murphy.  American Wine:  The Ultimate Companion to the Wines & Wineries of the US.  U. California Press:  Berkeley, 2013.  For an ‘ultimate guide’ there are only two pages, mostly covered by illustrations and no useful map.  It counts 33 wineries, mentions Millbrook Vineyards and Winery as the ‘Superstar’ and shows three wine labels.

Thomas, Marguerite.  Touring East Coast Wine Country:  A Guide to the Finest Wineries.  Berkshire House Publishers, Lee, MA, 2002.  Mentions only two wineries and is out of date.

For grape varieties:

Casscles, J. Stephen .  Grapes of the Hudson Valley and Other Cool Climate Regions of the United States and Canada,  Flint Mine Press, Coxsackie, NY, 2015.  An important an indispensable guide to the varieties of the region.  (See my review of the book at Grapes of the Hudson Valley.)

Robinson, Jancis, Julia Harding, & José Vouillamoz.  Wine Grapes:  A Complete Guide to 1,368 Vine Varieties, Including Their Origins and Flavours.  HarperCollins: New York, 2012.  Simply the best and most complete reference to all varieties available in the English language.

For history:

Benjamin, Vernon.  The History of the Hudson River Valley from Wilderness to the Civil War.  Overlook Press, New York, 2014.  Using up-to-date scholarship, this is a serious and significant contribution to the literature of the Hudson Valley but, alas, there’s very little about wine.  Nevertheless, a very worthwhile book to own.

 Online Sources

Be aware that most of these sites may not be up-to-date or may contain misleading or incorrect information.

AmericanWineryGuide.com: Hudson River Region AVA  Listing 30 wineries, it omits Windham Winery, but then its count doesn’t include cideries or meaderies

AppellationAmerican.com: Hudson River Region  Last updated before Robibero Winery was opened, so probably prior to 2009.  It lists 32 wineries in the region.

DutchessWineTrail.com  Website for the Dutchess County Wine Trail.

HudsonBerkshireExperience.com  Website for the Hudson-Berkshire Beverage Trail in Columbia County.  It’s not only about wine.

HudsonRiverWine.com  Blog by Carlo DeVito, author of East Coast Wineries.  He is the owner of the Hudson-Chatham Winery and also maintains another blog, EastCoastWineries.com, which covers wineries from Maine to Virginia.

HudsonValleyWine&GrapeAssoc.com  Website of the Hudson Valley Wine and Grape Association.  It lists 22 wineries and vineyards as members.

HudsonValleyWineCountry.org  It includes links to 3 of the 4 wine trails in the region.

HVNet.com: Wineries  The Hudson Valley Network is more about tourism in the Hudson Valley than it is about the Hudson River Region AVA, and includes at least two wineries that do not belong in the AVA.  It is also out of date.

HVWineGoddess.com  A light-hearted but informative romp through the Valley.  It is currently maintained with fresh material, but it isn’t clear if it updates old posts.

HVWineMag.com  The Hudson Valley Wine Magazine is probably the source with the most up-to-date information about what is going on regarding wine in the Valley.

NYSAES (Cornell U.)*  The academic/scientific go-to Website for all matters agricultural and horticultural, which means viticulture as well, in the State.

Also indispensable for New York State wines is the New York Cork Report by Lenn Thompson, with its many interviews, coverage of wine tastings, reviews, and more.

NewYorkWines.org  New York Wine & Grape Foundation, aka Uncork New York, covers all the wine regions of the state.  Though it states that there are 41 wineries in the Hudson region, but that includes 3 cideries, 2 distilleries, and 1 glögg producer, so strictly speaking there are really only 35 wineries in the region.  “The New York Wine Course and Reference.pdf.” can be downloaded from here.

ShawangunkWineTrail.com  Website for the Shawangunk Wine Trail in Ulster County.

UpperHudsonValleyWineTrail.com  Website for the newest wine trail in the Hudson River Region:  Upper Hudson Valley Wine Trail.

Wikipedia.org: Hudson River Region AVA  This is only a stub, so is not useful at present.

WinesNY.com: Hudson Valley Wines  An unofficial wine blog with much to offer, and its coverage of the Hudson Region is interesting and informative.  However, it has not been updated since 2009.

*NYAES stands for New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, in Geneva, NY, which is run by Cornell University.

Endnotes

[1] Wikipedia.org: /Wisconsin glaciation

[2] It’s actually even more complicated than that.  For a full description of the boundaries, see Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, sect. 9.47.

[3] NY Wine Course, pp. 92-3.  (An excellent introduction to New York State soils can be found on the Web page of the Hunter College Dept. of Geology:  Soils of NY (a downloadable PDF.)

[4] USDA Soil Series:  Hudson Series

 [5] Ibid.

[7] All the figures come from Uncork New York, Regions pages.

[8] Uncork New York

[9] See also the excellent article on the geology and terroir of the region in WinesNY.com: Hudson Valley Wines Geology.

 [10] HudsonRiver.com Wineries History; also Richard Figiel, Circle of Vines, pp. 14-28 passim.

 [11] Hudson Catell, Wines of Eastern North America, p. 96.

 [12] NY Wine Course, p. 77.

 [13] Wine Grapes, p. 290-1.  NY Wine Course, p. 75.

 [14] Wine Grapes, p. 318.

 [15] Wine Grapes, p. 327.

 [16] Wine Grapes, p. 369.

 [17] NY Wine Course, p. 41.

 [18] Wine Grapes, p. 1011

 [19] Wine Grapes, p. 1073.

 [20] NY Wine Course, p. 47.

New York State Wine Maps

There are maps and there are maps.  Good ones, useful ones, silly ones, and barely useful ones.  This is a brief survey of the best downloadable full maps dealing with agriculture and viticulture in New York State along with a handful that aren’t so functional.

One pretty obvious point is that there is no single map that convey all the information that one wants.  Ideally, there could be a comprehensive, high-resolution layered map, all to the same scale, that overlay a base map, preferably topographical.  Then one could add or remove the transparent layers as needed.  But such a map does not exist, leaving researchers to search on the Web, often fruitlessly and with much frustration, as shall be seen below:

NY Soil MapPerhaps the major and most important source of information and knowledge about viticulture in New York State is the Cornell University Agricultural Extension Program, which runs the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station based in Geneva, NY.  As a land-grant school, Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences was founded in 1874, and it is the 3rd-largest such school in the country.  Over the years it has mapped nearly all aspects of agriculture in the state, including viticulture.  The map above is a small-scale representation of the dominant soil types in the state.

NY Wine Regions Map 1

Map by the New York Wine and Grapes Foundation

NY AVA Map

Map by Quentin Sadler of the UK for his Web blog. Copyright 2010.

The two maps above are representations of the NY State American Viticultural Areas or AVAs, but neither accurately depict the Long Island AVA, which covers the entire island–what is shown actually represent a combination of the North Fork and Hamptons AVAs.  Furthermore, the two maps don’t even agree on the boundaries of the Hudson River Region AVA.  The top map (NewYorkWines.org) is the more accurate one.  It actually follows the contours of the AVA described in the TTB Code of Federal Regulation (GPO Title 27, Part 9, Subpart C:  Approved AVAs-Hudson River Region).  However, while the top map shows the Lake Champlain Region, the bottom one does not, and there is no indication that Lake Champlain is now a proposed AVA with approval pending from the TTB (short for Alcohol and Tobacco Trade and Taxation Bureau, an agency of the U.S. Treasury Department).

NY Site Evaluation maps NY State Vineyard Site Evaluation

The map above is taken from the NY State Vineyard Site Evaluation Website.  It is just one of perhaps hundreds of different types of views of all the regions of the state that may be considered appropriate for siting a vineyard.  According to the Website, it is “A collaborative project of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University and the Institute for the Application of Geospatial Technologies with funding from the New York Wine and Grape Foundation. As the grape and wine industry in New York has grown, there is a need to make wise decisions about sites for vineyards.”

The Wines & Vines review offers a good explanation of what the site evaluation maps are and how they can be used: Wines & Vines Review of NY State Vineyard Site Evaluation Website.  Also read this critical piece about it from the New York Cork Report.

There are also maps that, though not focused on viticulture in the state, offer other kinds of useful information, though at a scale that encompasses the entire state it is difficult to be more than very general.  For example, a state map depicting precipitation:

Precipitation Map of NYS

 

A problem with this particular precipitation map is that there are large areas depicted in yellow, such as most of Long Island, but the legend does not depict the rainfall amount for that color at all.  A strange lacuna.

The following map depicts the distribution of different kinds of bedrock thoughout the State:

Map of NY State bedrock

The information of the above map could be overlaid with the one below (if we only had the means), by the State Geological Survey, which is physiographic:

NY Physiographic map

From the map above we learn that the Finger Lakes belong in the Allegheny Plateau Geological Province, while all of Long Island is uniquely the Atlantic Coastal Plain.  The Hudson Valley includes two Provinces:  The Highlands and Lowlands, both of which extend southward into New Jersey–but off the map boundaries.

The physiography shown in the map above leads one, ineluctably, to a map showing the movement of the ice-age glaciers that helped shape it over 10,000 years ago:

Map of NY State glcial movement

from Circle of Vines by Richard Figiel, 2014

Which leads to a map of the State’s major water basins, which were themselves created by the one-mile thick ice sheets during their advances and retreats:

Map of NY State basinsAnother useful map, by the USDA, depicts the boundaries of extreme low temperatures, which define the kind of plants, including vines, can grow within certain temperature ranges known as zone:

NY map of Low-temp extremes

The one following, also by the USDA, is a variant on the one above, although the data don’t seem to entirely agree (note Long Island) nor does it show the temperature range for each zone:

NY map of Hardiness Zones

The next map was devised for the 2002 Census of Agriculture of the Soil Regions of NY State:

NY map of Soil Regions

At this small a scale, a great deal of information for specific regions is not visible at all.  For example, the map shows a pattern of deep acid and limy soils running from the southeastern part of the state to the border with New Jersey.  Were this to extend the soil region into New Jersey it would show its origin in Bergen County.  More than that, at a larger scale it would show that there is a run of alluvial soil stretching from Bergen County on a northeasterly direction that is associated with the Wallkill River, which eventually debouches into the Hudson River.

Of course, more detailed maps are available at much larger scales.  For example, an excellent “general soil map” by the USDA Soil Conservation Service, in collaboration with Cornell’s Agricultural Experiment Station, produced at a scale of 1:253440, renders the following, along with a list of the major different soil associations of Suffolk County (the East End of Long Island):

East End, General Soil MapHowever, as detailed as this map may appear to be, there is a caveat as to its use in the lower left corner:  “Each area outlined on this map consists of more than one kind of soil.  The map is thus meant for general planning rather than a basis for decision on the use of specific tracts.”  This particular map is used by the author in his post:  Viniculture in LI:  the Background.

The great frustration for anyone seeking an equivalent large-scale map of other wine regions of the State is the difficulty of finding them online.  In fact, the map above was scanned from a printed version and posted on line independent of the entities that produced it.  Apparently these maps can only be purchased from the USDA, but a Google search yields nothing to that effect.

Occasionally someone will come up with a whimsical version of a wine terroir map, though it may well be too clever by half; in other words, is it truly useful?  It is certainly decorative:

NY Terroir & Growing Regions Map

Book Review: Wines of Eastern North America, by Hudson Cattell.

Hudson Cattell’s Wines of Eastern North America:  From Prohibition to the Present, A History and Desk Reference (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2014), is an important new book on the history of the wine industry in the East, covering both Canada and the United States in equal measure.  It is a scholarly work and is meant for a fairly narrow audience:  wine professionals, others in the wine trade, and really serious wine lovers.

Its title brings to mind Lucie T. Morton’s Winegrowing in Eastern United States (Cornell, 1985), the first major scholarly book to cover both the history and viniculture of the region east of the Rockies.  Comparisons are inevitable, but a quick overview of each book also brings out the differences (which are significant) and the similarities.  Apart from the fact that Cattell’s work is twenty-nine years later, it shouldn’t be regarded as an update of Morton’s book.  For one thing, Cattell covers the history of winegrowing in the East principally from the Prohibition era to the present (2013).  Morton covers the period from Colonial times up to 1985 more evenly, though she doesn’t have as much to say about the consequences of Prohibition as does Cattell.  However, Morton is largely focused on the viniculture, whereas Cattell’s is primarily about the industry as a whole.  Morton touches on Canada briefly, Cattell gives Canada its full due relative to the United States.  Essentially, one book supplements the other, and any serious student of the region should have both.  (N.B.–Morton’s book is out of print, but can be found online, so still available.)

Cattell (born in 1931), has been covering the wine industry east of the Rockies since 1976 had has published numerous books and articles over the years, covering not only the Eastern United States but Eastern Canada as well.  In those 37 years he has traveled throughout this vast region and met nearly everybody who mattered in the wine trade.  He clearly has a profound knowledge of the region, the people, the soils, the varieties, the wines, the laws, and the controversies about almost everything bearing on the vines and wines of Eastern North America.  In 2012 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the first Eastern Winery Exposition held in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAA 2007 article in the Cornell University Library Website, “Noted Wine Journalist Speaks at the Lee Library, Geneva” (http://www.library.cornell.edu/insidecul/200705/#noted) mentions that “Cattell learned on the job. On his first visit to a winery in Pennsylvania he drove right by the winery’s vineyard. ‘I knew absolutely nothing about grapes and wine,’ he said. ‘In fact, I didn’t even realize they were grapevines.’”  A portion of his education came from Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Evolution of Our Native Fruits.

His knowledge and expertise show on every page of the book under review.  The chapters are arranged both chronologically and thematically.  The first chapter provides the historical background of the wine industry in the United States and Canada from pre-Prohibition days through Prohibition and its devastating effect on the industry to its still-lingering effects after the passage of the Twenty-Fourth Amendment.  State and provincial retail monopolies such as those in Pennsylvania and Ontario come out of this, as does the three-tier system that defines wine and liquor sales throughout the United States.

At the conclusion of the chapter is an interesting bit about Charles Fournier, the French-born winemaker at Gold Seal Vineyards.  He was from Champagne and had succeeded his uncle as winemaker at Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin.  Personal tragedy was a factor in his decision to come to the States.  One of his early projects had to do with the legalization of the use of the term “champagne,” which by Federal statute of 1934 had to be “a type of sparkling white wine which derives its effervescence solely from the second fermentation of the wine within glass containers of not more than one gallon capacity, and which possess the taste, aroma, and other characteristics attributed to champagne as made in the Champagne district of France.”  In 1970 Fournier would write of how proud he was “of the success of the New York State champagne industry.”  Yet, he was using American and French-hybrid varieties such as Catawba, Delaware, Dutchess, Elvira, and so on.  By the ’90s, of course, EU laws would ban the use of the term “champagne” for any sparking wine not made in the eponymous region, but firms using that term before the EU law was passed had “grandfathered” the right to continue to use it, so today we still have older sparkling wine producers using the word “champagne”–note the use of the lower case.

Chapter Two is devoted to  Philip Wagner and the arrival of French hybrids in the United States.  Wagner, a newspaper reporter and editor, would prove to be one of the most important and influential individuals in the Eastern wine industry.  From his struggles as a tyro winegrower in the early thirties, by 1933 he had published the first book in America on winemaking:  American Wines and How to Make Them.  Having limited success with vinifera varieties, he began experimenting with hybrids.  In 1939 he imported Baco No. 1  cuttings from France via Frank Schoonmaker–the legendary wine guru of the post-Prohibition era–and from that shipment were to come all future Baco Noir vines in the United States.  In fact, it was the first importation of hybrids from France, and by 1951 Wagner and Boordy Vineyards (which he founded in 1945) was the major disseminator of these varieties, among them:  Seibel 6339, Seibel 1XX, Seibel 1000 (Rosette).

And so it goes for thirteen chapters illustrated in black & white images with the occasional table–ample text loaded with facts, data, anecdotes, and stories of individuals, such as the Hargraves and Lucie T. Morton, wineries like Taylor Wine or Wollersheim Winery of Wisconsin, as well as organizations such as the Vintners Quality Association of Canada (VQA) or the Pennsylvania Premium Wine Group.  No one and nothing seems to have been overlooked.

With respect to Canada and its wine industry , Cattell marks Sept. 21, 1945 as “one of the key dates in eastern wine history.”  Philip Wagner, visiting from Maryland, Adhemar de Chaunac, winemaker at Brights in Ontario, and others from New York, including Nelson Shaulis from the Geneva research station, participated in a tasting of thirty-two New York wines.  Wagner had added some of his French hybrid wines.  “There was total silence–Wagner later recalled . . . — as it was generally realized for the first time that good wines could be made from French hybrid grapes.”

The result was that de Chaunac went back to Brights and soon had some twenty French hybrids and a few vinifera varieties ordered from France.  Commercial plantings began with 40,000 vines in 1948.  In addition, thanks to advances made at Brights with regard to controlling downy mildew with sulfur on a regular schedule rather after it first appeared in the vineyard meant that the imported vines had a much better chance of survival.  In fact, by 1955 Brights had produced the first commercial vinifera wine in the East:  a Pinot “Champagne”.  The following year Brights brought out a Pinot Chardonnay table wine (as the variety was then called).

Catell goes on to write about the arrival of the first hybrids in the Finger Lakes, as a result of the same tasting that had so impressed de Chaunac.  The first hybrid planted in the Finger Lakes was Seibel 1000 (Rossette), going back to 30s (though apparently no attempt was made to make commercial wine from it).  In 1946 Charles Fournier of Gold Seal ordered a minimum of 1,000 vines of both Baco Noir and Rossette.  Two years later Wagner tasted the results of wine made from these varieties and was astonished by the progress.  Eventually, other Finger Lakes producers began planting them–Widmer’s Wine Cellars, even, reluctantly at first, Taylor Wine Company, which until then was heavily invested in American varieties like Catawba.  Indeed, it was Greyton Taylor who wrote in 1954 that “. . . we happen to believe that since wine comes from grapes, wine should taste as though it did.”

In the next chapter Cattell tells the well-known story of Dr. Konstantin Frank and his crusade to plant vinifera grapes in the Finger Lakes.  He also recounts the controversial oenologist’s “Pro-Vinifera Crusade,” the “toxic scare” that was spread in the 60s claiming that wine made from hybrids was toxic, and the “vinifera-hybrid controversy.”

So Cattell provides not only a clear and well-organized tale of the wine industry in the East, but leavens it well with interesting, even fascinating, anecdote.  At the same time, it can make for very dry reading.  For example, in Chapter Four (Vineyards and Wineries Before Farm Winery Legislation), in writing about French Hybrids in Ohio, he writes:

Ohio is a good example of how a state got started on a wine grape program based on the French hybrids.  The first French hybrids to arrive in Ohio were cuttings of Seibel 1000 (Rosette) obtained by Mantey Vineyards in Sandusky and sent to Foster Nursery in Fredonia, New York, to be grafted on Couderc 3309 rootstock.  In 1954, Meier’s Wine Cellars in Silverton, ten miles from Cincinatti, planted Baco No. 1 (Baco Noir), Seibel 5898 (Rougeon), Seibel 1096, and Seibel 4643 on North Bass Island (Isle of St. George) in Lake Erie.

But then, it must be realized that this is most emphatically a History and Desk Reference.  The book is amply annotated and has an extensive bibliography.  It is not only suitable as a reference but is, thanks to its wealth of anecdote, readable and enjoyable as well.  How can one not be delighted by an anecdote like this one, on p. 125, “Grapevines from Canada were exempt from quarantine, and some of the earliest plantings of the French hybrids in the Finger Lakes took place in the 1950s when truckloads of cuttings crossed the border after pruning was completed in Canadian vineyards.”  Who would have guessed the source of French hybrids in the Finger Lakes?

Here and there are some minor errors.  For example, on p. 117, on the history of the beginning of appellations of origin, he cites 1905 in France as the onset of AOCs, but overlooks the earlier history of designated regions in the Port region of Portugal in the Eighteenth Century.  Another minor mistake:  “Sugar and water were added to the pomace [should be must] to make the wine potable.”  But I quibble.  After all, as a proper work of reference Cattell has this to offer:  The first petition for an American Viticultural Area designation was for Augusta in Missouri, applied for on Oct. 12, 1978 and granted June 20, 1980 as AVA #1; AVA #2 was Napa Valley, granted on Jan 28, 1981.  He goes on to explain that the with the establishment of the Augusta Wine Board in 1979, standards were to be based on those in use in Europe—in fact, four of the five designated board members were also members of the Commanderie de Bordeaux.

Again, in writing about the Canadian wine industry, he refers to the Horticultural Experiment Station, in Vineland.  There, he tells us, Ralph F. Crowther developed the Crowther-Truscott submerged-culture flor sherry-making method for making Spanish fino-type sherry, “a process that completely changed sherry-making in both Canada and the U.S.”  Also, Tibor Fuleki created the Vineland Flavour Index for screening seedlings for the labrusca flavor by measuring methyl anthranilate and volatile esters.  “Seedlings with an index over 14 were likely to have a discernible labrusca flavor component; vinifera and French hybrids averaged an index under 8. Conversely, Concord averaged 416.”

With respect to marketing, Cattell discusses how cooperative marketing began with the establishment of the first wine trails.  The very first was created informally in Pennsylvania in April 1979.  The first formal wine trail was later established in New York State in 1983 with the Cayuga Wine Trail.  With funding from the New York Wine & Grape Foundation, the Keuka Lake Wine Trail was created on June 18, 1986, so that by 1996 there were six wine trails in New York State.  Benefits of the wine trails included extending the tourist season from Columbus Day to end of the year, the establishment of new restaurants and B&Bs, and the rise of all manner of special events.

Another interesting factoid:  “The success of the VQA in Canada was a factor in the decision to set up the New Jersey Quality Wine Alliance (QWA).”  The program was inaugurated in 2000 in conjunction with the NJ Commercial Wine Competition.

Towards the conclusion of the book Cattell identifies three major trends that have helped the eastern wine trade get to where it is today:  “First is increasing wine quality; next is the improved business-oriented perspective of the winery owners, such as marketing initiatives; third, the increased ability of the producers to cooperate on legislative matters at both the state and federal levels.”

And then there are the Appendices, loaded with all manner of significant information and data.  Appendix A (The Origins of Eastern Wine Grapes), for example, has three pages of summarizing text and eight tables:

Table A.1.  Grape species most important for eastern North American wine production

Table A.2.  Vitis vinifera:  lists the 36 vinifera varieties most planted in Eastern N.A.

Table A.3.  American varieties: lists 23 varieties with their names, parentage, and source; e.g., Norton, Seedling (labrusca, aestivalis, vinifera), Introduced 1830

Table A.4.  French hybrid varieties: lists these varieties by name, with original name or number, and parentage; e.g., Baco Noir, Baco 24-23; later Baco #1, Folle Blanche ₓ riparia

Table A.5.  North American breeding programs: lists varieties by variety, number, cross, date introduced, and date crossed.   The list of varieties are arranged according to the program that developed them; e.g., NY State Agricultural Experiment Station breeding program.

Table A.6.  Independent breeding programs; e.g., Elmer Swensen and his varieties.

Table A.7.  Foreign breeding program:  Germany [focused on cold-climate varieties]

Table A.8.  Vitis amarensis varieties

Appendix B contains a quite interesting exploration, in brief, of how numbered hybrids like Seibel 5279—developed by Albert Seibel in France, was given the commercial name “l’Aurore”–because it was very early-ripening.  There are two tables.

Appendix E (Early Wine History, State by State), contains brief histories of the wine industry in each of the states covered in this book (in alphabetical order):

Alabama, Arkansas (one page), Connecticut (one page), Delaware (one short paragraph), Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana (one page), Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts (one page), Michigan, Missouri (one page), Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey (one page), New York (over three pages:  The Finger Lakes, Hudson River Valley, Lake Erie, and Philip Wagner, Boordy, and Seneca Foods; curiously, with no section devoted to Long Island or a word about the Niagara Escarpment), North Carolina, Ohio (almost two pages), Pennsylvania (nearly two pages), Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia (a page and a half), West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

It ends at Appendix G, lists, by state, the American Viticultural Areas in the East.

Thirty-seven years of experience studying and writing about the wine trade in the East were necessary to write a book of this scope and completeness.  It could not have otherwise been written.

Wines of Eastern North America cover

Wines of Eastern North America:  From Prohibition to the Present, A History and Desk Reference

by Hudson Cattell.  Ithaca:  Cornell U. Press, 2014.

235 pages of text with b/w illustrations, 7 maps; 7 appendices (A-G) taking up 75 pages, including tables; and 36 pages of extensive endnotes.

Viniculture in LI, Part II: background.

In exploring vinicultural practices in Long Island, I intend to particularly examine the practice of sustainable farming, which includes organic and Biodynamic® agriculture.  My original, first posting on 15 June 2010, Can 100% Organic Grapes be Grown in Long Island?, provoked some interesting and even useful responses.  I have since renamed it The Challenge of Growing Certified Organic Grapes in Long Island,  given the developments at Shinn Estate and The Farrm that have taken place since that 2010 posting.  The series now continues with this posting (now updated to April 2015 to include new developments and information, particularly with the Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing [LISW] program established in 2012). 

This Part II post serves as an introduction to the Part III articles devoted to the individual vineyards and wineries of Long Island.

NY Wine Regions Map 1To put things in perspective, one should bear in mind that New York State is the 3rd-largest producer of grapes by volume in the United States, after California and Washington.  Admittedly, most NY vineyards grow table grapes, but as of 2014 there were, according to the NY Wine & Grape Foundation (NYWGF), 373 wineries in the State, of which of which one in six are in Long Island.  Of all the wine regions of the State, Long Island is the one that is most committed to growing Vitis vinifera varieties, with very little planting of French-American hybrid vines and no Native American grapes at all.

I want to point out some factors that I believe appertain to most of the vineyards that I’ll be writing about—which is to say, all of the ones in Long Island, of which there are sixty-six bonded wineries, all but a handful of which are on the North Fork, as well as seven vineyards that sell their fruit to others.  They comprise, by my own calculation, about 2,565 acres of planted vines (the NYGWF calculates 2,041 acres.)

Geology & Soils

Geologically, Long Island is extensively formed by two glacial moraine spines, with a large, sandy outwash plain extending south to the Atlantic Ocean.  These moraines consist largely of gravel and loose rock that would become part of the island’s soils during the two most recent extensions of Wisconsin glaciation during the Ice Age some 21,000 years ago (19,000 BCE).  The northern, or Harbor Hill, moraine, directly runs along the North Shore of Long Island at points.  The more southerly moraine, called the Ronkonkoma moraine, forms the “backbone” of Long Island; it runs primarily through the very center of Long Island.  The land to the south of the Ronkonkoma, running to the South Shore, is the outwash plain of the last glacier. When the glaciers melted and receded northward around 11,000 BCE, their moraines and outwash produced the differences between the North Shore and the South Shore soils and beaches.

A General Soil Map (below), devised by the USDA Soil Conservation Service and the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station in 1972, shows the different kinds of soils that dominate the East End of Suffolk County, the part of Long Island that is home to most of the vineyards there.

East End, General Soil Map

The soil associations (or types) for Suffolk County as listed in the General Soil Map (and relevant to viniculture) are as follows:

  1. “Carver-Plymouth-Riverhead association [N. shore of the North Fork, extending across the Fork at Mattituck and then running East along the S. shore of Great Peconic Bay to Southold]:  Deep, rolling, excessively drained and well-drained, coarse-textured and moderately coarse-textured soils on moraines
  2. “Haven-Riverhead association [running from Brookhaven along the southern edge of 1 (above).  With an interruption at Mattituck, then extending as far as Orient Point; this is the dominant soil of the North Fork]:  Deep, nearly level to gently sloping, well-drained, medium-textured and moderately coarse-textured soils on outwash plains
  3. “Plymouth-Carver association [runs across the middle of the West-East axis of the county, encompassing Riverhead just south of 2.  It then extends into the Hamptons or South Fork as far as East Hampton but at no point touches the south shore.]  rolling and hilly:  Deep, excessively-drained, coarse-textured soils on moraines [the Ronkonkoma Moraine].
  4. “Bridgehampton-Haven association [actually runs immediately adjacent to, and south of, 3.]: Deep, nearly level to gently sloping, well-drained to moderately well-drained, medium-textured soils on outwash plains”

“Textures refer to surface layer in major soils of each association.”  [A caveat regarding the use of the map says,] “The map is . . . meant for general planning rather than a basis for decisions on the use of specific tracts.”

(There are ten soil types shown on the map, but we list only the four that form part of the terroir of the vineyards of the East End.)

With respect to the soil types in the North Fork and Hamptons AVAs, Louisa Thomas Hargrave wrote an article, “The Dirt Below Our Feet,” in the Spring 2011 issue of Edible East End, in which she made some important observations:

Every discussion of a wine region’s quality begins with the soil.  Going back to ancient Roman times, around ad 50, Lucius Columella advised, in his treatise on viticulture, De Re Rustica (“On Agriculture”), “Before you plant a piece of ground with vines, you should examine what sort of flavor it has; for it will give the wine a similar taste. The flavor can be ascertained…if you soak the earth in water and taste the water when the earth has [g]one to the bottom.  Sandy soil under which there is sweet moisture is the most suitable for vines…any soil which is split during the summer is useless for vines and trees.”

The “useless” soil that splits is clay, a colloidal suspension of particles similar to Jell-O. Clay retains too much moisture when it rains, making the tender roots of wine grapevines rot; it withholds nutrients from the vine when the weather is dry.

There is little clay on the East End of Long Island, except in specific and easily identified veins. We have remarkably uniform sandy soils here that vary in available topsoil (loamy organic matter), but all contain the same fundamental yet complex mixture of minerals.  These soils are ranked by the U.S. Soils Conservation Service as “1-1,” the most auspicious rating for agriculture. Any single handful of Long Island soil will show the reflective glint of mica; the dull gray of granite; the mellow pink, salmon and white of quartz; the red and ochre of sandstone; and black bits of volcanic matter. To describe them simply as “sandy loam” fails to acknowledge the profound effect that having this mixture of minerals must have on the vibrancy and dynamic quality of Long Island’s wines.

Richard Olsen-Harbich, the author of the two AVA applications for the Hamptons and the North Fork, published a two-part series on the soils of Long Island for Bedell Cellars, where he is winemaker:  the first, The Soil of Long Island. Part 1 – Ice Age: The Meltdown, published on April 12, 2011, and the second, more recent piece, The Soil of Long Island. Part 2 – There’s No Place Like Loam, published Sept. 6, 2013, which are useful and lucid explanations of how the glaciers of the Ice Age left Long Island with the soils that grow the vines today.

It should also be pointed out that Long Island soil, regardless of its composition, tends to have a rather low pH, which is to say too acidic for Vitis vinifera vines to grow well as it weakens the vines’ ability to assimilate nutrients from the soil.  The vines need the addition of lime to balance the pH and is something that nearly every vineyard must do to get itself established for vinifera.  It can take years—Paumanok Vineyards was adding lime to its vineyards every year for twenty years before it was able to relax the practice.  It nevertheless has to be done again every few years when the pH gets too low again, as it appears that the added lime may get leached out of the soil over time.

Climate

Overall, Long Island displays a cool maritime climate.  The brutal summer heat seen in the Iberian Peninsula, which is at the same latitude, is tempered in the Hamptons AVA by the Labrador Current which moves up the eastern Atlantic Ocean.  Summer temperatures are also moderated by Little Peconic Bay to its north.  The North Fork enjoys the moderating influences of Long Island Sound.  These same bodies of water help to temper the effects of the Canadian air masses that move in during the winter.  The influence of these waters helps prevent late spring frosts which can kill young grape buds.  The cumulative effect is a lengthening of the growing season to approximately 210-220 days.  Wine-grape varieties can thrive here, as they can grow better and ripen further than just about anywhere in the U.S. outside of California.  The North Fork is such a narrow band of farmland, situated between the bay and the sound that virtually all of the vineyards or near or on the water.  According to the Appellation American Website:

Despite being next door to each other, there are notable differences between the South Fork and the warmer North Fork. The South Fork is more exposed to onshore Atlantic breezes, delaying bud-break by as much as three weeks. Even after bud-break, the area is frequently foggy, keeping early season temperatures and sunshine hours lower than on the North Fork. By the end of the growing season, the seemingly subtle weather differences between the Forks add up to quite different overall climates. The Hamptons are generally very cold to moderately cool, while the North Fork is moderately cool to relatively warm. The damper silt and loam soils of The Hamptons, along with climactic differences, create a unique style, with wines from The Hamptons generally being more restrained and less fruit-forward than wines from the North Fork.

Wineries & Vineyards

By my own count, as of March 2015, there are a total of 76 wine production entities in Long Island, of which:

  • 21 are wineries with vineyards, though they may also buy fruit from others
  • 3 are wineries without vineyards that buy their fruit from growers
  • 11 are wine producers that have neither a winery nor a vineyard, but outsource their production, having their wine made to their specifications from purchased grapes
  • 33 are vineyards without a winery, but use an outside facility to make wine to their specifications  from their grapes
  • 1 is a crush facility that makes wine from fruit, provided by others, to the providers’ specifications
  • 7 are vineyards that sell their fruit to wine producers
  • In all, there are 58 tasting rooms in Long Island

Vinicultural Practices

Regardless of the different terroirs of either Fork, the first point that I’d like to make is that, based on my visits, so far–to Wölffer Estate and Channing Daughters in the Hamptons AVA, and to Bedell Cellars, Castello Borghese, Diliberty, Gramercy, Jamesport, Lieb, Lenz, Macari, Martha Clara, McCalls, Mudd Vineyard, The Old Field Vineyards, Osprey’s Dominion, Palmer, Paumanok, Peconic Bay, Raphael, Kontakosta Winery, Sherwood House, and Shinn Estate in the North Fork AVA–the standards of vineyard management are of a very high order.  The neatness of the rows of vines, their careful pruning and training (most, if not all, are using Double Cordon trained on two wires with Vertical Shoot Positioning, or VSP, and cane pruning), the use of cover crops between rows, and much else besides, attest to the high standards and sustainable practices to which the vineyard managers aspire. 

A handful of vineyards are endeavoring to farm organically and/or Biodynamically, though only a single vineyard, Shinn Estate, is actually working to obtain actual certification for both.  Then there is The Farrm, in Calverton, run by fruit and vegetable grower Rex Farr, who obtained full organic certification in 1990 and planted vinifera vines in 2005–thus harvesting the first certified-organic grapes on LI in 2012.  It is expected that the first wine to be made from its fruit will be produced in 2013 by a newly-established winery on the North Fork.  None of this is to say that a vineyard that does not seek to grow organic or Biodynamic grapes is the lesser for it, though all should seek to farm sustainably.  Excellent, even great wines have been and shall continue to be produced whether farmed organically or not.  Indeed, as I pointed out at the beginning of my first post, there is no proven correlation of quality of a wine because it is made with organic or Biodynamic grapes.  (A case in point is the famous and incredibly expensive wine of the Domaine de la Romanée Conti, in Burgundy.  It has been long acknowledged as the source of some of the greatest red and white wines of all of France, and this was the case before it was converted to Biodynamic farming, and continues to be the case today.)  Part of what makes it so difficult to quantify the quality of a wine made by either method is that fact that there is vintage variation every year, due primarily to factors of weather and climate.  Thus, there is no objective way of being sure that viticultural practice was the dominant reason for the quality of a particular vintage, rather than the weather of a particular season.  Nevertheless, those who practice organic/Biodynamic viniculture do aver that it is reflected in the wine and there are consumers who do think that they can detect the difference.

By now virtually all of the vineyards on the two forks are attempting some form of sustainable farming, though the kind of sustainable work can vary considerably across the gamut of over sixty vineyards.   Along these lines, an important development took place when a new accreditation authority was created in May 2012:  Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing, Inc., with the intent of setting out the guidelines for sustainable viticultural practices for all wineries in the region.  Membership is voluntary, but already, as of April 2015, there are sixteen vineyards that have joined, with thirteen already certified and three in transition.  Others are giving membership serious consideration.  A post devoted to the LI Sustainable Winegrowing authority was published on this blog in April 2012 (since updated as of 21 June 2013).

Another important factor to keep in mind is the role of clone selection for the vineyards.  A very useful article about the significance of clones was posted by Richard Olsen-Harbich of Bedell Cellars on March 19, 2013:  Revenge of the Clones.  The piece is well worth reading in its entirety, but there are two salient paragraphs that are worth quoting:

Over the past 10 years, grapevine clones have shown themselves to be of increasing importance in our vineyards. Simply put, clones are a genetic variant of a particular variety. The Chardonnay grown on Long Island decades ago is not the same vine we have today. Plantings since that time – especially in the past 10-15 years, have benefited from a wider selection of available plant material. Back in 1990, if you wanted to plant Chardonnay, you had one choice. Today there are more than 70 registered clones of this noble white grape being grown throughout the world and they all have their particular nuances and characteristics. Many of these clones are already in existence in Long Island vineyards – from the tropical and aromatic Musqué to the classic and alluring Dijon clones from Burgundy. Although these are all Chardonnays, each exhibits their own distinctive character.

This fact is also true of grapes like Merlot and Cabernet Franc, where profound differences in wine quality can be seen between clones grown in the same vineyard, on the same soils. Over 50 clones of Merlot have been identified in Bordeaux. Pomerol alone has over 35 clones of Cabernet Franc. Newer French clones, long kept overseas as tightly held trade secrets, are finding their way into the United States. In most cases these new clones are better suited to our maritime climate. Often these clones will ripen earlier than the older selections we used to have. Some are more resistant to disease. The ultimate result is higher quality wines. I’ve seen clones so different from each other that you would think the wines were made from another variety entirely.

In other words, when the first vinifera vines were planted in the 70s and 80s most of the clones came from California.  Many of these clones had been developed at the University of California at Davis (UCD) but of course were created with California vineyards in mind.  This meant that the clones were less suitable for the very different, maritime climate of Long Island.  For example, the Sauvignon Blanc clone 1 (the ‘Wente clone’) was very vigorous and produced large clusters but it was also very susceptible to rot in LI.  Only in the 90s were new clones planted to replace clone 1, and all of these came not from California but France (primarily from Bordeaux, in the case of the Sauvignon Blanc.)  This process was true for several other varieties.  In other words, the new clones are part of what makes Long Island the most ‘European’ of the wine-growing regions of the United States.

As a matter of fact, the Long Island Wine Region, which includes both the North Fork and the Hamptons AVAs, in 2010 became signatory to the Declaration to Protect Wine Place and Origin that was first enacted in 2005 in Napa (it is also known as the Napa Declaration on Place).  The original signers included not only the Napa AVA but also Washington and Oregon State AVAs, and Champagne, Jerez/Sherry, and Oporto/Port in the EU, among others. (The point of this, of course, is to control the use of place names and prevent the misuse of the name ‘Champagne’ for example, on any sparkling wine that is not from there.  Chablis, Port, and Burgundy were also place names that were widely abused around the world.)

There is no intention whatsoever in my series to judge a vineyard because it does or does not grow or intend to grow organically or Biodynamically.  (Indeed, wineries that are technically organic can still choose not to be certified.  Among the many reasons for this, for example, are that a winery may not want the added costs and the bureaucracy entailed in registering, or a winery may disagree with the government standards.  Whatever the case, such wineries are not allowed to use the term organic on their labels.)

In any event, the point of this series is to understand the reasons for choosing a particular approach to grape production over another.  We want to understand why Long Island vineyards do what they do before we go on to explore their methods of vinification, for between what is done in the vineyard and what happens in the winery is what determines the quality of the wine that is produced.  The wines from Long Island have long been improving since those first, tentative years going back to 1973 (when the Hargraves planted the first vinifera vines in LI) and in recent years are receiving their due recognition in the form of positive reviews, awards, and high scores for individual bottlings.

Important Terms Defined

  • AVA or American Viticultural Area: An area defined by a unique geology and climate that is distinctive from other vine-growing areas and hence that produces wines of a distinctive overall character.  There are none of the restrictions as to varieties planted, vine density, allowable harvest per acre, or any of the other limitations that exist in European appellations, such as the French Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC).  Long Island has three AVAs, all applied for to the TTB (Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau) which administers the program, in the mid-1980s: The Hamptons (South Fork), the North Fork AVA, and the Long Island AVA.
  • Biodynamic®, or Demeter USA, certification; also, Demeter USA, FAQ, Biodynamic wine (PDF file).  Also, see an excellent discussion in a 5-part series beginning with New York Cork Report, Biodynamics, Part I, by Tom Mansell, along with the ensuing debate in the comments that follow each of the postings.  There is also a controversial series against Biodynamics by Stuart Smith, a winemaker in California, called Biodynamics is a Hoax, a polemic that is worth reading, along with the comments in response.
  • Bordeaux Mix:  A widely-used type of fungicide that mixes copper sulfate and lime, first used in Bordeaux in the 1880s; see Univ. of Calif., Davis, Pesticide notes
  • Compost Tea:  A type of natural compost mixed with water for distribution in liquid form (it may be seen as agricultural homeopathy); see National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, Compost Tea Notes
  • Copper Sulfate:  A widely-used industrial pesticide, allowed in both organic and Biodynamic farming within specified limits: see  Cornell Extension Toxicology Network (ExToxNet), Pesticide Information Profile, copper sulfate
  • Cover crops: Vegetation that is either deliberately planted between vineyard rows (e.g., clover, to replenish nitrogen in the soil) or weeds that are naturally allowed to grow between and into rows (the Biodynamic approach); see UC Davis, Cover Crop Selection and Management for Vineyards
  • Integrated Pest Management (IPM):  A major component of sustainable agriculture, it is labor-intensive but effectively reduces the need for certain kinds of pesticides; pheronome ties are a typical method of disrupting the reproduction cycle of some insect; see EPA, Factsheet on IPM
  • Macroclimate:  The climate of a large area or region, such as that of all of Long Island, or perhaps just the East End of LI.
  • Mesoclimate:  The distinct climate of a smaller area, such as that of a single vineyard or a parcel thereof.
  • Microclimate:  The climate of a very small area; it could be as small as a single vine or a distinctive climate of a tiny part of a vineyard, such as a depression in a row of vines.  (NOTE:  These terms are often used interchangeably, but most often microclimate may be used to refer to the mesoclimate of a vineyard.)
  • Organic Certification:  USDA, National Organic Program, Organic Certification
  • Regalia:  A biologically-based pesticide; see Marrone Bio-Innovations, Products, Regalia
  • Serenade: A biologically-based pesticide; see PAN Pesticide Database, Products–Serenade
  • Stylet oil:  defined in the industry as a Technical Grade White Mineral Oil, it is used as a biodegradable fungicide and insecticide in integrated pest management programs.  It also serves as as a substitute for sulfur, reducing or eliminating the need for that application, according to Steve Mudd, a LI vineyard owner and consultant.
  • Sustainable agriculture:  according to Mary V. Gold, on the USDA Website, “Some terms defy definition. ‘Sustainable agriculture’ has become one of them. In such a quickly changing world, can anything be sustainable? What do we want to sustain? How can we implement such a nebulous goal? . . . If nothing else, the term ‘sustainable agriculture’ has provided talking points, a sense of direction, and an urgency, that has sparked much excitement and innovative thinking in the agricultural world.”  Follow this interesting, full explanation of the term at USDA, Sustainable Agriculture definition.  Another excellent source for information about sustainable agriculture is to be found on the NY State VineBalance Program website, which is dedicated to sustainable practices in NY State vineyards, and as mentioned above, the Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing certification program, with sixteen vineyards already committed to its regulations and guidelines.
  • Variety vs. Varietal:  not to be pedantic (though I can be), Variety is the term applied to a particular kind of vine and its grape; e.g., Cabernet Franc or Riesling; Varietal is the wine made from a variety or a blend of different varieties.  The terms are often used interchangeably but shouldn’t be.
  • Vertical Shoot Positioning:  is a training system used with single or double Guyot, cane-pruned training, or with a Cordon, spur-pruned system.  VSP is very common in cool and/or humid climate regions with low to moderate vigorous growth, as it encourages better air flow through the vine.  This is accomplished by making all the shoots grow vertically, with no vegetative vine growth allowed below the cordon/cane.  The increase in air flow helps prevent problems associated with disease and also allows the fruit to dry out more quickly after it rains.

      Both cluster thinning and harvesting are generally made easier using VSP, given that there is better access to the fruit.  The objective is to train the shoots so as to create a narrow layer that provides good sunlight exposure and air flow in the fruiting zone of the canopy.  Each shoot is thus trained to grow vertically by attaching it to movable catch wires.  The shoot’s length can easily be controlled by pruning any growth above the top catch wire.  The fruiting zone is generally kept at waist height, which makes it more convenient for the vineyard workers, given that the vineyard rows are worked throughout the season.)

For a full explanation of VSP, see Cornell Univ. Agriculture Extension, Training, and Trellising Vinifera Vines.

Viticulture vs. Viniculture:  again my pedantic side will out–Viticulture is the general term for the growing of any kind of grape vine, whether intended for the table or for wine; Viniculture refers to the raising of wine grapes in particular.

_________________________

The vineyards that I intend to write about are listed below in alphabetical order (those wineries that have no vineyard but purchase their grapes from others will not be part of the vinicultural survey– these are shown in gray; the ones that have already had articles posted on this blog are shown in purple; those that have been ‘indirectly interviewed’ are shown in light purple.  If the vineyard has been certified by the Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing Group (LISW), that is indicated:

  • Ackerly Ponds, North Fork AVA (85 acres) is now part of Sannino’s Bella Vita Vineyards (which see)
  • Anthony Nappa (no vineyard) posted 6/14
  • Baiting Hollow Farm Vineyard, North Fork AVA (11 acres)
  • Bedell Cellars, North Fork AVA (78 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); Rich Olsen-Harbich interviewed on May 12, 2011; posted June 2, 2011
  • Bouké Wines (no vineyard)
  • Castello di Borghese Vineyard & Winery [formerly Hargrave Vineyard], North Fork AVA (85 acres); Giovanni & Allegra Borghese interviewed on Nov. 18, 2014 and Mar. 27, 2015, to be posted
  • Channing Daughters Winery, Hamptons AVA (25 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); Larry Perrine interviewed on April 30 & May 21, 2012; posted January 22, 2013
  • Clovis Point, North Fork AVA (20 acres); see Bill Ackerman interview
  • Coffee Pot Cellars (no vineyard)
  • Corey Creek Vineyards, North Fork AVA (30 acres, LISW sustainable-certified), owned by Bedell Cellars; posted June 2, 2011
  • Corwith Vineyards, Hamptons AVA (3 acres; LISW sustainable-certified); Dave Corwith interviewed May 20, 2014 and Nov. 16, 2015; posted Oct. 15, 2014, updated Nov. 19, 2015.
  • Croteaux Vineyards, North Fork AVA (10.5 acres); see Steve Mudd interview
  • Deseo de Michael, North Fork AVA (.3 acres)
  • Diliberto Winery, North Fork AVA (4 acres); Sal Diliberto interviewed Mar. 28, 2015, to be posted
  • Duck Walk Vineyards, Hamptons AVA, and Duck Walk Vineyards North, North Fork AVA (130 acres; LISW candidate); Ed Lovaas, winemaker, on Nov. 16, 2015.  to be posted.
  • Gramercy Vineyards, North Fork AVA (3.5 acres); Carol Sullivan, owner, interviewed October 2, 2012; posted; as of June 2015 the vineyard is leased out; no longer making wine
  • The Grapes of Roth (no vineyard)
  • Harbes Family Farm & Vineyard, North Fork AVA (5 acres, LISW sustainable-certified)
  • Harmony Vineyards, LI AVA (7 acres); see Steve Mudd interview
  • Influence Wines (no vineyard); Erik Bilka interviewed 6/15; to be posted
  • Jamesport Vineyards, North Fork AVA (60 acres); Ron Goerler, Jr. interviewed on April 14, 2014; posted Sept. 9, 2014.
  • Jason’s Vineyard, North Fork AVA (20 acres)
  • Kings Mile, North Fork AVA (leased vineyard); Rob Hansult interviewed on Sept. 26, 2013; posted same day
  • Kontokosta Winery (23 acres, LISW sustainable-in transition); Michael K. interviewed Nov. 18, 2014, Gilles Martin interviewed Mar. 28, 2015; to be posted
  • Laurel Lake Vineyards, North Fork AVA (21 acres); Juan Sepúlveda interviewed Sep. 26, 2015
  • Lenz Winery, North Fork AVA (65 acres); Sam McCullough interviewed April 20 & 27, 2011; posted May 16, 2011; Eric Fry interviewed Mar. 27, 2015, to be added to original Lenz post
  • Leo Family Wines; John Leo interviewed for PWG on October 3, 2012; posted February 11, 2013
  • Lieb Family Cellars, North Fork AVA (50 acres, LISW sustainable-in transition); Logan Kingston, Sarah Kane, & Jildo Vázquez interviewed June 6, 2013; posted October 4, 2013
  • Loughlin Vineyards, Long Island AVA (6 acres)
  • Macari Vineyards & Winery, North Fork AVA (200 acres); Joe Macari, Jr. interviewed July 9, 2009 & June 17 2010; posted June 30, 2010
  • Martha Clara Vineyards, North Fork AVA  (101 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); Jim Thompson & Juan Micieli-Diaz interviewed Feb. 3 & March 27, 2012; posted May 3, 2012
  • Mattebella Vineyards, North Fork AVA (22 acres, LISW sustainable-in transition)
  • McCall Vineyards, North Fork AVA (22 acres); see Steve Mudd interview
  • Mudd Vineyards, North Fork AVA (50 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); Steve Mudd interviewed; posted September 18, 2012
  • The Old Field Vineyards, North Fork AVA (12 acres); Ros & Christian Baiz & Perry Weiss interviewed on May 12, 2011; posted on June 7, 2011
  • Onabay Vineyard, North Fork AVA (180 acres total, not all with vines): see Bill Ackerman interview
  • One Woman Vineyards, North Fork AVA (12 acres, LISW sustainable-certified)
  • Osprey’s Dominion Vineyards, North Fork AVA (90 acres); Adam Suprenant interviewed April 23 & May 8, 2012; posted February 3, 2013
  • Palmer Vineyards, North Fork AVA (100 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); Miguel Martín interviewed October 12 & 22, 2010; posted November 13, 2010
  • Paumanok Vineyards, North Fork AVA (72 acres planted, LISW sustanble-certified); Kareem Massoud interviewed May 3, 2011; posted May 23, 2011
  • Peconic Bay Winery, North Fork AVA (58 acres); Jim Silver & Charles Hargrave interviewed; posted May 9, 2011;  winery is now closed but see interviews with Steve Mudd & Bill Ackerman, since Peconic Bay’s vineyards have been turned over to Lieb Cellars as of January 2013
  • Pellegrini Vineyards, North Fork AVA (72 acres); see Steve Mudd interview
  • Pindar Vineyards, North Fork AVA (500 acres; LISW candidate); Pindar Damianos interviewed Sept. 26, Ed Lovaas on Nov. 16, 2015.  to be posted.
  • Pugliese Vineyards, North Fork AVA (45 acres); Pat Pugliese interviewed Jan. 19, 2015
  • Raphael, North Fork AVA (55 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); Leslie Howard & Steve Mudd interviewed May 21 & June 13; posted September 17, 2012; Anthony Nappa interviewed
  • Roanoke Vineyards, North Fork AVA (10 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); interviewed Richard Pisacano, owner; posted July 10, 2013
  • Sannino’s Bella Vita Vineyard (5.25 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); interviewed Jan. 30, 2015; to be posted
  • Sherwood House Vineyards, North Fork AVA (36 acres); interviewed Bill Ackerman on September 26, 2012; posted
  • Shinn Estate Vineyard, North Fork AVA (20 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); Barbara Shinn & David Paige interviewed June 18, 2010; posted July 12, 2010
  • Southold Farm+Cellar, North Fork AVA (9 acres; as of Sept. 2014 just entering production); Regan Meador interviewed Jan. 30 & Nov. 16, 2015; to be posted
  • Sparkling Pointe (29 acres, LISW sustainable-certified)
  • Suhru Wines (no vineyard); Russell Hearn, owner, interviewed for PWG on October 3, 2012
  • Surrey Lane Vineyards, North Fork AVA (25 acres, LISW sustainable-in transition); see Steve Mudd interview
  • T’Jara Vineyard, North Fork AVA (14 acres); Russell Hearn , owner, interviewed for PWG
  • Vineyard 48, North Fork AVA (28 acres planted)
  • Waters Crest Winery (no vineyard); interviewed Nov. 17, 2014, to be posted
  • Whisper Vineyards, Long Island AVA (17 acres); interviewed Steve Gallagher on Mar. 27, 2015, to be posted.
  • Wölffer Estate, Hamptons AVA (174 acres, LISW sustainable-certified); interviewed Roman Roth & Rich Pisacano on April 30, 2012 & June 20, 2013, updated and posted on July 10, 2013

Three very useful links that serve as portals to most of these vineyards are 1) Long Island Wine Country which lists only those wineries and vineyards that are members of the LI Wine Council; 2) Uncork New York! (aka the New York Wine and Grape Foundation) which provides links to all wineries and wine vineyards in New York State.  Also indispensable for New York State wines is the New York Cork Report by Lenn Thompson, with its many interviews, coverage of wine tastings, reviews, and more.

A framable 24 by 36-inch map of the wineries and vineyards of the East End of Long Island, by Steve De Long, can be purchased on Amazon:

LI Wine Map

 

Viniculture in LI, Part III: Lieb Cellars

Lieb Family Cellars Lieb Cellars Oregon Road Spring 2013  At first, the original 20-acre property was called Lieb Vineyard when it was established in 1992 by Mark and Kathy Lieb, but soon after, a new entity, Lieb Family Cellars, was created.  Today both are under the rubric of Lieb Cellars.  Because the vineyard has no winery of its own, at the beginning it used the winery facilities at Palmer Vineyards, and then those of Lenz Winery, where Eric Fry is the winemaker, but as of 2000 it has used the custom-crush facilities of Premium Wine Group (PWG), itself co-founded by Mark with Russell Hearn.  By 2001 Lieb’s tasting room at PWG was opened and it began acquiring more land for vinifera vines.  In early March 2013 PWG and Lieb Cellars came under the ownership of Southport Lane, a private equity firm.  Peter Pace, a marketing executive with long experience in the spirits industry, was appointed as Managing Director of Lieb Cellars this past March, and Russell Hearn is Directing Winemaker of PWG and the winemaker for Lieb.

Lieb’s vineyards have been sustainably managed since its founding and it recently has been awarded a USDA grant of more than $23,000, which will help it support its management practices and sustainable viniculture over the next ten years.  Indeed, it has also joined the Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing program—its conversion to the programs guidelines and regulations should be straightforward, given that it already follows the VineBalance sustainable program by Cornell’s Agricultural Extension.

It should be pointed out that Lieb’s commitment to sustainable winegrowing is decidedly emphatic.  From the beginning, it has said in its mission statement that Lieb is dedicated,  “. . . to produce the highest quality estate-grown wines, without compromising the land on which we live.”  Among the practices that they point out in particular are:

  • avoidance of herbicides
  • use of organic fertilizers
  • preservation of topsoil
  • replenishment of nutrients on a disciplined schedule
  • hand-tending and harvesting of vines
  • keeping fruit yields intentionally low

Lieb Cellars staff, 3I met with the management staff at the tasting room on Oregon Road, Sarah Kane who is Director of Operations, as well as her colleagues Logan Kingston and Jean Partridge.  They were very helpful and plied me with tastings of various Lieb wines—as the saying goes, liquor is quicker.  We spoke about many things, including Lieb’s operations and its long-term plans for expansion, We spoke about many things, including Lieb’s operations and its long-term plans for expansion, and some of our conversation was quite philosophical and very interesting.  Indeed, I’ll have to write a separate post for the discussion that we had, for there were some excellent insights into what the challenges are for Long Island wine producers, particularly with respect to competition and the selling of the wine in the larger marketplace.  What was clear was their passion and commitment to not just Lieb, but Long Island wine as a whole.

But when it came to discussion of the viticultural practices of the operation, they got me in touch with the head of the vineyard crew for the original Lieb parcels, Jildo Vázquez, originally from El Salvador, who has been with Lieb for the past sixteen years.  He’s held in very high esteem by the staff who cannot praise him enough for his work ethic, skill, and dedication.

Lieb vineyard, Jildo on tractorJildo came in from the vineyards where he’d been working on a tractor when I asked to speak to him.  Speaking in Spanish, I asked him what he and his crew did to bring quality fruit grown sustainably to the winery.  Rather shy and very soft-spoken, particularly with a stranger, even though speaking Spanish, I had to draw Jildo out.  He answered my questions very simply and directly:  “Well, this first thing that we do is check that each vine is health and clean.  Then we make sure to spray them as needed.”  When I asked him what kind of sprays he uses, he said, “I don’t know, as I don’t do it.  I dedicate myself to making sure that the plants are clean.”  It turns out, according to him, that there are individuals who are trained to do that particular job and must be properly licensed.  It wasn’t enough that a sprayer have the requisite experience; he needed, as Jildo put it, “to have the backing of the law.”  An answer, I thought, that was very reassuring in the context.

For that reason, he only maintains the vines and keeps them clean of any diseases that may threaten them.  Towards the end of the season and just before the harvest he’ll spray the vines to clean them of any bacterial or fungal growths.  He also ensures that each vine has no more than fourteen or sixteen shoots so that it grows well.

I asked about the use of fertilizers and he told me that though he knows that they are used in some places, they are not employed at Lieb because they can adversely affect the vines.  With respect to using machines to harvest the grapes, he made a point of explaining just why they aren’t used at Lieb:  they gather not only fruit, but also leaves, stems, bird droppings, damaged fruit, dirt, and so on.  That’s why they only pick by hand—the harvested fruit is clearly superior.

As his replies suggest, this is a vineyard that is closely and carefully managed, and the quality of the fruit shows in their wines.

Lieb Cellars, Russell & JildoJildo has been collaborating with Russell Hearn closely since PWG began making Lieb’s wine thirteen years ago, especially now that the two firms have been merged.  Jildo is himself a gifted winegrower, as Russell himself attests, given that with his long experience and acute eye he’s able to see if anything is wrong with a vine, and even without tasting can visually see when a vineyard is ready to harvest.  Russell thinks very highly of Jildo and enjoys working with him.  During the growing season, Russell goes out into the vineyard about once a week, and during the harvest he goes every day with Jildo.

As Logan pointed out, Jildo is extremely dedicated, and with the acquisition of the Peconic Bay vines he has been getting up at 5:30 every day and doesn’t quit until 7:00 in the evening.  He has a crew of eight, some of whom have been working with him for years.

At present Lieb has its vineyards planted to Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Pinot Blanc, and Petit Verdot, as well as Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, Viognier, Sauvignon Blanc, and Riesling.  Some of the vines were planted as far back as 1982.

Indeed, Lieb/PWG (Southport Lane) has taken control of Peconic Bay’s vineyards, as the latter is has just put its winery up for sale.  That’s an additional 58 acres in two large parcels, in consequence of which Lieb has hired Steve Mudd, a long-time wide-ranging vineyard consulting manager in the East End to help run Peconic Bay’s Main Road  vineyard and Bill Ackerman of North Fork Viticultural Services (NFVS) who works the one on Oregon Road.  The two men coöperate on certain aspects of the management of the fields, particularly with respect to the sprays to use.  Ackerman mixes his sprays at his own property and then brings in his equipment into all the vineyard parcels, using double-curtained machines that help keep the sprays contained and partially recycled.

Lieb Cellars labels, 4And then there are the Lieb wines. For starters, Sarah pointed out that Lieb Cellars labels, 2Lieb Cellars’ 91-point Blanc de Blanc brut sparkling wine, made entirely of Pinot Blanc, which we were tasting during the interview, was the result of the cooperation of two winemakers:  Eric Fry of Lenz Vineyards, who made the dosage, and Russell, who finished the making of the wine.  In fact, Lieb has employed the gifts of Eric to make dosages for the last twelve years, other than the 2009, which was entirely Russell’s effort.  Eric, according to Sarah, has the right palate for the Pinot Blanc sparkler that Lieb so famously makes.  Tom Collichio’s Craft Restaurant house sparkler —is made by Russell as well as another for Topping Rose House, another Collichio restaurant.

Lieb Cellars labels, 3Essentially, Lieb has two brands:  Lieb Cellars, which includes the Reserve wines, and Bridge Lane, its second label (right).  I’ve tried most of their wines, of which I have purchased several over the years and a few of which are still in my cellar.  All of them, without exception, are clean, well-made, and taste true to the varieties from which they are made.  Lieb is especially well-known for both its award-winning Pinot Blanc sparkler and its also medalled Pinot Blanc Reserve wine.  I’m also especially fond of the 2008 Cabernet Franc, which is wonderful to drink, mature and ready now, or cellared for a few years more.  One that I’ve not yet tried is the White Merlot, where the grapes are picked early in the harvest season and crushed without any skin contact.  From its description on the Lieb Website, it sounds intriguing.

Bridge Lane is being rebranded and is the first label in Long Island to sell wine in boxes, according to a piece by Eileen Duffy, just published in East End Magazine on Feb. 5, 2014:  Forget Screwcaps, Lieb Puts Second Label, Bridge Lane, in Boxes.

All the wines are made at PWG by Russell Hearn, so how could they be anything but good?  (see my interview with Russell about PWG.)

A final note: as of September 24, 2013, according to Lenn Thompson in his New York Cork Report, Lieb has joined Merliance:

. . . formerly known as the Long Island Merlot Alliance, [which] announced today that Lieb Cellars has joined its ranks and that two barrels of Lieb Cellars’ Merlot will be included in the 2012 vintage of Merliance, the group’s cooperative merlot blend.

This move isn’t surprising. Acquired along with Premium Wine Group by private equity firm Southport Lane earlier this year, Lieb Cellars is now under the business leadership of Peter Pace and technical direction of Merliance co-founder winemaker Russell Hearn.

“Lieb seeks to expand the visibility of Long Island wine at high-profile venues across the Northeast,” said Pace in a press release, citing Citi Field, Navy Beach, JFK Airport and other destinations as the winery’s newest points of distribution. “With this expansion, we will certainly elevate the perception of our region as a source for quality wines, with merlot foremost among them.”

Lieb currently makes three merlot-based wines: its Reserve Merlot — always a NYCR favorite and a great value — its second-label Bridge Lane merlot and Right Coast Red blend. “There’s a reason merlot wines dominate our red portfolio,” said Hearn. “The grape thrives on Long Island, enabling us to make wines of consistent quality, no matter what the vintage brings. By joining the Merliance, we seek to continue the important research and quality initiatives the organization advances, and grow the perception of merlot and merlot blends as the signature wines of Long Island.”

With the addition of Lieb Cellars, the Merliance has seven members, including Clovis Point, McCall Wines, Raphael, Sherwood House Vineyards, T’Jara Vineyards and Wölffer Estate Vineyard.

Lieb logo Lieb Cellars Mattituck • 35 Cox Neck Road, Mattituck, NY 11952 • 631.298.1942
Lieb Cellars Oregon Road • 13050 Oregon Road, Cutchogue, NY 11935 • 631.734.1100
Lieb Cellars East Hampton • 26 Park Place, East Hampton, NY 11937 • 631.527.5100

Lieb Cellars Interview with Sarah Kane, Logan Kingston, & Jean Partridge, augmented by information from its Website and PR releases, June 6 and October 4, 2013

Viniculture in LI, Part III: Bill Ackerman & North Fork Viticultural Services

Bill Ackerman interview at Sherwood House

 From the Sherwood House Web site:

Established in 1996, Sherwood House Vineyards is committed to the production of world-class wines using only estate-grown vinifera grapes. Owners Dr. Charles Smithen and wife Barbara believe that producing fine wine is a combination of passion and patience, handcrafting their wines using traditional methods combined with the latest scientific techniques. “There’s very little nature and man can do in true harmony,” says Dr. Smithen. “A vineyard is one of those things. Making wine requires both science and art to excel. Anyone can learn the science. But it’s the art, the near-intuitive understanding, the smell, sense, and feel, that makes the difference.”

On their 38-acre farm, the Smithens initially planted Chardonnay vines from Burgundian clones, but after careful research and planning, have since added Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot. Sherwood House currently produces a Stainless Steel Fermented (un-oaked) Chardonnay, Barrel Fermented (oaked) Chardonnay, Blanc de Blanc (sparkling), White Merlot, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and a Bordeaux-style red blend, using the facilities of Premium Wine Group, as Sherwood House has no winery of its own [author’s emendation].

The team at Sherwood is led by two veterans.  Winemaker Gilles Martin received his Master of Oenology from France’s prestigious Université Montpellier and directed production at more than a dozen prominent wineries in France, South America, and California, before settling on Long Island.  Viticulturist Bill Ackerman has 15 years of experience growing grapes on Long Island and a reputation for meticulousness, outstanding grape quality and viticultural innovation.  In 2012, the New York International Wine Competition held in New York City named Sherwood House the “North Fork Winery of the Year.”

Bill Ackerman Interview

Bill Ackerman, owner of North Fork Viticultural Services, originally came to the North NFVS, Bill Ackerman, 01Fork for both the land and the proximity to the sea, as he likes sports fishing.  He went on to start his own vineyard, Manor Hill Vineyard, in 1995.  He started NFVS in 2009 and the first harvest he worked was in 2010, so that was the operational beginning of his business.  I caught up to him in the middle of the 2012 grape harvest at Sherwood House.

At present he has five full-time employees, including Irwin, who’d been with him since when he had Manor Hill.  Of Irwin, he says, “I’m eternally grateful to him because he’s the only one who speaks Spanish and English.”

NFVS already has six clients, including Onabay, Sherwood House, Clovis Point, Lieb, Sargon, and, as of 2013, one of the two vineyard parcels of Peconic Bay (the other is looked after by Steve Mudd).

Sargon vineyard, located in Orient, on the North Fork, is owned by a retired neurosurgeon out of NYC—about 12.5 acres planted to grapes planted around 2002 by Steve Mudd.  The vineyard is about five-eighths red-grape vines, the rest is Chardonnay (Dijon clones 76 & 96).  The reds include Merlot (clones 1 & 314), Cabernet Franc clones (1, 332 & 327); Cabernet Sauvignon (clone 327).

Sherwood House’s 12.5 acres of vinifera vines were also planted by Steve Mudd.  Nevertheless, Bill states that he is not an active competition with Steve nor does he go out of his way to compete.  Rather, he says, he spends his time trying to grow the best grapes he can for making wine.  “It makes a difference if you grow grapes just for the sake of growing grapes versus knowing that the grapes are going to be used to make a varietal.”

He’s largely self-taught, based on the work he’d done at Manor Hill, from roughly 1995 to 2006 and reading is a big part of his knowledge.  He points out that, “I use empirical evidence; based on what I’ve read I’ll ask myself, does this make sense for this environment, this climate, will it work?  Certain parts of what I read will make sense, certain parts probably will not make sense, because of the environment.  I take a look at how plants react to what it is we’re doing, and that’s the empirical side. When I had Manor Hill, that’s I made a lot of changes to then current growing practices.”

With regard to organic practices, Bill says that it’s a good objective, but given the Long Island climate, which is humid and wet, one is really hard-pressed to adhere to pure organic practices.  It’s a noble cause, but he likes sustainable winegrowing, because it offers degrees of freedom that are needed here.  When I asked him about Biodynamics, he replied, “Biodynamics, as in, taking compost material and turning it into energy sources?”  And he laughed and went on to say that the closest he gets to it is in orienting a vineyard so that its rows run directly north to south, the he can take advantage of the sun, or for that matter east to west, depending.  Actually, he acknowledges having heard the term but never paid it much attention.

With respect to the LI Sustainable Winegrowers program, Bill has attended a majority of the meetings that have been held before the program was incorporated.  Given the newness of the program, on behalf of his clients he wants to know more about the standards that will have to be met:  for example, the inputs or sprays that will be allowed, the spraying schedule, things that we have to get comfortable with.  The irony of it is that his clients are already doing sustainable practices.  As he says, “I didn’t even know the word ‘sustainable,’ I just did what I thought was appropriate, based on what I read and what I knew about other areas of the world that grew grapes for wine.  While I was in California writing software I visited tons and tons (no pun intended) of grape areas, if you will.”

To the question, “What do you do for the Sherwood House vineyard that is different from what was being done before you came on?” Bill answered:

“Well, we did what I call ‘renewal pruning.’  What I noticed, as far as I could see, was that when they pruned the vines they weren’t anticipating what would happen in subsequent years.  So what happens is, if you don’t pay attention to how you are pruning for subsequent years . . . it isn’t just a question of this harvest year or that harvest year; you end up getting a fruit zone—or actually a ball or a knot right at the apex of the vine, and all these little shoots come out of it, and you have little or no real new growth coming out of it, which means it’s not strong enough to accommodate a healthy crop.  And if you do get a shoot out of it, it tends to create a much thicker cane—which they call ‘bull canes’—so, long story short, what we did is to try to bring the down the head of the vine–down lower—in order to promote the growth of younger shoots down below so that we could train them to come up.  Ideally what I want to see is a ‘Y’, a single trunk and then a left and a right cane each year.

“One of the things that I did when first I got out here and started my own vineyard—which is, again, Manor Hill—everybody was growing two trunks per plant, and nobody ever said ‘do it’ or ‘don’t do it.’  The reason that they did it out here at the time was that they were concerned about frost killing the plant and they’d have one trunk left.  And I was, like, if the frost killed the plant, which had two trunks coming out of one rootstock, you’re going to kill the plant, period.   And I spoke of ‘empirical’ before—I went around my vineyard and saw that naturally there was one trunk, and the vines, canes, the vertical shoots, all seemed to be much more balanced to me.  And I saw several vines that way and so I said to my guys, ‘We’re cutting off that second trunk, period, end of story.’  And that’s what we did.  And I never told anyone to do it elsewhere, I just wanted to do it in my vineyard—I guess because they saw the quality that we generated, that gave them the impetus to cut off the second trunk in their vineyards.

“Part of that renewal pruning that we do is first to push down what I call the fruit zone of the vines so that we can renew the canes so that they’ll have the vertical shoots.  And the other thing to do where appropriate is to cut off the second trunk; if it’s giving healthy growth you leave it alone, but if it’s aged and not giving that growth you cut it off.

“From my reading and experience I’ve come to understand that the trunk is nothing more than a highway or conduit for the nutrients.  And the other side of the coin is that if the plant is putting too much of its effort into growing trunks and canes, it’s not going to put in as much effort to grow healthy and flavorful fruit.  We [also] fruit-thin for two reasons: a) in order to improve ripening, and b) if you have too many clusters bunched close together that makes them more prone to disease—so we also thin in that regard.  The more I learn about trunks and canes, again, if you have too much cane growth, that detracts from the quality of the fruit.  I didn’t know this when I was doing this eons ago, I just saw a more balanced plant, and that was enough for me.  Again, you can read all you want, but you have to check and see what’s going on in the field to make sure that what you’re reading and trying to implement field, you need to check to be sure so that what you’re doing is beneficial to the plant, the region, etc.”

Bill tells me that he uses the same practices in all the vineyards in which he works.  He pointed to the Sherwood House vineyards and mentioned that they use dry farming—there is no drip irrigation.  His view of irrigation is that it is:

“ . . . strictly an insurance policy, and you don’t use irrigation [for vines] as you would for tomatoes, for instance.  You know, vines, specifically vinifera, do not enjoy a wet environment.  The more you irrigate it the less flavor you’re going to have in general.  The more canopy you’re going to have, so that’s going to detract from the flavor.  There’s a huge balance between having the right, healthy canopy and the right degree of cane growth—we literally go about cutting, but there are places where we just let the canes grow laterally, and you’re not hedging them.  So when you hedge them you’re not going to catch every single cane, so when I see lateral canes that the hedger didn’t catch then I send my guys in to cut them off.  To me there are three key things:  balance, uniformity, and the right amount of dryness—you don’t want to stress the plant so much that it’s going to die.  In dry periods obviously I use irrigation to keep the plant healthy, but there’s another reason, especially around here, and that is because . . . we know that it’s going to rain here and when it does rain we don’t want the vines to soak it up immediately and then crack and then that induces disease.”

Upon my remarking that the area has a very high water table, He went on to say:

“The thing is, the soil is not that deep . . . maybe six inches in some shallow places and as deep as it goes is twenty-four–maybe—the average being about twelve to eighteen, so I could dig anywhere from twelve to twenty-four inches down here and I’ll hit gravel and then sand.”  (Sherwood House’s vineyards lie on sandy loam with a good amount of clay.)

Another thing that Bill pointed out, with respect to sustainable practices, is the use of minimal herbicides underneath and he cultivates under the vine, which is very difficult to do without [specialized and] expensive machinery and it’s difficult to train the crew to use it.  According to Bill, it’s valuable for two reasons:  1) it takes off the suckers from the root zone which prevents it from sucking up unnecessary water; 2) when it does rain it acts like a sponge and sucks it up and lets it drain quicker to the ground, through the soil [meaning unclear].  And if there is any herbicide material it’s less likely to go into the plant because it’s taken the suckers off.  The fundamental reason is for dryness and then the residual reason is to help with minimal use of herbicides.

I made the observation that there was a lot of disease pressure in 2011, due to the bad weather, to which Bill remarked that there was a lot of Downy Mildew in 2012 as well.   It was so humid and there was so much rain that it was ideal conditions for growing things that want to be green, like grass, for example.  “You get a lot of water and then you get a lot of sun; well, the vine doesn’t really want that.  What grows in that environment on a vine is fungus.”  Vines, after all, are unique in their own needs and that they can thrive where other plants don’t.

In fact, many vineyards in Long Island, including Sherwood House, are planted on what were once potato fields.  Potatoes, as Bill explained, want an acidic environment whereas grape vines need a more neutral soil environment, with the result that many vineyards need to add lime to the soil to help bring the pH to that neutral level.  Many people have been putting Dolomitic lime, which contains a lot of magnesium [calcium magnesium carbonate CaMg(CO3)2] to the vineyards, which is a positive.  But the thing about magnesium is that it binds up the aluminum, which is what potatoes want; so NFVS uses lime that has no magnesium, but rather a high-calcium lime, which is CCE [Calcium Carbonate Equivalent] rated.  Another kind of lime that he uses is a pelletized version that is more soluble, so it breaks down more evenly.  He also does a certain amount of foliar sprays to help where there might not be enough nutrients in the soil.  Furthermore, he pointed out, adding too much fertilizer puts more nitrogen in the soil, and vines don’t tolerate an excess of that either.  Whatever inputs NFVS uses, incremental nitrogen is avoided to the extent possible.

As Bill says, “everything’s a balance.  What do I think that I need to get the best flavor, to get the best health out of the vine.  Flavor first, then health; you don’t want a diseased vine, because then you don’t get the flavors; it’s that combination.”

For foliar inputs Bill uses a recyclable sprayer.  He applies the foliars in conjunction with whatever other sprays are needed at the time, but he points out that one has to be very careful not to mix a highly alkaline component with a highly acidic one.

With respect to cover crops—if he could change the cover in all the vineyards he works—his preference is fescue or a [indistinct word]; rye, for example, has an effect on certain soil enzymes that encourages denitrification, as do some flowering plants.

Bill meditated about winegrowing in France:

“In France they grow some of the best fruit and make some of the best wines on some of the least fertile soil in the world.  And what they have that we don’t have here naturally is the natural limestone.  I think that they tend to forget about that.  I was talking to someone from France not long ago, [and he pointed out] that their topsoil is barely soil—it’s just dirt.  They don’t irrigate or anything, but was it a foot, two feet, three feet—how far under the ground?—they have limestone, and it sweat and wept a little bit of moisture—like condensation on a glass—that was just all that the plants needed.  But it’s also a calcium-rich environment . . . .  If I was going to do anything artificial, I’d try to bring in some crushed limestone and let it dissolve in the soil naturally.”

As our interview drew to a conclusion, he went on to tell me that Sherwood House is going to plant the remaining acreage—about seven—to vines, and he’d like to see a little bit of that put in there, as that plot has been fallow and hasn’t had potatoes and hasn’t had any chemicals on it—so for Bill it’s a kind of virgin environment, perfect for sustainable farming.

North Fork Vineyard Services doesn’t have a Website of its own, but there is an interview with Bill posted on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150271354530247.

Other than that, NFVS doesn’t advertise nor provide contact information.  Why should it?  Those who need him will know how to reach him.

NFVS, license plate

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Based on an interview done on 26 September 2012, updated 28 September 2013

My take on the state of NY wines back in 1971

[NOTE:  –This piece was originally published in the April 1971 issue of Abel Magazine, the motto of which was Panem et Circensis.  The first vineyard in Long Island didn’t even exist until 1973 and the Niagara Escarpment wasn’t even a gleam in a winemaker’s eye.]

American wines can be separated into two categories:  those which are produced in California and those which are not.  The California product is a step-child of the European one.  It resembles the step-parent in both type and taste, and is actually made from European wine-grape varieties.  The non-California product is made primarily from native America grape varieties belonging to the species Vitis labrusca, and resembles most Old-World wines very little.

Among the non-California producers, New York State is far and away the largest and most important.  Its wines are drunk twice as often as imported wines, and its “champagnes” vie with those of California for market leadership in this country.  Despite the statistics, New York wines remain among the least appreciated of all wines that are consumed by Americans.

One reason for this is that New York producers have established their reputations, by and large, by their “champagnes.”  Their table wines, being in the inexpensive, ordinary category, have hardly been in the the position to acquire the kind of reputation some California producers have gained for their own wines,.  Too many of the Eastern wines, while sound enough, are either sweetened, pasteurized, or even mixed with cheap California wines to get rid of the so-called “foxy” taste so many wine drinkers find disagreeable.

There are quality table wines from New York State.  Not being produced in the quantities of the Western state’s vineyards, they are relatively scarce and not very well known.  Most of them are made from recently planted hybrids developed by oenologists such as Louis Seibel of France.  These vines — producing the new varietals such as Chelois, Baco Noir, Aurora, and Dutchess — can suit anyone’s palate.  The reds are distinctly flavored, sound, and good meal accompaniments.  The whites are soft, fruity, and well-balanced — not too sweet, and obviously unsugared.  They are inexpensive as well, rarely costing more than $2.00.

Pleasant Valley PR photo

A memento of my visit to the Pleasant Valley Wine Company. I am in the center, next to Richard Vine, manager, at right.

Pleasant Valley Wine Co., [aka Great Western Winery (established in 1860 and Bonded Winery #1–the first in the United States.)] is the largest and most important of the producers of these wines at present.  Smaller firms like High Tor Vineyards on the Hudson and Boordy Vineyards on Lake Erie produce interesting wines for less than $2.50 a bottle.  Bully Hill’s red and white wines come from the same district [Finger Lakes] as Great Western, but they cost nearly twice as much.

One producer in the Finger Lakes region had the courage to plant pure vinifera strains such as the Pinot Chardonnay, Riesling, and Traminer, and makes really fine wines which you can try if you are willing to pay the price.  Dr. Constantin Frank’s pioneering efforts under the aegis of Gold Seal Winery has even brought us a remarkable instance of a vintage Riesling Trockenbeerenauslese for $45 a fifth.  Don’t try to find one for hardly any exist.  But $4.50 will buy you his fine Spätlese.

More New York varietal wines will be produced and made available to us.  It is simply a question of time, and of making the producers see that the demand is there.  Eventually, one will not have to be a reverse wine snob in order to drink any New York wine.

 

Oenology in Long Island: Premium Wine Group–Russell Hearn

Interview with Russell Hearn about PWG (& Suhru Wines, T’Jara Vineyards)

PWG headerFor further background on Premium Wine Group (PWG), please read my earlier post, Oenology in Long Island:  Premium Wine Group—John Leo.

NOTE:  While Premium Wine Group makes wine for its many outside clients, there are also the wines of three of the employees that work there:  John Leo, production winemaker, Russell Hearn, Managing Partner/Director of Winemaking, and Eric Bilka, production winemaker.  While this article is, foremost, about Premium, it also includes sections devoted to the wines of these producers.   (The winegrowing at Lieb Cellars (owned by partner Mark Lieb) and its wines will be the subject of a separate article, as will be the case with Clovis Point, whose wines are made by John Leo.

It should be noted that a press release issued on March 28, 2013, states, “Lieb Cellars and Premium Wine Group announced a merger of the two companies. Established in 1992 and 2000 respectively as two separate businesses with Mark Lieb as an investor, the combined companies have received substantial funding through their parent company Southport Lane, a private equity firm focused on growing its portfolio businesses. Southport Lane selected Lieb Cellars and PWG in part for their “custom crush” business, which is the production home of many North Fork wineries and the only one east of the Mississippi. There has been talk of the company going public.”

Because I interviewed both John and Russell separately, and the conversations were so extensive, I’ve divided the interviews into two posts:  The first was based on my conversation with John, and was published on January 30.  I was then away for six weeks on a cross-country trip and another week was recently spent in Northern Virginia (I was exploring vineyards on both occasions), so I have only now published this post based on my interview with Russell, which also includes discussions of T’Jara Vineyards and SuhRu Wines.  Jed Beitler, Russell’s partner at T’Jara, contributed, by e-mail, a discussion of how he and Russell work out the blends for their wines–his comments are follow the interview with Russell.

From the bio of Russell Hearn on the Suhru Wines Website:

PWG, Russell HearnWith 30 years of winemaking experience, in Australia, New Zealand, France and the USA, Russell Hearn has taken his Australian training with him throughout the journey. During the last 20 years on the North Fork of Long Island, Russell has established himself as an industry veteran who has helped forge our region into one known for producing World Class Wines.  As winemaker for Pellegrini Vineyards, in Cutchogue, since 1991 Russell  garnered five 90-point scores from the Wine Spectator.  Russell continued to drive the style and quality of Pellegrini Wines for almost two decades [until August 2012].

He has consulted for a number of wineries on the North Fork of Long Island, in the Finger Lakes, in New England and in Virginia. He has lectured at Industry Technical Conferences in: New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Interview with Russell Hearn:

JM-L:  John [Leo] just mentioned that PWG has more than 150 different lots of wine.

RH:  Yep.  Well, really, we actually have closer to 200 fermentations.  Of that 130 are different lots.

JM-L:  So of course that means that you are blending some of these fermentations.

RH:  That’s right.

JM-L:  What brought you to Long Island all the way from Australia?

RH:  A girl.

JM-L:  It happens so often!

RH: I worked in the industry in Australia, then exchanged for one harvest to Burgundy, and another year exchanged a harvest in New Zealand, and while I was there I took some vacation time, backpacked around New Zealand, and met this American girl at that point.  Then she came to visit me in Australia, when I went back to work for Houghton Wines in Australia, and the next year I went on an exchange internship to California, so I went across and visited her in Massachusetts.  There’s not much winemaking going on in Massachusetts, but I decided to stay for a while.  Then I went back to Australia, then came back then went to Virginia for two years, then Long Island.  We’ve been married now for twenty-seven years.

It was either Australia or East Coast; California, Oregon, Washington didn’t really interest me.

JM-L:  For what reasons, may I ask?

RH:  For a combination of personal reasons and professional ones.  California—large chunks of it—has what a winemaker can see in Australia, the climate’s just like it is in Australia; Oregon’s too far from the ocean, Washington State’s too far from the ocean—regions that don’t fit my personal objectives.

JM-L:  I see.  So you really like the ocean—water life, sailing, surfing, swimming . . . .

RH:  Sailing, swimming, surfing that’s right.  I want to be close or in the water a lot, and I didn’t know that until we lived in Virginia for two years.  And as pretty as the Blue Ridge Mountains are, we were three-and-a-half hours from the water and I realized that it didn’t work.

JM-L:  Were you working for a winery there?

RH:  Yes, a winery called Dominion Wine Cellars, it’s in Culpeper.  It doesn’t go by that name anymore; it was bought by Williamsburg Winery three or four years after I left.  And then I came here, consulted for several wineries initially; then for Bob and Joyce Pellegrini in late ’91, when they were looking to design a winery, I worked with local architects as they designed the facility; I designed the production part inside, it was built, I was with them for their first vintage in ’92, and I was there full-time until 2000.  Then we I thought of Premium Wine Group, so I was starting this with two other partners, Mark Lieb and Bernie Sussman, I switched to a consultant role at Pellegrini—a very active consultant until the last vintage, 2011—and it’s stopped as of this vintage.

JM-L:  I see.  So now you’re full-time here.

RH:  I finished up, yes.  Being full-time here, yes.  I was doing that in addition . . . .

JM-L:  I don’t know, you people in the wine trade in Long Island seem to have to find more things to do and you’re all working—probably—80-90 hour weeks.

RH:  It keeps it interesting . . . .

JM-L:  It does.  I don’t have that kind of energy, but I certainly enjoy writing about it, drinking it, and I especially enjoy meeting and speaking to people in the trade.  They’re very interesting.  They’re not just farmers, and they aren’t just chemists . . . .

RH:  Yes, it’s a combination of . . . .  There aren’t too many industries in which you have to have so many tiers that you must have at least competence in:  growing it, making it, marketing it, managing it, so that makes it very challenging and very interesting.

JM-L:  Yes.  Well, you must have always had a very high organizational sense.  You couldn’t possible have conceived of this business—PWG—if you didn’t.

RH:  Hm.  I think the best thing that one should do in starting in the trade or starting from school is to work at a large winery.  The winery at which I started in Australia—Houghton’s—made about 800,000 cases.  So it’s not a huge winery—Hardy’s, which owns Houghton’s, makes five and a half million cases.  In a huge winery you’re pigeon-holed, in a large winery you’re forced into an organizational necessity . . . because you’re not as big so you have to do everything to make good wine, and that’s critical in winemaking. It’s not only how you do it or where you do it, it’s also when you do that is critical in winemaking. If you start off in a small winery, or only work in a small winery, you don’t get those organizational skills, because they never needed to, that force you to think ahead.

JM-L:  Yes, just learning by the seat of your pants . . . learning on the job.

RH:  Houghton’s was very organized so I was exposed to a good organizational structure, which as a result allows me to do this relatively comfortably.  There are a lot of moving parts in the shuffle, so we need to make sure that people are paying the correct amount of attention and timing things so that they run on schedule, do deliveries.  It’s not really so much of an issue:  we have several full-time people, we have additional interns at the time of harvest [when the grapes are brought in to PWG].  We have good people who we’ve hired over the last twelve years.  John’s been here twelve years, Eric has been here eleven, Rinaldo’s nine, Rosa’s eight, and Andrew started four years ago.  Patrick’s been here a couple of years. . . we haven’t had a lot of turnover.  We all know what has to be done and we have some smart people here, and so far it’s been turning out well.

JM-L:  So everyone’s on salary.  How many people are there in all?

RH:  Eight full-time people and four additional people during harvest. The winery is working 18 to 20 hours a day, with a lot of automated procedures.  So from September through November we get people from different parts of the world in the industry.  We have two Australians for this harvest, a girl from Hungary in the industry, and an American.  So we go from five days a week for nine months of the year to seven days a week and then in two shifts.  So at this stage the night shift will be coming in about ten minutes . . .

JM-L:  They work until midnight?

RH:  Yep!  As the harvest progresses—as we get into the second half—in October they’ll start coming in at 2:00pm or 3:00pm and work until 2:00-3:00am.

JM-L:  Are they sleeping by the vats?

RH:  Not yet!  Not yet.

JM-L:  Temperature control has changed that, hasn’t it?

RH:  Yes, yes, exactly.  We have a lot of technology here that allows us to sleep well.  So the winery will be operating 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week, from September until about the week of Thanksgiving, after which we start packing it in.  We go back to six days a week for a while and then back to five days.

JM-L:  And then you go back to having a life of your own again.

RH:  Yeah, my wife says that she’s a “harvest widow” for a period of time, so . . . .

JM-L:  A “harvest widow”—that’s good!  So I just posted, recently, a piece on Raphael, and one of the salient facts about Raphael is that it cost six-million dollars to build that facility.  That’s very deep pockets for a great deal of money . . ., but then it’s a showcase.  You’re no so concerned with being a showcase, so much, though your facilities are attractive, but of course highly functional.  How much did it cost to build this facility?

RH:  Well, in today’s dollars it would be north of six-million, but as you can see it’s predominantly equipment.  Therefore the saleable value, if you will, is real because it’s all asset.  I mean, the building is an asset obviously, and the building cost, in today’s dollars, might be a million, since it’s a metal building, it’s concrete, it’s not aesthetic. It’s practical, functional.  Setup prices would have been three-ish million.

JM-L:  Yes.  Well, Raphael went so far as to design their winery so that it could use gravity feed, which is also a very expensive proposition.  Would you someday incorporate that into your facility?

PWG, 21R.H:  Ultimately we can use fork lifts and gravity, on that level, so we don’t have a tier setup—everything’s one level.  But we have some —I like to think—real quality additions to our equipment that really minimize the effect of not having gravity [feed].  We don’t pump skins—red-grape skins—everything is gravity because we drain the tank and put the skins into bins that are then fork-lifted back to the press.  A lot of wineries don’t do that, so they pump the skins to the press.  We don’t do that, and we try to be very gentle on the wine.  And we have bulldog Waukesha pumps which push nitrogen rather than pump . . . they’re Waukesha twin-lobe pumps that are the gentlest in the industry.  But they’re very expensive and for a small winery to have a Waukesha pump would be cost-prohibitive.  We have four of them because we’re trying to make an affordable way of making quality wine.  We have equipment here that isn’t anywhere else on the North Fork and the only ones on the East Coast, on some levels.

JM-L:  Really?  So you really are a premium Premium winemaker.

RH:  Winemonger [chuckles].  We kicked around the idea of being Premier—being the first—and that didn’t really carry the concept of being Premium, and we have a high number of quality wines that are coming out through this facility.  We allow people to do what they want to do so, depending on how high a bar they’re shooting for, I think that they can get that at this facility.

JM-L:  Right.  Very interesting.  I was speaking to John [Leo] about his involvement and how you work with your clients and he said that you are, essentially, the cellar crew for the clients.  Obviously, you get your marching orders from the consulting winemaker they hire and there are so many approaches that can be taken to making wine.  You have to adapt to so many requests—do it this way, not that way—do that many pumpovers, no pumpovers, and so on  . . .

RH:  We have to be flexible for their needs.  We’re assisting them in making their wine, we’re intimately involved in the quality control, with their practices and their whole organization.  But the stylistic choices are 100% driven by the producers.

 

JM-L:  Until recently Duck Walk was selling a magnum of their Chardonnay for $10, which is a terrific price, but they don’t have that anymore.  Obviously, it isn’t possible to sell much wine at prices that low.  Your costs out here are too high . . .

RH:  It wouldn’t be economically viable in the long term.  The one thing that we have is quality, which means that we have to sell on quality and we have to be realistic about how much we can ask for those quality products.  So, where is that?  It’s in the high teens and up.

JM-L:  So, do you have special equipment to make sparkling wines?

RH:  We do.  We have all the equipment that we need for riddling [a fully-programmable 1,000-bottle automatic riddling machine] and disgorging, and bottle washing, and capsule pleating, and so on, so we do offer that service.

JM-L:  Do you also provide for aging . . . ?

RH:  Once it’s bottled, we do not continue to store wine here; so each producer would warehouse their wine elsewhere.  Ours isn’t large enough for it; we can’t keep any volume for any length of time.

JM-L:  That wasn’t your intention to begin with.

RH:  No, were we to expand into something like that, we could.  But we’re already full with tanks and barrels.

JM-L:  Have you had to expand with more tanks and so forth as the business grew?

PWG diagrams, 01

 

Let’s take a look at the diagram.  Locations of tanks, this is the main tank room . . .

 

PWG diagrams, 03. . . and then we have external tanks and additional tanks near the bottling area.  So in the original setup these tanks [pointing, above] were not here.  These others [pointing to other tanks outlined in red] were not here—these four.  In the second year we’ve added all of these and in the fourth year we added some outside.  In the fifth year we added a substantial number outside and in the seventh year we added more tanks outside and just last year we put in another eight tanks.  So when we started in the first year we had sixty-five tanks and now we have 125, so we’ve nearly doubled our capacity since or first production.  We now use about 70% of our total capacity so we have room for more tanks.  Do I think we’ll add more?  I think it’ll be a few more years before we increase our capacity.  We do have some organic growth—we’re adding more people.

JM-L:  Exactly.  Now, you also have your own label:  Suhru.

Suhru winesRH:   Two, actually.  Suhru, which is Susan Hearn and myself, and we work with growers  around the state, mostly in the North Fork and the Finger Lakes, to source the fruit that grows best in those regions, so we bring Riesling from the Finger Lakes and Shiraz and other red fruit from the Island here.  So my wife and I and another couple that we’ve known for twenty years, bought a piece of land here in Mattituck in 2000, and planted it in 2000 and 2002.  We sold fruit initially, and then in 2007 we started T’Jara Vineyards.

JM-L:  Oh, yes, T’Jara.  Isn’t that based on an Australian word?

RH:  Yes.  It’s sort of phonetic.  We put a hyphen [apostrophe] between the two words, which mean “where I live/where I grow/where I farm/where I’m from.”

JM-L:  I see.  Does it sound like that when an Aboriginal pronounces it?

RH:  Yes, T-Jara.  You know, I guess you could say that it’s the Aboriginal word for terroir, although they don’t grow grapes there; they never have.

JM-L:  Yes, though I’m sure that today many Aboriginals work in the wineries.

RH:  Yep!

JM-L:  Are there any Aboriginals who actually own their own wineries?

RH:  Well, not that I’m aware of.  I’m no longer really that connected [to the Australian wine industry] to know about that.  But I suppose that there are.

JM-L:  I ask because in South Africa there is a program to help get black Africans into the business.  This is true of the South African label Indaba . . . .

RH:  Oh, yes, of course.  They make a very nice Chenin Blanc.

JM-L:  Getting back to Suhru and T’Jara, Do you have styles that you wanted to make that would stand out from what everyone else does?

RH:  Yeah.  Suhru is a little more of a niche in that we are not going with mainstream varietals.  We do not make Chardonnay; we don’t make Merlot as a varietal, or Cabernet Franc.  We don’t make varietals from these three main varieties that we have out here.  We do utilize the red ones in our blend, but the goal of Suhru is to make wines that we enjoy drinking:  crisp, vibrant, good-acidity whites, and some quick-to-market, soft, juicy reds.  More mainstream in respect of pricing, mid to high teens, and in approachability.  T’Jara is sort of aiming for the high end of the market out here.  We all have to aim high, shoot for the moon, but we aim to make the best red wine out here:  the fullest—but, soft wines that will age because of the quantity of tannins plumper but lusher.

JM-L:  So you pick the grapes as late as possible?

RH:  Correct.

JM-L:  You want them to go beyond their phenolic ripeness?

RH:  Yes.  So they’re barrel-aged for a long period of time but they’re not designed to be oaky wines.

JM-L:  So you use a lot of used oak?

RH:  Well, reasonably so, but everything’s Hungarian, and Hungarian oak is very tight-grained so it doesn’t give up the flavor as much as other—the French—would be.  That doesn’t imprint on the wine heavily, so it keeps that soft plumpness.  We use old oak barrels—one to seven-years-old ones so as to get the benefit of aging but without the imprint of tannin.  Typically we don’t go for that long maceration that, you know, leads to that astringency level that needs time.  They’re big wines but their big, soft wines.

JM-L:  They’re almost ready to drink by the time that they’re released?

RH:  Absolutely.  The goal . . . that is goal number one.  You do not need to age them—they will benefit if you age them, but you don’t need to do so.  Stylistically, for example, Pellegrini’s wines [made by Russell], over the years, have rewarded aging.  But that’s a stylistic choice.  We looked at that model and Jed Beilter [Russell’s partner at T’Jara], Laurie, and Sue and I decided that that wasn’t what we wanted and we wanted our wine to give pleasure from the beginning.

So from a brand standpoint, there’s a separation in terms of the market segment that each is shooting for.  In price separation as well.

Suhru is a brand; at T’Jara we make only as red wines:  Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot are planted there.

JM-L:  So how many cases of wine are you able to produce?

RH:  Well, we have seventeen acres under vine out of twenty acres of land, so ultimately we’ll have 3,000 cases; right now we have about a thousand cases.

JM-L:  I see. And what’s the density of your plantings?

RH:  7 X 5 and 7 X 4.  Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot are 7 X 4 we’re trying to carry as little per vine as possible.  Merlot is 7 X 5 and Cab Franc is 7 X 6—Cab Franc is more vigorous . . . .

JM-L:  Well, that seems to answer the question of why one chooses a density of 7 X 5 or 7 X 4 or 7 X 6—it has to do with the vigor of the vines.  That makes sense.  OK, so T’Jara . . . and Suhru?

RH:  Suhru is producing fifteen-hundred cases.  T’Jara is a thousand cases.

JM-L:  So for T’Jara you’re harvesting what?  About two-and-a-half tons an acre?

RH:  Yes, about two-and-a-half to three tons, depending on the year and the variety.  More on the lower end for Cab Sauv, closer to three on the Merlot.

JM-L:  Russell, thank you very much for the time you’ve given me.  This conversation was a pleasure.

What follows are the T’Jara blending notes by Jed:

The process actually begins much earlier in the vintage year with how the growing season has gone.  Depending on the strength of the season, we’ll know which component varietals we’ll have to work with.  For example, 2007 was both a long and a very hot year.  A spectacular year all around.  So all our fruit showed beautifully on the vine.  That includes our Cab Franc, our Merlot, our Petit Verdot and our Cab Sauvignon.  In 2010, just to compare vintages, it was a hot year, but not as long a year.  The Cab Sauvignon didn’t ripen to a state that we felt was good enough to put in our wines.  So you won’t see that component fruit in our 2010 releases.

This past year, 2012, was also a very strong growing season and all our component varietals grow to maturity.  Each year, however, the fruit shows different characteristics.  So you can’t always assume that the Merlot that came out of the barrel in 2012 will be the same as every year preceding that.  It’s always a clean slate when it comes to blending a particular year’s components.

The process Russ and I go through is the same every year we’ve worked together.  We assemble the component varietals and look to see what possibilities exist.  As you can see from the photo, it’s not the most romantic picture of what transpires.  Beakers, water baths, pipettes all arrayed on a conference room table.

T'Jara blending, 4It also helps that Russ and I learned early on that we had very similar tastes in terms of our palates.  When Russ was the winemaker at Pellegrini, he first brought me in to their conference room for a similar exercise.  We had three flasks, filled with either Cab Sauvignon, Cab Franc or Merlot.  We each had to come up with three blends:  a Cab Sauv, a Merlot and a red blend.  Blinded from each other’s admixtures, we each came up with three offering and presented them to each other.  the three blends were all very close to each other and, as we had previously experienced, cemented the fact that we were of similar minds when it came to what we thought would be best in the bottle.

This year, we are dealing with four or, potentially five component varietals to make our wines.  Initially, we didn’t think we would release a red reserve in addition to the Merlot and the Cab Franc.  While 2012 was a good growing season, we just weren’t sure that we’d have a reserve that would be good enough to release.

As the process unfolds, we start with one of our wines.  As you know, for a wine to be called by its varietal name, it must contain at least 75% of that component fruit.  Anything after that is up to the winemaker.  Anything less than that has to be called a blend or some other nondescript name.

Russ and I went through the Merlot and the Cab Franc.  We started with the minimums and tested a number of different combinations of supporting varietals, each to bring something specific to the blend.  Maybe it was more roundness.  Maybe it was more length.  Sometimes, we are trying to balance the various smells coming from the component fruits:  red berry versus darker stone fruit; more chocolaty or tobacco notes versus more jammy qualities.  All those ingredients are what we are trying to balance to achieve a wine that, year over year, will have a similar (not necessarily the same) consistency that those who have tried and liked our wines will come to expect as the years roll on.

To our surprise, we not only were able to come up with what we feel are very formidable Merlot and Cab Franc blends, but we also came up with a reserve blend for the 2012 that we are very proud of.  From the initial sampling, we went through iteration after iteration of blending options.  It kind of surprised us when we focused in on the final option.  But we’re very happy with the result.

That whole process, going from large fractions of blending components to the fine-tuning took over three hours.  But the process doesn’t stop there.  And I’m sure Russ can add further to this discussion here, but he’ll take the blending notes from our session in the conference room and start the process of putting the final blends together in the barrel.  He will still tweak a particular blend as it matures in our Hungarian oak barrels before it’s ready for bottling.  Maybe a touch more Cab Franc here, a slight addition of Malbec there.  That’s all part of Russ’s magic as a top-flight winemaker.

In the end, it’s all part of the joy we have as partners in coming up with wines we are proud to call T’Jara.

 

Oenology in Long Island: Premium Wine Group–John Leo

Interview with John Leo about PWG (& Leo Family Wines)

on Sept. 27, 2012, updated on Jan. 21 & May 24, 2013

PWG, 01

 From the PWG Website:

Premium Wine Group is a contract winemaking facility designed to allow an economical way to produce wine without the huge investment in equipment and facility. The individual style is driven by each Producer / Client in the production of their wine. PWG is designed with an array of technologically superior equipment which allows our clients complete freedom in producing wine. Our experienced staff of wine production professionals allows our clients the comfort that their wines are being handled in the highest quality practices.

Both “custom-production” and “custom-crush” services are provided to licensed producers and wholesalers of wine. These services are being utilized by many local wineries and wineries in the Northeast that source fruit from the North Fork of Long Island, see our Producers / Clients

Established in 2000, an initial 545 tons were received, we have steadily grown to 1,000 tons with an ultimate capacity of 1,400 tons. Premium Wine Group’s mission is to continually upgrade plant, equipment and services to allow our Producers / Clients the highest quality environment in which to sculpt their individual wines. This is evident with more than 18 Wineries producing over 100 individual wines each vintage.

NOTE:  While Premium Wine Group makes wine for its many outside clients, there are also three employees that work there who are themselves clients:  Russell Hearn, Managing Partner/Director of Winemaking, John Leo, production winemaker, and Erik Bilka, production winemaker.  While this article is, foremost, about Premium, it also includes sections devoted to the wines of these three producers.  (The winegrowing at Lieb Cellars (owned by partner Mark Lieb) and its wines will be the subject of a separate article, as will be the case with Clovis Point, whose wines are made by John Leo.)

It should also be noted that a press release issued on March 28, 2013, states, “Lieb Cellars and Premium Wine Group announced a merger of the two companies. Established in 1992 and 2000 respectively as two separate businesses with Mark Lieb as an investor, the combined companies have received substantial funding through their parent company Southport Lane, a private equity firm focused on growing its portfolio businesses. Southport Lane selected Lieb Cellars and PWG in part for their “custom crush” business, which is the production home of many North Fork wineries and the only one east of the Mississippi. There has been talk of the company going public.”

Because I interviewed John and Russell separately, and the conversations are so extensive, I’m dividing this post into two parts:  The first (this one) is based on my conversation with John, and subsequently my interview with Russell, which also includes discussions of T’Jara Vineyard and SuhRu Wines:  Oenology in LI:  Premium Wine Group–Russell Hearn.

According to the bio of John Leo from Winemakers’ Studio Website, “A native of the Hudson Valley, New York, John graduated with a journalism degree and immediately proceeded to wander slowly around the world. He started working in wine in 1982 and joined the PWG, John LeoEast End wine growing community in the early 1990s, becoming winemaker for Clovis Point, in Jamesport in 2004. John works full-time at Premium Wine Group where he makes the Clovis Point wines as well as Leo Family Red. A journalist by training, traveler by inclination, and grape grower by preference, John believes in honest hard work, natural transformation and the pleasure of sharing a bottle with friends.”

Personally, I found John to be thoughtful, articulate, soft-spoken yet straightforward, as well as clearly professional in outlook and attitude.  It was a pleasure to converse with him.

Interview with John Leo (JL):

JM-L:  I want to begin by asking you about your client list on the PWG website.  I recognize all of the names but on [see below], but there is one that puzzles me, DeSeo de Micheal [sic], but actually that’s Deseo de Michael . . . What’s his full name?

JL:  Michael Smith.  His wife is Puerto Rican, so I think that she anointed the name.

JM-L:  So that explains that mystery.  Well, one of the reasons that I called you was because I’d been in touch with Chiara Anderson Edmands, and she’d said that one of the people that I have to speak to is you.  So the advantage of speaking to you now is that I can now speak to you of your wine, their wine, and possibly Sherwood House, because I will be speaking to Bill Ackerman, the vineyard manager.

JL:  You know, the consulting winemaker for Sherwood is Gilles Martin, so he’ll have more answers about style and things like that, but about the logistics part I can help out with because it all does come in here.

JM-L:  So Gilles and Juan—who used to work here—and other consulting winemakers formulate what they want you to do and how do you work with them?  How do they formulate what they want you to do?

JL:  Well, we sit down to talk about that.  I guess that in a stand-alone winery the winemaker is not only making the decisions but lifting the hoses and doing the work.  But they usually have assistants, especially around harvest time, so they’re making their own plans about how much tonnage to bring in, how to ferment it, etc. etc., and their usually delegating that to their assistants in the cellar.  So in a sense that’s what we are . . . we’re custom production, so the consultant tells us that he will bring in 5 tons of this Merlot, 6 tons of that Merlot, we want you to handle this one way and that another way.  So we’re basically the cellar hands . . . we’re the winemaking service for that . . .

JM-L:  So you are, in effect, the cellar assistants.

JL:  In a sense, yes.

JM-L:  Except that you actually do all the hands-on of making the wine . . .

JL:  And we have all the equipment—that belongs to us, and the facility belongs to us, and they’re being charged, sort of, per finished case. [See below, From the PWG website: Wine Production; which lists all the equipment they own.]

JM-L:  I see.

JL:  So we’re the winery with the labor to get the job done that they want, but in terms of how they formulate things, it’s straightforward, just like in any winery, they decide how they want to handle certain batches, what yeasts to use, what temperature to ferment at, how often to pump over, all those decisions they can make to then communicate them to us and we do the work.

JM-L:  The thing, of course, is that they’re not being hands-on, so what happens when some kind of issue, say a stuck fermentation, takes place (which I’m sure doesn’t happen too often) . . .

JL:  Not too often, no.

JM-L:  or, for example, a temperature issue with the tanks, or you find that the amount of pumping over that they request perhaps is not optimum for the wine as its coming out . . .

JL:  Right.  That last one is a different issue.  I might personally disagree with their protocols, but if that’s their protocol that’s what we do.  Lots of oxidation, no oxidation, no air at all. They can ask for seven pumpovers a day or no pumpovers. They can demand of me whatever they want.  If it seems that out of the ordinary we’ll clarify.  We’ll say, “Are you sure that’s what you’re asking for?  That’s not the norm.”  Maybe we’ll have to charge more for more pumpovers, so we just want to make sure that that’s what you want.”  When they confirm it, it doesn’t matter what I like or think is right or wrong for that batch of wine . . . they’re the boss.  In terms of stuck fermentations or a little bit of sulfide issues or things like that, Andrew’s very attentive [Andrew Rockwell, the Laboratory Director].  We’re testing everything every day, after rackings, every day’s ferment, so Andrew’s sticking his nose in the tank every day, and he’s got a good nose and palate and he’s very sensitive, so he’ll let Russell or I know, or if the consultant’s already sitting in the room he’ll go directly to them, or we’ll call the consultant and say, “Hey, there’s an issue with tank 1956, there’s some sulfite issue, a little bit of a stink coming out of it.”

Also, a lot of our newer clients, for example Deseo de Michael, say, “I want to bring in my grapes this year, 600 pounds . . .

JM-L:  600 pounds.  Well, if you only have a third of an acre . . .

JL:  Exactly.  So the first thing I explain to him if you want us to press it, that we need more than that because our presses aren’t that small, so we can’t press 600 pounds effectively, so you’re going to have buy some Chardonnay to put in with yours to make it.  So he’s so small that it doesn’t make sense to have a consultant, you know, realistically, but the first year I helped him through that and I didn’t charge him anything, and I said, “You know, you can do it this way or you can do it this way.  Here’s the decision points now.  You can taste the juice coming out of the press, do you want to cut it there?  Do you want to keep on pressing harder?  You’ll see the change.”  So we just walked him through it.  So for 2011 he hired Gilles [Martin] to be his winemaker for his one Chardonnay, so now it’s at a more professional level.

JM-L:  Good.  But the vines must be very young . . .

JL:  Sure.  So that’s an extreme example of someone who wants to do things right, is willing to pay commercial charges, but he doesn’t have enough volume to get a full-time consultant . . . so we try to be as helpful as we can.

JM-L:  Of course.

JL:  We have other clients like that, they have a little bit of fruit in their back yard, so we try to avoid it, but when it’s a friend of a friend, we do stuff like that . . .

JM-L:  Sure.

JL:  You know, Juan [Micieli-Martinez, Manager and Winemaking Consultant of Martha Clara Vineyards], Gilles [winemaking consultant to several vineyards], Tom Drozd—who makes the Baiting Hollow wines, and Erik [Bilka, the other PWG production manager] has his own wine, and other clients who know what they’re doing.  So we expect them to make all those decisions, so we’re just backing it up.  We do have some non-Long Island clients, but that is just coincidence.

JM-L:  So who are your non-Long Island clients?

JL:  Well, you know, Silver Springs, up in the Finger Lakes.

JM-L:  All the way up there?  Do they send their fruit down?

JL:  Mmm, no.  When they started five or six years ago, they bought Long Island red, so they make some things up there in the Finger Lakes, and that goes for the white, the hybrid stuff, and they wanted to buy some red, so they approached us and said, “We want to buy a few tons, and how do we get it up to us and what can we do?”  And, I don’t think they actually have a winery, I think all their production is custom, either here or there.  So anyway, that’s how we got started.  And now, every couple of vintages they’ll send some white juice down, and they’ll have us ferment it here because it’s going to be part of a bigger blend or something like that.

JM-L:  I see.  Very interesting.

JL:  So they’re one.  And then there’s Belhurst, Belhurst Castle . . .

JM-L:  Are they also in the Finger Lakes?

JL:  Yes, they are.  They’re basically a hotel, a resort hotel, and again, they might have a little show winery, but I haven’t actually been there.  But we make their wines, sort of for the same reasons, they’re purchasing all their fruit, both red and white, and we’re making the wine for them.

JM-L:  Is PWG unique in New York State?

JL:  Not any more.  We were the first on the East Coast as a custom crush, and I don’t know, but I think that there are one or two in the Finger Lakes now.  I know that East Coast Crush started up and it’s connected to one of the bigger wineries.  I don’t know if it’s the exact same facility or if they have separate business names to bring in more clients, or it’s a whole new facility.  Russell might know that.  And I think that I heard of another place, White Springs was, again, doing their own thing but doing a lot of custom work, I think that just changed ownership and might now be all custom.

JM-L: I see.

JL:  But, anyway, we started people thinking about it as an option, since they save a lot of money and only pay for what they’re bringing in rather than buying equipment that’s going to cost them two million to put in and they’re only going to use it once a year, so . . .

JM-L:  Yes, like Raphael, which spent six million dollars on their own winery . . .

JL:  Yeah, it’s a different interest.  If you have the money to invest and you want that showpiece, you know, that’s . . .

JM-L:  Well, they have that showpiece, there’s no question of that.  Pretty impressive!  So, when you have a really abundant harvest out here, even the wineries that have facilities of their own may find themselves with more fruit than they can handle . . .

JM-L:  So you do take overage, as it were . . .

JL:  Yes.  If we have the space for it, sure, and it happens where we have one particular client, another  winery that knows pretty much that they’re going to have more fruit coming in every year than they have space for themselves, so they’ve been saying fairly consistently that they need a tank of twenty tons, or something, for this overage.  There are other wineries where it’s more vintage-related, most years they’re self-sufficient but some years they’re looking for extra space, so as long as we have the room we’re happy to do that.  We also do pressing and settling; some Connecticut buyers of wineries, are buying local Chardonnay or other varieties and they’re looking for a place to have it destemmed, pressed, cold settled [chilled], and then they’re taking it as juice so that they don’t have to drive [the purchased grapes] all the way around.  So that’s another part of our business that is pretty consistent every year.

JM-L:  So you’re just sending them the must?

JL:  Yes, either the must for reds or the settled juice for, say, Chardonnay.

JM-L:  And then they ferment it.

JL:  Yes, and we have fee schedules—so they don’t have to bring things just to bottle; we have a pressing and settling charge, or you can ferment it here, age it here, and then sell it in bulk, instead of selling it in the bottle, and you’re not paying the full cost . . .  In other words, PWG has a fee schedule for all its varied services that allow a client to decide whether to take a wine all the way to bottle, or to sell it early in the process as juice (before fermentation) or later in the process as bulk wine.

JM-L:  OK.  Well, you and Russell, and who else helped found this?

JL:  Well, I’m not a partner, Russell is.  It’s Russell and Mark Lieb and a fellow called Bernard Sussman—he isn’t located out here.  He lives in New Jersey or may have moved to Florida now.  They’re the three partners.  I’ve been here since it opened.  I was working with Russell at Pellegrini Vineyards when he was planning this, and when 2000 was our first harvest he asked me if, when this was done, I’d like to come with him.

JM-L:  Now, how many clients did you start with?

JL:   Roughly a dozen.

JM-L:  Really?  So in other words, you first determined that there would be a market out there, you determined that there would be people who would bring their fruit in, if you would just set up . . .

JL:  Yes. And, you see, the reason that we knew that—especially Russell—was that Russell, had been the winemaker for Pellegrini Vineyards, at that point, for eight or nine vintages, and people kept approaching him, saying “I have fruit for sale, I’m thinking of starting my own label, do you have room?”  So he was doing custom production at Pellegrini, with whatever excess space he had there, for Erik Bilka and everyone else . . . and, you know, people were looking for space.  He knew that there were more vineyards coming online, he knew that this would be a growth market.  And I think that Russell first approached Mark Lieb—or it might have been vice versa—because Lieb had a forty-acre vineyard and no facility, and he was trying to buy more property so that he could build a winery, and there was some political issue, possibly, and it was taking longer than he expected so they got together and he said, “OK, you build this and I’ll be an investor in it and instead of making it a Lieb winery we’ll make it a custom production winery.  And Russell, you’re going to run it, right?”  And it was very clever and it was the right time to get something started . . .”

JM-L:  Interesting.

JL:  Most of those clients are still with us.  I’d say that the only ones that aren’t were the ones that got sold or closed down.  But Martha Clara was there the first year, Sherwood House was there, so pretty much everyone who was looking for a place and found us in 2000 has stayed.

JM-L:  So Deseo de Michael [aka OR Wine Estate as of 2014] is the just latest . . . ?

JL:  Yes, pretty much.  Around 2010, in terms of having a license and all of that.  But for example, my wine, which is a 2007, and Erik [Bilka], who makes a Riesling from Finger Lakes juice that he brings down, and he started in 2009, and that’s it; it’s not so much new vineyards coming on line anymore, but rather people buying fruit who want to start their own brands.

Leo Family Red:  a History

JM-L:  I see.  So let’s talk about you . . .

JL:  I don’t own my own vineyard; my situation is a little different in that I lease two acres. Well, I have a long-term agreement since 1999, with a particular vineyard to lease the two acres and I bring in my own fruit, with the understanding that I’ll do all the handwork.  I do the pruning, I do the thinning, I do the harvesting.

JM-L:  So you’re not buying fruit, you’re essentially the vineyard manager for a parcel that’s leased to you.  So you have complete control of the fruit.

JL:  Yes.  The things that I didn’t have control over—I started at Martha Clara in 1999–where they controlled the spray schedule, the weed control, anything that had to do with tractor work—I could make suggestions.  So in that respect I didn’t have complete control.  But I was fine with that.  That lasted until 2006, when they decided that they wanted to harvest their own fruit on that plot, so they decided that I was too small to make an exception for . . . so I was all ready to move anyway, and I was fine with that; it was time to move on.  So I continued the same arrangement with Pellegrini Vineyards, in their easternmost vineyard, called South Harbor.  So there were two acres planted with Merlot there as well, same arrangement as before, so I don’t have control of the spraying schedule.   So I worked with the vineyard manager and that worked out nicely.  That was between 2007 through 2010.  In 2010 I started working for Onabay Vineyard as a winegrowing consultant, working out in the vineyard.  So they asked me, would I be interested in leasing a couple of acres with them, and since I was already telling them what to do and hands-on with their whole vineyard it finally meant that it felt like my own vineyard, in that sense.

JM-L:  Oh, that’s very nice.

JL:  So in 2011 I moved to Onabay.  I was very happy with Pellegrini, but at Onabay, where they’ve planted several varieties, I was able to have an acre of Merlot, half-an-acre of Cabernet Franc, and half-an-acre of Petite Verdot.

JM-L:  So you were finally able to make a Meritage.

JL:  Yes.  And I did . . . since 1999 I’ve made wine every year, selling it off  in bulk, but bottling a barrel for myself to have something to drink, and. . .

JM-L: I see.  So now you’re now making wine in your own way—originally you were only making Merlot . . .

JL:  Only growing Merlot.  So the early vintages were 100% Merlot, but I started to go to other sources—Premium, for example, and other clients, to get a little bit of  Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, whatever happened to be available depending upon the year, including Syrah, Malbec, as well.  Working here made it easy for me to know what was out there—the quality, the amounts, whatever was available . . .  2007 was the first wine I bottled and labeled myself; up to 2006 it was a just hobby project, what I kept at home for drinking myself and then to cover costs I’d sell most of the bulk; I sell anywhere from 200 gallons to 1000 gallons a year depending on my harvest yield and my blending needs.

Leo Family Red, bottle [From the Winemaker’s Studio Website, there is this description of the 2007:  “The first and so far, only wine released under the Leo Family label. A blend made of sustainably farmed grapes: 80% Merlot, 7% Syrah, 6% Petit Verdot, 5% Cabernet Franc and 2% Cabernet Sauvignon from the North Fork of Long Island. Aged 18 months in French and Hungarian oak, released spring 2011.”]  [NOTE:  I tasted this wine on Feb. 2 at a dinner party where venison was the main course.  It followed a rather funky Spanish Tempranillo, and it showed beautifully.  It was already showing secondary aromas and flavors, including lightly-smoked wood, coffee, lead pencil, and sour cherry.  It was balanced and had an agreeable persistence on the palate and a very clean finish.  I’d describe it as elegant and somewhat austere–rather like a Premier Cru from St-Emilion (Bordeaux).  Its structure suggests several more years of maturation and good longevity.  It was very much appreciated by all the guests at the venison dinner, and was a really fine food & wine pairing.]

Leo Family Red, RL

[The back label—shown at right—tells even more about the wine and how it is made. . . ]

JM-L:  And how much bulk are you selling now?

JL:  Depending on the harvest . . . it was a lot, anywhere from 500 cases to a 1,000, or 200 gallons, some years there wasn’t very much.  The 2007 was a blend of Merlot, Syrah, Petit Verdot . . . it’s not all Merlot.

JM-L:  Which means that it’s more of a Left Bank than Right Bank Bordeaux style of wine.

JL: Yeah, with the Syrah tossed in too.

JM-L:  And with the Syrah, which in the 19th Century, they used in winemaking in Bordeaux.

JL:  Yes, I read that too.  I’m not going to market it as Bordeaux . . . it’s just was the best that I could do.

JM-L:  Of course you’re not going to label it as Bordeaux.  Despite all the claims about how Bordeaux-like your wine is, this is still Long Island, after all . . .

JL:  Exactly.  There’s no French on the label, it’s just Leo Family Red . . .

JM-L:  And where is it available?  Can I buy it, for example, at Empire State Cellars?

JL:  It’s available there; you can also buy it at the Winemakers’ Studio, that’s my biggest outlet . . . Anthony Nappa’s.  They pour it and sell it on a regular basis.  There’s also a small wine shop right here in Mattituck, called J. Shields.  It’s owned by a woman who’s a real oenophile.  She just loves wine; I think she studied the sommelier’s course . . . so she took it in a couple of weeks ago.  So it’s on the shelf there.

JM-L:  What was your aim in making your particular wine?

JL:  Honestly, it’s kind of a cliché.  I wanted to make a wine that I would enjoy drinking.  There are no asterisks.  I wanted it to stand on its own on a commercial level.  I want make it only in good vintages and have it taste better than what people are expecting.  . I wanted to be able say:  Taste it and if you like it, buy it, and if you don’t, well, there are no questions asked.  I made 420 cases, I think I have about 160 left.  If I’m stuck with a hundred cases, fine, I’ll be happy to drink it for the rest of my life.

JM-L:  So you’re really saying that the 2007 has great longevity.

JL:  Yes, I think it does.  Because I released it last year and it’s certainly drinking better this year. It hasn’t shown any signs of fading and improving still.

JM-L:  You think that it has the structure to last another five, ten years?

JL:  Five, ten years from now?  I think so, but I honestly don’t know?  It’s hard to say.  Two to three years to reach its peak, and how long will it hold?

JM-L:  Well, as you know, that’s a sign of good wine and good winemaking.  The very fact that there is so much wine being made in Long Island that is age-worthy is, I think, a stunning testament to the level of the winemaking here, and the quality of the fruit and everything else.  It’s no secret, after all, that for us, that the quality of the wine from Long Island is, frankly, at times sensational—and, well, times that it’s not— but given how good it is I often to prefer it to that of California.

JL:  I’ve come the same way, obviously I’m in the industry and you could say that I’m completely biased, but I’m less and less happy when paying sixty or seventy dollars for a California wine that turns out to be an ordinary red wine, just high in alcohol but without much character.

JM-L: As soon as Robert Parker says “jammy and full of fruit,” I know immediately that that is a wine that I’m not likely to touch.

JL:  Exactly.  They’re making a style.  Good for them.  They’re marketing a style and making it work.  We’re just not that.

JM-L:  The other thing to remember is that everything here is “micro.”  You just do not have the production to take on California, you just can’t make enough for a national market.

JL:  And that should free us up a lot to experimentation, to be able to focus on quality, which more and more of our customers are asking for over the twelve years we’ve been in the business; at first our clients were just happy to get the fruit in, get it at 22 Brix, get the right pH.  It’s got to have flavor.  We’re all working on making higher quality wine, we’re challenging one another, we’re raising the bar.

JM-L:  And what other vintages have you made since the 2007?

JL:  Put into bottle and labeled—just the 2010.

JM-L:  And that was a fabulous vintage.

JL:  It was very good.  At first I didn’t think that it was going to be as good as the 2007, but as I sampled it from the barrel it just got better and better, to the point that I decided to bottle it.  Now I think it may even be better than the 2007.  Leo Family Red will only be made in the best vintages. And now that we have 2012 in barrel I’m optimistic that 2012 could be another Leo
Family vintage.

JM-L:  Well, that’s a good policy.

JL:  Well, it’s nice to have a day job!

JM-L:  John, you’ve been more than generous with your time, and I thank you for it.  I’ll get back to you when I’m ready to write about Clovis Point.

 

Erik Bilka, who was not interviewed, is the other production winemaker at Premium, and also has his own wine label:  Influence—a Riesling made from grapes sourced from Ovid Farm in the Finger Lakes.

From the Influence Wines Website:

“Every vintage a winemaker’s goal is to showcase the best attributes from the fruit he is presented. Fruit intensity, acidity, and sugar balance are all attributes which bring a wine to a harmonious blend of aroma, flavor, and palette impression. The winemakers’ influence determines the quality seen in the glass.

Influence Wine Riesling“Once harvested, Influence Riesling is delivered to White Springs Winery in Geneva, NY on Seneca Lake, where the experienced staff led by Derek Wilber crush, press, and cold settle the juice, which is then shipped to Premium Wine Group on the North Fork of Long Island. Upon arrival, winemaker Erik P. Bilka begins the winemaking process. The juice is fermented in stainless steel tanks. Before completion fermentation is halted in order to maintain the natural residual sugars found in this semi-dry vintage. The refining process which involves separating natural occurring sediment from the final product is done delicately in order to preserve the fruits integrity. This minimalist approach by the winemaker influencing only what the juice requires, allows the fruit to be showcased in the final wine.”

Brix at Harvest – 19.8
Ph – 3.10
Titratable Acid – 7.02
Residual Sugar – 22.00 grams/ liter
Aged – 100% Stainless Steel Tank
Bottled – March 31, 2011

 To me, the commitment by the oenologists who work at PWG simply goes beyond the normal range of expectation and duty.  For each of them is so passionate about wine, and apparently has so much excess energy, that it’s not enough for them to only work full-time at their place of employment, they have a deep need to practice their skills for themselves and their reputations.  One can’t ask for more devotion than that.  It’s also hard to find better winemakers.

Next, Russell Hearn.

From the PWG Website:

Services Provided

Services provided by Premium Wine Group range from grape sourcing, crush/pressing, fermenting, barrel aging, bottling, Methode Champenoise riddling and disgorging, and Compliance Issues. These services are available to “custom production” clients, Alternating Proprietorship and existing wineries. North-East wineries sourcing North Fork of Long Island fruit may wish to ferment rather than move unstable fruit during harvest. Or those that have exceeded their own production capacity might look to utilize our wide variety of equipment.

Contact us for (Fee Schedule or Component Services Fees) and (Standard Procedures for what is included).

The “producer” is to supply at their expense all:

  • Fruit (delivered to PWG)
  • Fermentation supplies (yeast, enzyme and tannin, malo-lactic bacteria)
  • Wooden cooperage or oak additives
  • Packaging supplies (bottles, corks, capsules, labels and related items)
  • Winemaking direction (consultation)

Wine Production

With a highly trained staff operating within a State of the Art facility, all wine production services requested can be performed in a timely and professional manner. Additional specialized equipment allows such processes as:

  • EuroSelect Destemmer-Crusher, the gentlest way of destemming
  • Tube-in-tube Must Chiller capable of dropping must temperature 20° F. downstream from the destemmer-crusher en route to press or fermentation tank
  • Reverse Osmosis System to remove water from grape juice
  • Ozone Machine for barrel sanitization
  • Lees filtration via Crossflow System
  • Crossflow wine filtration via Vaslin Bucher FX 8 System

Methode Champenoise

  • Complete semi-automatic Methode Champenoise bottling, riddling and disgorging equipment
  • Mainguet Crown capping device
  • Oenoconcept – Twin cage (1,000 bottle) automatic riddling machine fully programmable for the most complete riddling
  • Mainguet – Neck freezing
  • Disgorging
  • Mainguet – corking and wire hood application
  • Sick International – external bottle scrubbing/washing and drying unit
  • Sick International – capsule dispensing and eye sensitive/ orientating automatic double station capsule pleating device

Bottling

  • Full in-line 4,000 bottle/hour bottling line.
  • McBrady – cardboard dust evacuating and nitrogen bottle sparging device
  • GAI monoblock twenty (20) spout vacuum/ gravity filler with double (2) nitrogen sparging and triple (3) head vacuum corker
  • GAI single head screw capping machine, capable of applying Stevlin and Stevlin Lux screw caps
  • Automatic capsule dispenser and eight (8) head (reversible) capsule spinner and heat shrink capability
  • Sick Automatic champagne capsule dispenser and pleating device
  • Kosme – triple station (neck, front and back) six (6) turret pressure sensitive servo motor driven labeler
  • Manual inspection and packing station
  • Top and bottom ‘Little David’ case taper
  • Lanxess Velcorin DT 6 S dosing unit

Laboratory

Our facility has a fully-equipped laboratory, with a full-time Lab Director and assistant during the Harvest period. A production software system (Winemaker Database) allows our clients’ bulk inventory to be tracked from the time juice or bulk wine arrives at the winery, every moPWG, 08vement, addition, chemical analysis and process is recorded and tracked. Our clients have full access to this detailed history of their inventory.

  • Mettler Toledo Auto-Titrator, generating pH, TA, and FSO2 automatically for reliable consistency

Analytical

  • Brix
  • Total Acid (Automated Titration)PWG, 03
  • pH
  • Total and Free SO2
  • Alcohol
  • Heat and Cold Stability
  • CO2
  • NH3
  • Enzymatic R.S. and Malate
  • Volatile Acidity
  • Specific Gravity
  • Bottling QA/QC
  • Routine Wine / Lot Maintenance

Crush Pads

PWG, 14We can receive hand harvested fruit in small half-ton bins, or machine harvested in gondolas. The receiving pad consists of a Weightronix truck scale and printer, two 7-ton Membrane presses with s/s dump hopper for whole-cluster pressing. Two destemmer / crushers: Rauch E20 and Euroselect ES, to ensure uninterrupted receiving capacity. Both presses utilize direct to press systems, if requested, to minimize solids and for “dug-out” red fermentations. Our 50-ton Refrigeration system ensures more than sufficient capacity for rapid cooling of juice. Tube-in-tube must-chiller capable of decreasing must temperature 20ºF. Additionally we have a 700 KW generator to ensure uninterrupted electrical service.

Equipment

  • Numerous ‘gentle on wine’ Waukesha (twin lobe) pumps.
  • Pneumatic ‘punch-down’ tool above (18) red fermentation tanks.
  • (2) in-line tank heaters to maintain warm red ferments, correct malo-lactic temperature in tank, pre-bottling temperature control.
  • Crossflow filtration system Vaslin Bucher FX 3 with lees filtration add-on capability plate and frame pad filter as well as membrane cartridge filtration capability.
  • Steam and ozone capability.

Producers / Clients (all of which use only Long Island fruit)

  1. Baiting Hollow Farms Vineyard
  2. Bouké/Bouquet
  3. Brooklyn Oenology
  4. Clovis Point Vineyard
  5. OR Wine Estate (aka Deseo de Michael)
  6. Harbes Vineyard
  7. Lieb Cellars
  8. Martha Clara Vineyard
  9. McCall Wines
  10. Onabay Vineyards
  11. Pumphouse Wines (Scarsdale, NY)
  12. Sherwood House Vineyard
  13. [Leo Family Wines, by John Leo, employee]
  14. [Influence Wines (Finger Lakes fruit) by Erik Bilka, employee]
  15. [Suhru Wines, by Russell Hearn, PWG partner & production manager]
  16. [T’Jara Vineyards, by Russell Hearn]

PWG header Premium Wine Group 35 Cox Neck Rd. Mattituck, NY 11952

info@premiumwinegroup.com
phone 631-298-1900
fax 631-298-3588

Viniculture in LI, Part III: Osprey’s Dominion

Osprey's Dominion sign

From the Osprey’s Dominion website:

Bud Koehler was among the first vintners to settle on the North Fork.

After retiring from a job in construction in 1983, the Farmingdale native headed out east with his wife and 11 children and purchased a 24-acre plot of land in Peconic.  He planted grapes and founded a vineyard that would be in the company of just three others: Hargrave Vineyard, Pindar Vineyards and Paumanok.

“I’ve always been building and making,” he said. “I wanted to make something with my hands.”

He called the vineyard Osprey’s Dominion Vineyards after the brown and grey bird ubiquitous in the North Fork’s skies.  The osprey is a “great, courageous bird,” he said, explaining that it dives into waters to snatch fish to eat even though it can’t swim. He likes to think the large raptors watch over his many rows of vines.

In the early years, Mr. Koehler only grew grapes and sold them to surrounding wineries. His entire family, 11 kids and all, hit the grapevines each October, forming their own harvesting crew.  He soon expanded the operation by purchasing 16 additional acres near Locust Avenue in Mattituck and teaming up with a good friend, Bill Tyree. Mr. Koehler and Mr. Tyree together purchased 50 more acres in Peconic and decided that adding a winery would make for a more prosperous business.

They had a production facility installed in a building on the newest Peconic property and bottled their first wine in 1991. They restored a farmhouse on Main Road in Peconic, just in front of the largest vineyard, into a tasting room.

Osprey's Dominion

Interviews with Adam Suprenant,Winemaker, 23 April & 8 May 2012,  updated on 2 February 2013

Adam Suprenant, ex-FB

photo by Wonny Lervisit

Adam Suprenant, winemaker for Osprey’s Dominion, in Peconic, NY, met with me for an interview near Union Square, in New York City, having just been in the company of Peter M.F. Sichel—the influential and well-known wine executive who, among his many achievements, created the popular Blue Nun wine brand—and whom Adam regards as his mentor in the wine world, having known him for many years.

Adam describes himself as a “champion of what goes into the bottle.”

He had earned a BS degree in Agriculture, from Cornell in 1985.  At the time, there was but a single one-semester course on viticulture. His first job as a viticulturalist, in 1986, was with the Banfi vineyard operation in Old Brookville, NY, where he worked under Fred Frank.  During the Holiday Season of that year he worked as a salesman for Sherry-Lehmann.  For the next two years Adam worked for the wine distributor Joseph Victori (now JV Wines) wearing a Brooks Brothers suit while canvassing the liquor stores in the South Bronx, where the product and the clerks worked behind thick bullet-proof Plexiglas.  How it was that he was never mugged and robbed he thinks may be explained by the fact that as a man who was apparently Irish, wearing such mufti, must have suggested to the street thugs that he was a plain-clothes policeman or perhaps a Mafioso.  They didn’t dare touch him.

After he left Victori, Adam needed time to work out what direction his career would take next, so he worked as a waiter at well-known New York City restaurants such as La Petite Ferme, Tavern on the Green, and Bruxelles.  However, by 1992 he realized that he really wanted to make a career in the production end of the wine trade, so he went to California and earned an MS in Enology with a concentration in sensory science from UC Davis in 1996.  His Master’s Thesis was a cork quality-control manual.*

While studying for his MS, he applied for an internship to work at the Château Lafite, the great Premier Cru vineyard and winery in Bordeaux.  At the time, Lafite had an agreement with the Agricultural School at Davis to take on one intern a year to work for the harvest season.  To get in he went on a “charm offensive, in which I overcame myself.”

While there for the ’95 harvest, he was assigned to perform the task of pumpovers (or remontage) in Frenchin the fermentation vats.  (As that kind of work wasn’t deemed suitable for women, female interns were assigned to the lab.)  Thirty-five days of this work, without a break, left his hands became so deeply stained that months later the stains still showed, for they couldn’t just be washed away.  He also served as an intern at Trefethen Winery, a comparatively small enterprise, where he got to do everything—a real hands-on experience.

Post-graduation, Adam then spent two years working for Franciscan Estate in Napa.  It was a very large operation, and in such an operation winemakers don’t exactly get to work hands-on.  Rather, it is a large-scale commercial, computerized affair, a kind of agricultural factory.  The labor costs for such a vast operation would simply be too high and it can be a challenge to maintain consistent quality, though it’s possible to be managed even when the production is greater than 100,000 cases a year.  Given all that, Adam says, “My point isn’t that they can’t make high quality wines, which Franciscan did and still does, rather that there is less of a connection between the winemaker, vineyard and the winery cellar than there is in a hands-on small winery like Osprey’s Dominion.”

He returned East in ’98 and worked as winemaker at Gristina Vineyards, in Long Island until 2001.  As he explained, “At Gristina I felt it necessary to deconstruct California winemaking because in New York State full grape maturity happens at lower sugar levels due to climatic factors.”

When he arrived in Long Island it was just in time to see the great transition in viticulture that was taking place.  As he puts it:  “Old School practices were:  no irrigation, no deer fence, no leaf removal, no crop thinning, no spray after the nets went on, earlier harvest, widespread virus and trunk disease in some plantings and inadequate vine maintenance due to cost cutting.”  Furthermore, they often harvested before the grapes were fully mature.

It took a realignment of the industry that began “in the early aughts”, as the vineyard owners came to understand the need to bring about the changes that had to take place in standard practice:  Leaf removal, green harvesting to thin the crop, reduced use of inputs—especially the high-impact versions—ending their use weeks before the harvest to eliminate toxicity on the fruit before harvest, and allowing longer hang time for the fruit to achieve full mature if possible,  weather and climate permitting.  (This meant that sometimes the fruit would hang in temperatures as low as 51°F, the point at which ripening would slow down and nearly stop.)

Again, in Adam’s words, “The philosophy is to do the ‘right thing’ vis-a-vis the environment, to be a steward of the land in order to perpetuate its use for generations to come.”  However, he goes on to say, “The New School [of viticulture] is the opposite of Old School plus widespread planting or replanting of vineyards with better grape clonal selections/varieties, and higher density plantings.  [In other words,] the New School means higher inputs because of more hand labor to remove leaves to thin the crop; more vines per acre equals more rows to spray per acre, more deer fence, etc.  The irony is that the Old School was actually more sustainable than now because there were less inputs because of lower planting density, less frequent sprays, etc.  Now there is an industry-wide focus on high quality, which can only be achieved with more inputs, not less.”

Weather and climate have always been a challenge along the Eastern seaboard, what with storms and hurricanes, high humidity, and a general unpredictability of weather.  (Indeed, Adam points out that the hardest climate for viticulture in America is East of the Mississippi.)  In October of 2005, for example, the Merlot was just ripe and ready to be picked.  Fortunately, there was just enough warning from weather reports to call in crews to take in the grapes, and they managed to pick 80% of the fruit before one week straight of rain arrived, dropping over 15 inches. After the rain we lost between 30-60 percent of the grapes not picked such as Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc.   In 2011, a hurricane hit LI in late August, again resulting in very difficult conditions, such that some vineyards lost a great deal of fruit—California certainly doesn’t have this problem.

With respect to sustainable farming, Adam wrote this in an e-mail:

“Osprey has been a pioneer since 2002 in incorporating green practices into our farm and winery operations. These include:

  1. Biodiesel – We began using 100% Biodiesel in 2004 or 2005 and continue to use it but as a blend of 20% Biodiesel with 80% diesel.
  2. Wind Energy – We were approved for a LIPA pilot wind project in 2003 but could not get zoning approval. Eventually the politics and the zoning regulations at the Town changed and we erected a wind generator in 2011.
  3. Nitrogen Fertilizer – We began using pelletized chicken manure in 2005 to supplement our conventional fertilizers. We also produce nitrogen from our cover crop rotation of clover which captures nitrogen from the air and turn it into plant-available nitrogen. This reduces our total need for nitrogen fertilizer.
  4. Pesticides – Our spray program utilizes between 35-45 percent organic materials. The remainder are classified as “reduced risk” or are not “restricted use” pesticides
  5. Alternative Transportation – I am an avid cyclist and regularly bike commute to work 2-3 times a week.”

As indicated in Adam’s list, true sustainability is more than just the reduction of toxic inputs to the vineyard.  The carbon footprint of the machinery used in the field is of major concern, so Osprey’s Dominion was an early adopter of bio-diesel fuel (1. above), which is made from vegetative matter.  It turned out, however, that the fuel was rather gummy and began clogging the fuel lines, leading to expensive maintenance of the equipment.  They now use B20 fuel, which has a 20% biological component—not as ecologically friendly, but a necessary compromise if the equipment was to function effectively.

According to Adam, from a holistic point of view, “True sustainability is where we need to go.”  But for him, the term “sustainable” is terribly plastic and can be used to mean almost anything. As he says, “Sustainable is too broadly defined; for example, the use of fossil fuel is not sustainable, yet is allowed under the program.”  Hence a certain skepticism on his part about the Long Island Sustainable Winegrowing program, so he isn’t yet ready to commit to involvement in the LISW.  But, he points out,  “I have not read the LISW plan so I am not directly commenting on their manifesto but my knowledge of sustainable programs in other wine regions.”  For him, what is lacking in other programs includes:

  • Requiring suppliers to be sustainable as well
  • Employees/owners incorporating sustainability into their lifestyles
  • Paying a sustainable living wage to all farm employees

With respect to participation in the LISW project, Adam is taking a wait-and-see position.  As far as he’s concerned Osprey’s already qualifies as a sustainable operation given its long commitment to sustainable and organic practices.  He’s not sure that the certification will mean that much or be worth the trouble.

Apart from the issue of the meaning of “sustainability”, also troubling to him is the overzealous use of the term “organic.”  Given that even factory farms claim that their produce is “organic” it raises the question of just what it means when they use it.

However, the reality is that one of the most effective controls for some infestations, such as mildew, is copper, a toxic metal to which eventual resistance is not possible.  Less toxic to the general environment is mined copper as opposed to the industrial product.  However, it should be borne in mind that organic copper has same toxicity as non-organic.  Its use is allowed in sustainable, organic, and even biodynamic agriculture and it is nearly impossible to avoid applying it in all aspects of agriculture, including home gardening, given its irreplaceable long-term effectiveness.

Osprey’s vines are typically planted in rows 9 feet apart with 4 to 10-foot spacing between the vines.  They rotate cover crops every three to five years, alternating between fescue and clover.  Since 2004 they’ve also been using pelletized chicken manure from Maryland.  They prefer to use organic inputs but when necessary will resort to industrial ones.

When he joined Osprey’s Dominion as winemaker in 2001, he at first worked with Tom Stevenson, whom he regards as one of the finest vineyard managers he’d ever known.  When Tom retired so that he could spend more time with his family, Wojtek Majeski took over the vineyard, and the two of them now have an excellent, even symbiotic relationship, for Adam walks the vineyard nearly as much as does Wojtek, conferring with him on when to spray, when to green harvest, how much the foliage should be cut back, and especially, as harvest time nears, when to pick the fruit.  It was during Adam’s walks in the vineyard that, over time, he discovered that one of the worst pests is the common raccoon, which comes into the vineyard as the grapes are ripening. The animals don’t just go after the low-hanging fruit, for they are capable of climbing the vines.  Bird nets, to ward off avian grape predators, are no impediment to the raccoon, which can easily rip them open to get at the grapes.  These creatures can only be control by the use of traps.

Adam and Tom Stevenson worked to incorporate greener growing practices. Wojtek has continued on the path that Tom and he started.  From the beginning of Adam and Wojtek’s relationship they worked closely together to maintain the sustainability standards of the vineyard.

For example, Osprey’s was among the very first vineyards to use pheromone ties to help control one of the scourges of a vineyard, the Grape Berry Moth (GBM).  (Adam explains that “pheromones are mating disruptors, which can only be effective if there is industry-wide application in the vineyard as part of an IPM program supported by the Cornell Extension Program.)  But these are expensive, especially given the amount of labor needed to tie the bait in the vicinity of the vines.  However, it eliminates spraying insecticide and is therefore a truly sustainable practice.  A less costly alternative to the ties is the use of BT, or Bacillus thuringiensis, a rudimentary neurotoxin that is an effective biological pest control, but the moth can and will eventually develop resistance to it.  Thus, “We currently control Grape Berry Moth using organic insecticides. An industry-wide program to use pheromone disruption could theoretically negate the need for any insecticide use.”

GBM have been a growing problem since 2007, and the only way to effectively control them is with pheromone ties, which are expensive.  The vines need continual scouting since the moths produce several generations in the span of a growing season.  In other words, calendric spraying doesn’t work under these circumstances.  One consequence of the moth problem has been an increase in botrytis due to the nature of the damage made by them.

What is further needed, then, is a trapping and monitoring system with support and help from the Cornell Agricultural Program.  Vineyards can’t afford to deal with this on their own.

So Adam sees himself as an “extra set of eyes and knowledge base; Wjotek and I confer on important vineyard decisions to utilize our over 50 years of combined experience growing grapes. [We] are continuing the work that was largely implemented by Tom Stevenson (who retired from Osprey’s and now owns and operates a no-spray, naturally-grown berry farm in Orient, NY, called Oysterponds Farm).”

Osprey's Dominion, 04Some of Osprey’s property was originally part of Alan Barr’s Le Rêve vineyard.  When it was first planted with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in the 1980s, the rows were 9 feet apart and the vines were at 8-foot intervals in the rows, with posts set 6 feet high.  However, in terms of solar exposure the ideal height should be equal to the width of the rows, or a one-to-one ratio.  Consequently, in 2000, trellis extenders were added (see picture above) so that the post heights are now 7 ½ feet, and hedging the foliage at the top wire means that the vine heights are now 8 ½ feet, nearly the ideal ratio and means that the more northerly rows are still not shaded until the late summer sunsets.  In other words, the height was increased to maximize sunlight capture by the vines, theoretically leading to better quality.  The difference may not huge but it might be enough to capture that elusive last 5-10% of maximum quality potential.

100% of the original La Rêve vines were replanted by us between 2003-2007.

The Le Rêve Chardonnay vines were not clonally selected, or as Adam put it, they were the “give me anything” clones.  Since Osprey’s purchased the property additional Chardonnay plantings were done using Davis clone 4 and Dijon 95.  Although most of the original Pinot Noir vines were pulled to make way for other red varieties, there are still 1 ¾ acres left, made up of four different clones, but the winery only makes red wine in warm years.  If, by the third week in September the Pinot has reached 22º Brix then it is made as a red wine; if it only reaches 19º, then it will become a sparkling wine.

There are three acres of Gewürztraminer and an additional three of Carmenere, the latter having been made into a varietal for the first time on Long Island.  There is also some Petite Verdot, as well as one hundred vines of Tannat (a red variety native to SW France and widely planted in Uruguay) that are being grown as an experiment.

Adam also has his own wine label, Coffee Pot Cellars, which he started in 2008, since, he said, “I thrive on challenge.”  He buys the fruit from Osprey’s, while his Chardonnay comes from Sam McCullough’s vineyard; the wine is made at Osprey’s.  Coffee Pot is an “in-the-know” kind of brand.  About 750 cases per year are currently being produced and are divided among four wines, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot, and a Meritage blend.  Regardless of whatever comes in the future, as far as Adam is concerned, he will always have a relationship with Osprey’s Dominion.

Bud Koehler, Bill Tyree, owners, and Adam. Photo from Adam's FB page

Bud Koehler, Bill Tyree, owners, and Adam. Photo from Adam’s FB page

Indeed, according to the Osprey’s website, Bud “praises his winemaker, Adam Suprenant, and vineyard manager, Wojtek Majewski, for producing quality wines. A recent success was the 2007 Reserve Merlot, which was named best Merlot at the 2011 New York Wine and Food Classic.”  As a matter of fact, in 2010 Wine Spectator gave the 2007 Merlot a high mark, 90 and described it thus:

This red is balanced and dense, with ripe plum and black cherry framed by smoke and mineral notes. Sleek, focused and expressive.

Also, the 2009 Pinot Noir was named  the “Best Pinot Noir” at the 2012 New York Food and Wine Classic competition.  In fact, the awards list is a pretty long one.  After all, they grow thirteen varieties and make twenty-three different wines.  Visit the website and see for yourself.

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44075 Main Rd. • Peconic Long Island, NY 11958 • Toll Free: (888) 295-6188 • Local: (631) 765-6188 • Fax: (631) 765-1903

http://www.ospreysdominion.com/