Twenty Wineries In Four Days: And So We Come To The End

1:45ish: As our tour of Long Island wine country comes to an end, we've decided to eat lunch at Modern Snack Bar, which is basically a diner. It's been around since 1950, and has remained seemingly true to its roots, serving good, simple food at affordable prices. Their mashed turnips are famous, so we order some even though they don't really go with my soft-shell crab sandwich or AMP's Caesar Salad. They're so good we slurp them up anyhow.

2:45ish: We're faced with a choice. Head home, or take a detour to the South Fork to visit Channing Daughters, tacking about an hour onto our trip? AMP's had their wine before and she loves it, and I'm obsessing over it after reading an article in Edible about their Mosaico wine and falling in love with the label. It winds up not really being a difficult decision: off to the South Fork we go. (Plus, we both kind of want to be able to say that we've been to the Hamptons and sneered at them.)

3:45ish: There's some weird art at Channing Daughters. But there's also a large, fuzzy, friendly dog who greets us at the door. He wants to be outdoors STAT. We herd him back indoors and check out the tasting room, which is nicely done, with seriously extensive notes about how each of their wines is produced, as well as about how it tastes. The Mosaico that I'm obsessing over, for instance, is made from 32% Pinot Grigio, 29% Chardonnay, 14% Sauvignon Blanc, 12% Muscat, 7% Tocai Friulano and 6% Gewurztraminer, the signage informs me. And it's fermented in an insane number of different types of vessels: "a stainless steel tank and stainless steel barrels, two Slovenian oak barrels, two Slovenian oak hogsheads and one Slovenian oak puncheon. A total of 27% of the wine saw new oak." I mean, damn.

As the above description indicates, these guys are doing different things then any other Long Island tasting room, that we've visited, anyhow. Most of the vineyards are growing Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay and Merlot grapes. Many of them share the same vineyard managers and winemakers. Inevitably, with the exception of a few stand-outs, they all start to taste much the same to someone with a less distinguished palate than Rober Parker's. No danger of that here. Tocai Friulano? I've never even heard of Tocai Friulano. The server explains that the owners think that Long Island has a similar climate to Northern Italy, so they've intentionally planted a lot of the same grapes that get grown there.

We've pretty much been sharing a single tasting at every single place we've been to since very early on, which works well except when we both really like a particular wine, in which case the tastings degenerate into open warfare. Here, there'll be no sharing. We start with the 2007 Sylvanus, which is a blend of Muscat, Pinot Grigio and Pinot Bianco. This is a field blend, which means that the grapes are grown intermingled in the field and harvested the way they're grown. I've never heard of this before and think it's totally cool; maybe I feel that way because the wine is soooooo good, and completely different from everything else we've tried.

Next, we try the 2007 Scuttlehole Chardonnay. This has been prepared in all stainless steel, which normally I don't like, but this time it works. (We've heard a lot of people out here sputter indignantly about Chardonnays that have been over-oaked; I don't know if this is really a problem or just a way of distinguishing their wines from California Chardonnays.) It also hasn't been through malo-lactic fermentation, a process our pourer takes the time to explain to us. Basically, wine can go through two fermentations: the primary one, which converts the grape juice to alcohol, and then malo-lactic fermentation, which changes one type of acid to another and which is common in red wines and the heartier white wines. Malo-lactic fermentation can be stopped by cold temperatures, and that's what they did with this Chardonnay.

We tried a couple other whites - both incredible - then a rose, then moved on to the reds. They don't plant a lot of red at Channing Daughters, but just like with the whites, what they do do with red here is completely different than any other vineyard. We tried the 2005 Sculpture Garden, which is 97% Merlot and 3% Blaufrankisch. I'd never heard of Blaufrankisch (which also goes by the name Lemberger); turns out it's grown primarily in Germany, Austria and the surrounding region. Our pourer said it's meaty, and maybe it was just her persuasiveness, but I swear I can detect sausage both in the nose and the taste of the wine. So good!

I bought four bottles of wine here, the most I bought at any vineyard: the Sylvanus, my Mosaico (which wasn't available for tasting), the Sculpture Garden, and another red, the 2007 Rosso Fresco, which she was kind enough to let me taste. It's basically a low-brow version of the Sculpture Garden, also with the signature Blaufranksich grape, and I'm drinking it and smacking my lips as I write this. Please, don't let this bottle of wine end.

5:30ish. So that's it. That's our four days in wine heaven. To summarize day four, Channing Daughters gets the largest smiley-face of all, Old Vine and Raphael get quite broad smiley-faces, Paumanok gets a smiley-face, and Jamesport gets a fairly wrinkled frowny-face. Four days wasn't quite enough to entirely do the North Fork; we definitely could've found another five or six wineries to go to (especially Peconic Bay, Shinn and Sherwood House). But since we already felt like winos, it was time to go. I leave you with a picture of a giant duck, the "hysterical monument," which we randomly drove past on our way out of Dodge - or Flanders, actually, which is where this fabulous roadside art is.