Twenty Wineries In Four Days: Day Two

9 a.m. I have a bagel for breakfast. AMP does not. Shortly, the folly of her ways will become evident.

10 a.m. Dear Lord, Greenport is a ghost town on Tuesdays. All I want is a decent latte, and I'm not going to Starbucks, dammit!

10:30 a.m. We have to drive to do it, but I finally find me some froofy coffee, at a little place called the Blue Duck. As it turns out, we are there on its first day. Good thing it opened, otherwise all these wineries wouldn't have much liked seeing my cranky coffee-less face.

10:45 a.m. Hmmm. Pugliese says they are open at 10 a.m. So why aren't they open? Why? We drive over to Bedell instead, and sit in the parking lot waiting for them to open. How pathetic are we? There's a car parked in the lot with a custom license plate that I think says "Grapest," which would be awesome: "Grape! Graper! Grapest!" But no, it actually says "Grapes1". I take a picture to occupy the time.

11:03 a.m. Bedell is open!!! They have a beautiful tasting room with a genial fella behind the bar. The people who work at these places are interesting - some of them own the wineries and make more money than ex-Lehman Brothers' traders once did, some of them are hired hands who are clearly just collecting a paycheck and don't know the first thing about the wine or care for that matter, and some of them are folks like this guy - pretty young, interested in the industry, not sure exactly what they want to do (maybe a brewery, he says), but they know their stuff. Wineries really ought to pay more attention to who they put behind the bar - it's amazing how much of a difference this can make in whether or not you enjoy the wine.

Bedell - like Corey Creek - is now owned by Michael Lynne, who used to run New Line Cinema and was executive producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There's a certain cinematic flair in their presentation - the labels on the bottles, the design of the building, the view out on the vineyard. (Our pourer pointed out to us the difference between Bedell's lovely green vineyards and those next door, which belong to a winery that we won't name but that was mentioned already and rhymes with "Hen Bar".) No hobbits, although there is a timid dog. We spend full on an hour - maybe more - here, tasting the wine, wandering around their gorgeous building, and sitting on the porch in the sun watching some grapes being processed. It's pretty neat to be out here at harvest season; you get an idea for how much work actually goes into making good wine, watching the grapes being hand-picked and hand-sorted and just generally treated like small purple kings. I buy two bottles of wine: the First Crush red and the (wince) $48 2006 Bedell Gallery. I love me a big buttery Chardonnay, and this one makes my tongue water.

12:15ish - Back to Pugliese, which is now blessedly open. They have a vineyard cat, who shuns us. To be honest, it isn't really the wine that I like about this place - although it's more than decent - it's the bottles. They're all hand-painted, every single one of them. So pretty. I buy a bottle of '06 Cab Franc. Long Island originally planted Cab Franc as a blending grape but it turned out that the grape did really well in the climate, so now it seems like the island is obsessing over it. It's a rare vineyard where you won't find at least one bottle of the stuff, and lots of folks think that this grape is the future of Long Island. We've already had a good laugh over a headline in one of the rags we've picked up that starts off thusly: "Let's be franc."

12:45ish - Oh dear God, it's 12:45 and I think I'm drunk. Some of these wineries don't even have spittoons out on the counter. What's a girl to do? In our case, putter a hundred feet or so down the road to Lenz. Thank goodness these wineries are all scrunched together so you don't have to drive too far from one to the next.

Lenz is picturesque without being over the top. There are workers harvesting grapes in the fields, strategically placed, artfully toppled-over wine barrels, and a garage that you can peer into to get an idea of what's going on behind the scenes. In the tasting room, we get a real treat: a blind tasting of three different Merlots: the 2001 Old Vines Merlot, the 2001 "Estate Selection" Merlot, and a 2003 Merlot. I have been known to wax poetic about how much better wine from old vines is than from new ones, but I really got my comeuppance in this tasting. I guessed the 2003 Merlot was from the old vines, and entirely mixed up the two 2001 bottles. Our pourer gave us a tip: as wine ages, it gets darker...so you should, when tasting wines from several different years, be able to figure out the year based on which wine is darkest. But our utter confusion was yet more proof that you should just drink what you like, and who cares about the price or the vintage or the nose.

1:45ish: We put a moratorium on wine-drinking until 3 p.m. We - especially bagel-less AMP - need to eat. We drive over to Love Lane, which might be the shortest road on Long Island at maybe a quarter of a mile, and settle in at the Love Lane Kitchen, where neither one of us is tempted in the least by the wines by the glass on the menu. Just water please, and keep it coming. I'm pretty sure my chicken/avocado sandwich was tasty, but I can't really recall. After, we wander around Love Lane a little bit. There's a candy shop that has pumpkin fudge, but the store is a little creepy, so I pass. We do buy some cheese next door, where we are involuntarily sucked into a cheese tasting almost as serious as all the wine tasting we've been doing. (Blueberry cheese? Not for me.)

3ish: Honestly, if I didn't have my camera as evidence I wouldn't remember that Duckwalk is where we went next, but I have photos to prove it, so I guess that's what we did. The Duckwalk we went to is the Northern cousin of the main vineyard, which is in the Hamptons. It is owned by the same folks who own Pindar, and it's got the same commercial thing going on. Now, in snooty winemakerese, "commercial" seems to be a synonym for "bad," but I have to say that there's a little room in this world for commercial. I mean, why is slapping some cute ducks on your label a bad thing? And the wine? They make some perfectly fine stuff, and it is more reasonably priced than comparable mediocre wines at other vineyards out here. I bought a $12 bottle of red table wine that I am going to enjoy thoroughly with a pizza sometime soon.

One other comment on this place. I am not a big fan of dessert wines. I'm not a fan of sweet wines in general, so I don't bother with dessert wines - I'd rather just have dessert. Perhaps this will change as I get older and wiser, but for now my modus operandi is to taste the dessert wine, make a face, and let someone else finish it. But Duckwalk makes a truly lovely blueberry port - it was my favorite of all the dessert wines we tasted out here.

3:30ish: We are trying to go to The Tasting Room, a little store that pulls together a bunch of the smaller wineries that don't have their own tasting rooms. Sadly, it's closed Monday through Thursday, like rather too much of this silly island, so no tiny boutique vintage tastings for us. Instead, we tried pumpkin preserves (disgustingly sweet) at the shop next door and then headed for Castello di Borghese.

This is one of the oldest vineyards on Long Island, although it changed hands a few years ago. It's owned by Italian royalty now, and it gives off an impression of gravitas that can be a bit off-putting. But for us, that was lightened by the big truck advertising "Pinot Noir" out front, and by the guy behind the counter, whose idea the truck was. Turns out he's a Pinot Noir freak, and as such, he knows that fellow Pinot Noir fans will do u-turns in the middle of a highway to check out a bottle of the stuff. Pinot Noir is pretty rare on the island - I'm not even sure if we tasted another - so of course we had to try it. It was good but I wound up going for another bottle I liked more, the 2005 Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

3:45ish: We've moved just up the road to Vineyard 48. In retrospect, I'm not quite sure what I thought of this place. I guess my overriding impression was that it was a little odd. It is owned by several families who appear, in addition to their love of wine, to really, really, love chess. And it makes a mean peach wine, under the cheesy "NoFo" appellation. And that is all I will say about that.

4:29 p.m.: At Duckwalk, we got a free tasting coupon to go to Pindar, since they're owned by the same folks. So we try to go back. We think we've slid in just before their hard-ass 4:30 deadline. They appear to have a different clock. They've been wiping down the bar for the past five minutes. No tasting for us, but we're welcome to buy! Are you kidding me? I won't be drinking your wine any time soon, thanks entirely to your crappy attitude. As far as "commercial" goes, this place embodies all the bad aspects of it.

7:30ish: At several points during the day, we've asked people where we should go for dinner, and one place keeps coming up: Seafood Barge. The guy at Castello di Borghese even told us exactly what table to ask for. We drove past it on the way to our hotel on the first night, and thought, well, dive. Looks like a dive, has a dive name, so, dive. Au contraire: the only thing divey about Seafood Barge is its external appearance. Inside, it's very cute, done up in a nautical theme without being nauseating. And the food, oh, the food...curried crab spring rolls...pan-seared tuna with coconut rice in soy and ginger broth...yum.

So, smiley-face roundup: Bedell gets a giant smiley-face, Pugliese a moderate one, Lenz a moderately smilier than moderate one, Duckwalk a robot flat line, Castello di Borghese a moderate smiley-face, 48 a robot flat line, and Pindar a giant, giant frowny-face.