Twenty Wineries In Four Days: The Final Day, Part One

Thursday on the North Fork of Long Island was SO FUN it's going to take two posts to do it justice. There are just too many themes here, from unusual wineries, to a theory of Merlot, to the best winery we went to.

10 a.m. We check out of our hotel sadly and wander around Greenport. This sleepy little town starts to wake up on Thursday as wine-heads head out for the weekend. All the coffeeshops are finally open, and I successfully order my necessary jolt of strong caffeine. The local bookstore is open too, and I buy a biography written by one of the founders of the first vineyard on the island, Hargrave.

11 a.m. We pull into Old Field, which is pretty much what it sounds like, a tasting room in a field. This place is so different from the rest of the wineries we visited this trip, just a shack in a field with a table set up on the porch outside. The server ducks in and out of the shack's window to get wine, which is served in plastic cups. There's a loud fowl strutting around. They sell eggs. (There's another place like this in the area, called Sherwood House, but we didn't make it there this trip.) What a treat!

Brief aside: As I've been writing this, I've been experiencing considerable angst about what to call the people who poured us our tastings. I even looked it up on Google, and there just doesn't seem to be an appropriate one. I've been using "server" and "pourer," but these don't really do it justice. Perhaps I should invent my own term? Any ideas?

11:45ish: We swore we were only going to go to three wineries before heading down the LIE, but after that taste of Raphael we had the previous night, we have to add it to our list. Boy am I glad we did - this was one of my favorite places. It's pretty much the polar opposite of Old Field in terms of presentation, with a giant, luxurious tasting room fitted out with a gorgeous circular bar in the middle meant to look like a wine barrel. Rather than go for a full tasting flight here, we opt to try just three Merlots from different years: 2001, 2002, and a 2005 "Fontana" that is 80% Merlot. I've already described their 2002 Merlot so I won't go into detail here, except to say that they're all just as good as the one we had at the Frisky Oyster.

Our server rocked - one of the bottles had been open for a couple of days, so she poured us a sample from that and from a brand-new bottle of the same year, which was a pretty interesting comparison in and of itself. And she warned us off one of their newer wines that she thought wasn't ready for tasting yet - honesty we appreciate. A lot of the winemakers out here bring out their latest vintage as soon as the previous one sells out, which, since they're generally making not very many cases, means some wines make it to the tasting rooms before they're necessarily ready.

One last thing: we asked why the 2005 wine we tasted was called "Fontana," since it was 80% Merlot. She hemmed and hawed a little bit and said it was because the winemakers wanted to name it after the fountain in front of the tasting room. We developed our own theory shortly later - more on that in a bit.

12:30ish: I finally find pumpkin fudge, at a little shop on the opposite side of the road from the Jamesport and Paumanok vineyards. The friendly proprietor has only one box, but beggars can't be choosers. He also gives us directions to a "historical - or hysterical - local landmark." More on that in the next post.

12:40ish: Here we are at Jamesport. We had high expectations for this place - almost everyone we asked told us to go here and try their whites - but sadly, our expectations were not met. The wines may very well have been decent, but our overall experience was so poor that they were overshadowed. First of all, the guy behind the counter was totally lame, not interested in human interaction at all. He told us almost nothing about their wines, even when we asked leading questions. (US: So, you had an oyster-fest here last weekend, how was that? HIM: Fine. US: Errrr...so, what wines go good with oysters? HIM: Oh, whites. (Thanks, who woulda guessed?) Also, this was the first place there were actually fruit flies IN our wine, which was just kind of gross. They were in three consecutive glasses, and I didn't see them fly in, which makes me wonder if they were in the wine bottles themselves. And when we asked him to pour one of the fruit-flied glasses out, rather than giving us another sample of the same wine, he moved on to the next one. Dude, go work in the back office and take your crap attitude back there with you.

1ish: Wow. After that experience at Jamesport, we're really hoping Paumanok can get the bad taste out of our mouths. We're thinking this may be our last tasting before we head back, and we want it to be good.

Paumanok doesn't disappoint. After our morose Jamesport server, the young lady here is a right treat. She's willing to chat, and she knows what she's talking about. We share a full tasting here, and we like almost everything we taste. They have a 2002 Merlot here too, and we try it, asking why the Merlots that people are serving are so much older then the rest of the wines available: do they take longer to mature, or what? No, says our pourer: it's that movie.

She is of course referring to "Sideways," which came out in 2004. Anyone who's seen it will not be able to forget the famous anti-Merlot speech made by the character played by Paul Giamatti: "If anyone orders Merlot I'm leaving. I am not drinking any f**king Merlot." Who knew it had such an effect on Merlot sales? Now the renaming of that 2005 Raphael wine as "La Fontana" makes a lot more sense.

I'm feeling a little guilty - I stopped drinking Merlot for a time around then, too. But the side effect is nice: because of the dip in sales, we get to taste appropriately aged Merlot on our trip, rather than wine which may be too young, which seems to be the case with some of the other reds out here. And it's good. Still, I don't buy any Merlot here, having been spoiled by the stuff at Raphael. I do pick up a bottle of Cab Franc though.

Part two, coming soon.