Wine Country...Long Island Style

This past weekend, Anne and I made a trip out to Long Island to take a tour of some wineries. Like most, we were only there to learn about the process of wine making, the type of grapes utilized, and the climatic differentials that impact the harvest and its respective yield. Oh wait, that wasn’t us, we just sampled a lot of wine at some different places. We started off with a lengthy train ride from NYC, roughly 2.5 hours. Some light reading passed the time and before we knew it we were stepping off of the train in a rather rural looking area, very green, and very different from the city. Some fresh air was nice, and our bus/van was waiting. Everyone else on the tour, about 10 people, was already on board so we made haste to the first winery which was only a few minutes away. The first place was really nice, I don’t recall all of the details, but suffice it say they did serve wine, and they had a really nice deck outside overlooking their vineyard. This was certainly an enjoyable way to start the day. Next we cruised to a winery that boasted of how they were approximately 95% organic in their wine production. We took a walk through their vineyard with the lady who ran the place as she talked all about organic and being green etc. My thought process went something like this: hmm, this walk could be neat (3 seconds later) I wonder if there is wine out here somewhere, (5 seconds after that) not seeing any wine, what is this lunatic talking about?, (2 seconds after that) less talky more drinky. So anyway, I’m pretty sure this was the most earth friendly wine I’ve ever had. It was all some of the least flavorful wine I’ve had. Basically my lesson learned is that pesticides are our friend, let’s not anger them any further. The next stop on our road was at a really cool place, where we had some lunch. There were picnic tables out on a patio with some nice umbrellas for shade (pasty says: I like that!). The place also had a pretty decent band playing so coupled with the wine this was really good. At this point, it was getting relatively late in the day and only one more winery remained on our tour. We only had about 30 minutes to burn here so after many tastings, we were all business at this point. It was taste, choose, repeat as quickly as we possibly could. Needless to say, we weren’t too eager for a second 2.5 hour train ride back at this point. Now, we were doing just fine at this point, and really the only sensible thing to do was keep it going. We spotted a group of folks drinking something out of red solo cups, so I was happy to bum a couple of empty cups off of them. Long story short, only 2 of the 3 bottles of wine we purchased made it back to the city with wine in them. We however, had plenty in us, and as a result our evening was over after a slice of pizza.