At Bedell Cellars, testing young wines right from the barrels and moving on to finished wines in their bottles, and partaking of a Mediterranean inspired lunch in an haute style farmhouse
Long Island: Bedell Sampling
The vineyards stretch north across a gentle slope, thyme creeps between the flagstones of the terrace, and spiked lavender lines the walks around winery. The old farmhouse is impeccably restored and decorated by a noted interior designer. The Mediterranean influenced food at lunch is a perfect presentation, the correct complement for tasting a number of wines produced here on the property. It could be Napa or Sonoma, the southwest of France, or any eminent wine region in the world, but it is Cutchogue.
I was visiting Bedell Cellars—generally acknowledged to be in the top tier of Long Island wineries. Seriousness of purpose and dedication to quality have enabled Bedell to produce several quite ambitious red wines as well as some good, moderately priced everyday reds and whites—and in the process to establish an enviable reputation. My goal was to get a comprehensive picture, a sense of who they are and where they are heading, to see the fields of vines, to examine the production facilities—and of course to sample the wines.
Summer, a busy season for the tasting and sales rooms of wineries, is a slower period in creating the wines. The winemakers wait, testing and tasting, and caring for the wines fermenting and maturing in their cellars, while this season’s grapes grow and ripen in the vineyard. Later in the season, the harvest will take place, and during the winter months the vines are carefully pruned. So early summer is a good time to leisurely look over a winery and talk with the winemaker.
My host was Kip Bedell, who planted his first vines in 1970 and who sold the property to Michael Lynn of East Hampton three years ago, but continues as winemaker. Peggy Lauber, who is in charge of sales and marketing for Bedell, joined us. Mr. Bedell is sometimes called Mr. Merlot. I do not want to be an iconoclast and destroy legends, but I must say right off that over several years I have found his cabernet sauvignon as impressive as his merlot, and both are memorable.
As we looked at the winemaking facilities we sampled some wines in their barrels. This is a very different experience than drinking a finished and bottled wine. From my point of view as a wine consumer I could easily discern the different grapes and certain differences in richness and flavor. I suspect however that a winemaker’s trained palate can detect the potential of each young wine and mentally begin piecing together some future blend of the barrels.
At lunch, instead of the nascent product, I had the opportunity to taste the final winemaking results of previous years. The whites, produced under their Cory Creek label, included a 2001 rosé, selling for $12 at the winery, a 2001gewürztraminer, selling for $15, and a 2000 chardonnay, priced at $14. All had clear, distinctive tastes, reflecting their predominant grape and composition, and the only question in my mind was which of those tastes might suit my mood and food on another occasion.
We opened two interesting reds: a 1999 C-Block South Merlot, prosaically named after the two acre plot where these grapes were grown, and a 1999 Bedell Cupola, a Bordeaux style blend of cabernet sauvignon with several other grapes, both selling for $27.50. Both were rich and tasty, each expressing different fruits and fragrances. This was not a comparative tasting in any sense, and I was not attempting to measure these wines against any impartial standard. I was looking at overall quality, subjectively, and I was very pleased.
The intriguing surprise for me was a bottle of 1993 merlot from their library. It had matured to become a captivating wine, lively, elegant and substantial in the mouth, and fascinating now in my memory. It provoked a discussion of the capacity of Long Island wines to be cellared and to mature over the years, something I will expand on in next week’s column.
