Mary Ginsburg of Clovis Point at the LIMA table

Throughout the holiday season, I have found myself thinking back to harvest…or rather, HARVEST-the event the Long Island Merlot Alliance organized, in September. As event director, I had a birds-eye view of the participation of wineries, restaurants, our event partners (East End Hospice, the Peconic Land Trust and Long Island Wine Council), the many businesses that came on board as sponsors, advertisers and auction contributors, and the individuals who comprised the event Steering Committee, formed our corps of volunteers, and purchased tickets and attended the event. Time and again, I was moved by people’s willingness to give-whether it was their time, talents or monetary contributions. The generosity of all who got behind this first-annual event was nothing short of amazing.

I have heard more than once that first-year fundraisers often don’t succeed in raising funds for the charities they are to benefit. I’m certain it’s not for lack of trying, but for the sheer, massive effort of getting events like this off the ground. But thanks to the outpouring of support from our community, we were able to raise $60,000 for our two charity beneficiaries. I’m so proud of what we-all of us, together-were able to accomplish.

The spirit of giving is alive and thriving on Long Island-and not just during the holidays! On behalf of the Merlot Alliance and all who took part in this landmark event, thank you and seasons greetings. We look forward to another successful HARVEST in the new year! –Donnell

The April 27 edition of the Wine Advocate includes David Schildknecht’s review, “Long Island Wine: No Longer a Long Shot.” He names our 2007 vintage ”the new benchmark,” unseating 2005. And he gives highest marks to our region’s merlot.

Mr. Schildknecht’s tasting reveals a region, “the quality of [whose] best wines…is impressive—and steadily improving.” Indeed, of the 50 Long Island wines he rates, none receives a score lower than 89. And of the top five—all rated 92—four are varietal merlots.

Mr. Schildknecht writes that “the region’s most prominent and obvious successes have been with reds from the Bordelaise grape varieties-with which it is possible here to achieve wines of more tender and forward fruit than that of classic Bordeaux, yet with lower alcohol and slighter frame than characterize New World regions like California.” He adds that, “among the Bordelaise black grapes, Merlot and Cabernet Franc remain manifestly Long Island’s most successful.”

The article is posted online (see links to individual articles on the edition’s main page), but access requires a Wine Advocate subscription. If you’re a fan of Long Island wine, and particularly Long Island merlot, you might consider rewarding the magazine’s good taste and subscribe! Thanks to David Schildknecht for the kind words.

Ever since moving to the East End of Long Island, I drink only local wine. It’s a professional choice, but one that rewards me in many ways. The local wines sing with the local produce, fish and cheeses, proving “what grows together goes together.” But Long Island wines also have a unique tendency to improve, not only in the bottle in my cellar, but on my kitchen counter. Open a bottle of Long Island merlot, and it’ll be reliably good-especially with food. But three days, even five days later, it’ll be amazing.

Having gotten used to this phenomenon, I had forgotten the days when, living in the city, I’d avoid ordering wine by the glass at any but the best wine bars or wine-focused restaurants. The danger of getting a glass from a stale bottle was just too great. But recently, someone gave me a bottle of a red wine from another well-known wine region (I’m being deliberately vague). Upon opening it, the first glass was delicious. The next day, it was so appalling I poured the rest of the bottle down the drain.

What does this say about our wines? More than anything, it indicates their age-worthiness. “One day open is roughly equivalent to a year in the cellar,” some winemakers say, though it seems perhaps the oxidation process gains momentum in the open bottle, compounding the effects of air and time. But as a concept that makes sense. Our wines are built for cellaring.

And it isn’t just the reds. Louisa Hargrave, an honorary member of the Merlot Alliance, recently wrote about this aspect of Long Island white wines in her column in the Suffolk Times: “Age-worthy whites are worth the wait.” Quoting Ann Marie Borghese, owner of Castello di Borghese, from a conversation at a LIMA meeting, she writes: “‘Sometimes I’ll open a new bottle for a customer,’ she said, ‘and let them compare it with another bottle of the same wine that was opened the day before. The fresh bottle does show more fruit, but the opened bottle is more complex and interesting.’” Louisa adds that, “This experience could not be duplicated with the wines from every region. Hotter climates produce bigger wines, but those wines are also less stable, and fade faster over time. It’s wine from cool climates, like the Rheingau, Burgundy and (yes) Long Island, that have the best change of improving over time.”

If you haven’t already, test it yourself. Open a Long Island merlot (or other varietal) and try I tonight, the next night and the night after that. Or decant it, and let it sit for a few hours. You’ll find it just keeps on giving.
-Donnell

To pull or not to pull? That is the question.

The Long Island Merlot Alliance was established as a quality alliance. Through the sale of Merliance, we fund research into what it takes to make quality merlot. Our research has included the taste and aroma profiling referenced in earlier blog posts, as well as field trials designed to understand what it takes to improve quality right from the vine. We have, for three years running, commissioned a leaf-pulling study with Cornell’s Long Island Horticultural Research and Extension Center in Riverhead. The study, which had to be suspended in 2009 due to the unusual growing conditions, has begun to yield interesting results. I talked with Rich Olsen-Harbich, winemaker at Raphael, who annually leads the study on the LIMA side, to learn how leaf-pulling can lead to better-quality merlot.

Donnell: First of all, why does leaf-pulling matter?
Rich: We need leaves for carbohydrate (sugar) production but we don’t need all of them—just like we don’t need all of the fruit a vine will want to produce. Removing leaves allows sunlight to penetrate the canopy of the vines to help the grapes get riper. It also allows summer breezes to help keep fruit dry and reduce the incidence of mildew and other fruit rots. It’s important to practice this sort of viticulture in the northeast since we often lack sun and heat. The vines can use all the help they can get. 

D: Isn’t this Viticulture 101 stuff? I mean, leaf-pulling seems like one of the routine things vineyards do. Why make a study of it?
R: You would think so, but not all vineyards pull leaves. Many do, but may not be getting the timing right. Leaf-pulling is one of the reasons the wines from Long Island are so much better today than they were, say, 20 years ago when it was not as common. As with any practice, even if it seems to be working, it’s good to look at it from a scientific standpoint, see its cause and effect, and make sure you’re getting the most benefit from your labors.

D: Can you give a brief overview of LIMA ’s leaf-pulling trials?
R: The trials were done with the help of Alice Wise and Libby Tarleton from the Cornell Research Center in Riverhead. We utilized the Pellegrini South Harbor Vineyard as the location for the study. A Cornell protocol laid out three different levels of leaf-pulling, based on the percentage of the leaves present, as well as a control (no leaves pulled). We pulled leaves at these levels at three different times in the growing season-early, middle and late-at four plots within the vineyard. Wine was made from each trial (four wines in all) and LIMA members did the first formal tastings of these wines this past summer.

D: What were the results?
R: The wines were from the 2007 vintage, so of course they were actually all pretty good! We did see some riper flavors, though, with an earlier removal of leaves. I think the results of the 2008 trial will be a little more interesting since it was a more challenging year.

D: What do these results mean in laymen’s terms?
R: We can make better wine if we remove leaves earlier in the season rather than later in the summer or fall. The more time the fruit is exposed, the riper it will get.

D: What do you do with the results? Publish them to LIMA members? Do LIMA members apply them to their own plots of merlot?
R: We hope to get the actual numbers [technical data] up on the website soon to share with the industry. We’ve also supported the work of a Cornell grad student, who looked at the same trial with cabernet franc. His results were presented at the Long Island Agriculture Forum a few weeks ago, and were very similar to our findings for merlot.

D: Will LIMA continue the leaf-pulling research or focus on another aspect of improving quality for Long Island merlot?
R: We’d like to fund this project for at least one more year to make sure our results are consistent and statistically significant. Last year we began a three-year study on the effects of crop load on flavor composition. I think many of us also would like to delve deeper into the question of what makes Long Island merlot special. Not only identifying the flavor characteristics of our local merlots, as we have been, but isolating the reason those flavors express themselves as they do here. Our research is taking our vineyards to the next level. I have no doubt that this and other work being done around Long Island will help us to keep making better and better wines in the future.

Barrel samples

If you’re familiar with the Long Island Merlot Alliance, you know we make a cooperative blend of 100% merlot called Merliance, the sale of which we use to fund our research and quality efforts. Each member-winery contributes two barrels of finished wine to make Merliance, which is blended and barrel-aged for about a year before it’s bottled and sold.

How does this work, exactly? What wines go into the blend? If it’s all 100% merlot, do different lots make that big of a difference? And how can seven winemakers make one wine? On Thursday, January 21, I witnessed this collaborative process in action, as the group got together to make the 2008 blend. Here’s what happens:

Each winemaker brings up to three barrel samples of his vineyard’s (or vineyards’) 2008 merlot for all LIMA winemakers to taste. As the samples are poured and the group begins to taste through them, each winemaker shares details about what he’s brought–details he clearly knows intimately and by heart about the product of his labor. The winemakers relate the kind of barrels the wines are aging in: new (e.g., coopered in 2008 and more recently) or older barrels, made from French (they question one another about which forest the wood comes from), American (one lot was made in Virginian casks) or Hungarian oak, or stainless steel tanks. The clone (or variety) of merlot (of which there are many), or blends of these, from which the wine is made. And the vineyard plots where the grapes were grown. 

Does this data really matter? Yes! As you might guess, newer oak barrels impart more woody characteristics to the wine–tastes and aromas of vanilla or tobacco, for example–while the stainless steel lets the fruit shine through; older oak barrels are somewhere in between. What you may not know is that different merlot clones can have subtle but perceptible differences in taste (think of the many varieties of apples and their range of flavors). And different plots of land may get more or less sun, irrigation and drainage, exposure to birds, bugs and wind than others; these variations can affect ripening and thus the character of the fruit.

Russell Hearn blends samples to create the 2008 Merliance

So, we taste through all these samples and make notes about the qualities of each wine. Then, like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together, we (or rather the winemakers) decide which lots work best together, sometimes choosing two different barrels from one vineyard, to create a wine that best represents the taste and aroma profile of Long Island merlot. (See earlier posts on our ongoing research in this area.) Working from the consensus of possible combinations, one of the winemakers–Pellegrini’s Russell Hearn took the honors this year–concocts the blend right there, in a blending beaker, for all to taste and approve. And voila, a blend is born!

And so, the 2008 vintage of Merliance is on its way. It will age for a year in the barrels the original wine was made in, bottled in early 2011 and released that Spring. Judging from what we tasted last week, it’ll be well worth the wait.
-Donnell

John Leo (left) and Donnell Brown lead Finger Lakes trade and media through a blind-tasting of Long Island merlots.

On December 4-5, the Long Island Merlot Alliance took our show on the road. Clovis Point winemaker John Leo and I (Donnell Brown, executive director, LIMA) traveled to Canandaigua for our “Music & Merlot” event at the beautiful New York Wine & Culinary Center (NYWCC). Through a number of events-a trade/media tasting, “Celebration of Long Island Merlot” dinner, food-and-wine-pairing classes, and a daylong consumer tasting-we introduced more than 200 people to our merlots.

As you might imagine, a lot of the people we met there had never had merlot-or any wine, for that matter-from Long Island. Some even admitted they’d never even heard that we make wine here. (I assured them that, for a few years after I’d moved to New York, I didn’t know either.) So it was exciting to expose people to a new world of wines they might not have otherwise tried.

I’m happy to report that, across all the reactions I saw firsthand, people loved our elegant, food-friendly merlots. We shared examples from each LIMA member, as well as our current-release cooperative blend, 2006 Merliance. Each wine was someone’s favorite. (Note: For anyone reading who lives near the NYWCC, all these wines are still available for sale in the restaurant and tasting room there.)

Many thanks to all who came to our “Music & Merlot” event, to John Leo for sharing his wealth of wine knowledge, and to the Center’s inimitable Shannon Brock, who invited us to partner with the NYWCC for this terrific event and left no detail undone. She and the rest of the NYWCC are knowledgeable, passionate advocates for New York’s wine and culinary concerns. If you get the chance to go, GO!