More Wine on the South Shore

Lost in Southampton

Friday, Sept. 8

I’m either very relaxed—perhaps soothed by the ions in the sea air—or I’m coming down with something. I can never tell the difference.

I rode one of Bryan’s bicycles yesterday. Don’t know how far I went—50 miles easy, maybe a hundred. I went out past the hospital. It, too, has a huge hedge, I guess to protect the identities of the sick. Everybody is supposed to be rich here, so they have to protect their identities. It’s a rule written somewhere.

The hospital hedge is a few yards from the site of the original town, where the religious dissidents (what else?) from Massachusetts built dugouts to live in while they made more permanent dwellings. It conjures up a strange picture—guys in Pilgrim hats and buckle shoes living like Hobbits.

Some firemen were setting up camp near Cooper’s Beach. More than a dozen trailers were parked in the lot by the dunes and across the road more firemen were pitching tents. It may be an outing of volunteer firefighters. I saw a few trucks with different town names on them.

I could hear them blasting their sirens this morning, so there may have been a parade.

The tide and the surf were high. The cloud cover had thinned, so everything—sky, water, foam, sand—had a silver cast.

I rode some distance farther along the dunes until I got tired and came back.

I seem to recall sitting in deck chair for—I don’t know—five minutes or ten days watching birds fight over plots of grass by the pool. I didn’t do anything, not even drink a beer, that whole time.

I took Joanna out to see the surf. The waves looked like they were breaking just about at eye level. At one point the end of a wave came up onto the beach and didn’t stop. I was wearing the only pair of shoes I packed, so I was racing to keep my feet dry.

Joanna had the foresight to take her shoes off. That’s why she’s pointing with her sandals.  

The surf tends to be high here. We were sitting in the house at night and Joanna asked if I could hear the ocean. I thought the noise was from trucks going by on the main road a block or so from the house. Not so. It was from the surf, which could be a quarter mile away from us.

Some brave souls yesterday morning were out in the waves. All you could see were a couple of heads bobbing up and down.

After lunch, we visited the tasting room of the Wolffer Estates Winery, which is just a little farther east of here than Channing Daughters. When we got there, a man was using a forklift to load plastic containers onto a truck. I think they were shipping wine in bulk.

Turns out, they serve food there, and we could have had lunch with the wine. But we didn’t know that at the time.

We split one flight of wines. it started with a sparkling wine, “brut” because it was dry, and “blanc des blancs,” we were told because it was made only from chardonnay grapes. It had a sweet edge, like Prosecco and Asti spumante, the Italian sparkling wines that I know. That’s because the climates of Italy and Long Island are warmer than that of Champagne, where the flavor of the wine is drier. I do not know this. I am only repeating what I remember.

The second wine was a still chardonnay, a little sweeter than I expected, but also better. I don’t know if it’s a quirk of my tongue or if anybody else gets this, but one of the reasons I stay away from chardonnay and chablis is that when they go down they have a musty, sour, almost moldy aftertaste. I find them good with a few things that kill that effect—chardonnay with Thanksgiving dinner, for instance—but generally I prefer reds. The Wolffer chardonnay had none of that. It was very good all the way through.

There was a red that had been aged, if I heard right, about 15 years. I can’t swear to that. 

The last was an ice wine. They pick the grapes late, and because they can’t count on a natural frost in time, they freeze the grapes after they are picked and then crush them. This one was definitely sweet. According to the lady who served us, it would be good with a piece of hard cheese after a meal, but not with chocolate cake. The red would be good for that. This last bit I knew, because I often have red wine with chocolate.

The cheapest bottle of Wolffer wine is $37, and it goes up to at least $195. That’s a little rich for my blood. I can buy classics like Barbaresco and Chateauneuf du Pape for less than that, so I decided to pass.

Yesterday morning, when we stopped at the library to get directions to Wolffer, I discovered there is WiFi there, besides the desktop computers connected to the Internet. I went back there to send yesterday’s e-mail and stopped at a restaurant called Tuscan House to make reservations for dinner. It was Friday night, and I have no idea how busy the town’s restaurants get on weekends this time of year. 

I have to say, though, in case anybody comes this way, that Tuscan House is overpriced. We shared an entrée—spaghettini alla puttanesca. It is a tomato sauce with green and black olives, capers, and “a hint of anchovies.” The green olives were very salty and there were at least twice as many as there should have been.  I know we’re near the ocean, but the salt should not have been that overpowering. I couldn’t finish my half.

Joanna’s version of this sauce is far better—lighter on the tomatoes, more anchovies, and very judicious application of olives and capers.

The wine, however, was very good, a Sangiovese, a pinot noir, and a Chianti. They cut some of the salt.

Joanna had packed some beach towels in the trunk of the car, so we went back to Cooper’s Beach, where the firemen were. You can smell the ocean before you see it: Salt air and something like fresh clams on the half shell. In the dark, all you can make out is the white lines where the waves are breaking.

The sky had cleared, so we spread the towels on the sand and lay down to look at the stars. Remembering the morning’s shoe episode, I made sure we were well up the beach.

There were a couple of flood lights trained on the sand. the cafe was closed but maybe the lights were on so no firemen would get lost or fall in.

The light was strong enough that we couldn’t see the Milky Way. Even so, there were so many stars, that I was lying on my back trying to find one of the two constellations I know, Orion’s belt and the big dipper, but had no success. 

Same when we returned to Bryan’s backyard, where it was even darker.

I almost fell asleep on the beach. As I say, I’m either relaxed or coming down with something.

Saturday, Sept. 9:

We decided to come home today.

First we went to the art museum, but it was closed. They probably don't have an exhibition right now.

So we said hello to the heads of the 19 Caesars in the yard next to the museum, bought an ice cream cone, walked on Job's Lane and Main Street, and headed home.

We left around three, so we missed the tornadoes. We had stopped for gas in Clifton and just as I was getting back into the car, the wind hit and I got a spray of rain in the face. 

That was it. All that downpour and I didn't get rained on, except a little when I ran into the house.

It was great being home again, eating my own meat sauce, getting mildly buzzed on red wine, watching season three of "The Tudors" on Netflix. One of the joys of going away is that you enjoy coming back, too.

Unless something really weird happens close to home, the next dispatch should be from Hong Kong in a few weeks.

Sept. 9

Dear Harry,

Happy you enjoyed where I spent my summers until I was 18. I have very fond memories of the east end of Long Island.

I would love Joanna's recipe for puttanesca! Sounds perfect!

Love,

Anna

Wines on the South Shore

Greetings from downtown Southampton

Sept. 7

I’m sitting on Bryan’s back porch in Southampton on Friday morning. The yard is surrounded by a hedge and a fence because there is a pool here. But this isn’t one of the towering Hamptons privet hedges. This one consists of what appear to be cedars or junipers and rhododendron with trumpet vines and roses climbing through them.

We left Montclair yesterday morning, and since it was any day but Sunday, we took the long way around—the George Washington Bridge, Cross Bronx Expressway, Throgs Neck Bridge, and the Cross Island Parkway to the Long Island Expressway.

If we had taken the shortcut through midtown, we likely would still be waiting for a light on 34th Street.

The ride is fun. It takes you though the Pine Barrens, and then near the end, through the Shinnecock Indian Reservation. In a stretch of less than a mile, there is a souvenir store, a luncheonette, and about a dozen stores selling tax-free cigarettes.

One of the cigarette stores is called Smokin’ Arrows. No fooling. I wonder if there isn’t some underlying hostility there.

After all, these fellows’ distant cousins killed one of my distant cousins, Anne Hutchinson, during King Philip’s War in the 1600s. Anyhow, this time we crossed the res and weren’t captured.

We rolled into the driveway about one and a short while later headed out to the Southampton Publick House, which brews its own beer. The Secret Ale is a German-style altbier, lighter than I expected but fine for lunch.

Besides, I didn’t want to ruin my palate for what came next.

We had made a brief stop at the local library to access the internet. The Channing Daughters Winery had been written up in a magazine article that Joanna clipped. The byline was Baroness something or other. I trust that this is the pen name of somebody from Passaic named Sally Smith or something. It would be very sad to think anyone who was a real baroness had to sign her name that way.

Turns out Channing Daughters is just east of Southampton. It’s in Bridgehamptom. Everything for a long ways out here is a Hampton of some kind. Come to think of it, though, I didn’t see a Hampton Inn, but surely they must have one or two at least.

When you get to the winery, you drive down a gravel road through the vineyard. White grapes on one side, purple on the other. The grounds are dotted with curious but very witty carvings.

The bartender in the tasting room told us that the place is owned by Walter Channing, who started growing grapes in the 1980s to make wine for himself. It later became a business, which is run by other people. Walter does the carvings. There is even a sculpture garden—a large meadow with various strange figures, some worked more than others.

The symbol of the winery is an overturned tree. It goes back to the early days of the winery, when a tree was uprooted by a hurricane and landed upside down on some kind of large tripod that may have been a long-abandoned farm-related structure. Maybe it held the wind-driven pump, or that’s where they tethered the unruly cows. I don’t know.

Some of the figures made me feel that I had wandered onto the set of “Fantasia,” but of course “Fantasia” didn’t have a set because it was a cartoon, so the thought was unsettling and made my head hurt.

The tasting costs ten bucks to sample six wines. There were three whites. the most intense was the first one, called Sylvanus, named for the Green Man, the Roman god of the forest. It was one of the most flavorful white wines I ever tasted and was a lot of fun. Sylvanus is a field blend of Muscat, pinot grigio, and pinot bianco. Of course, I don’t know what that all means, but we were told that “field blend” refers to the way the grapes are treated. They are collected together from the field and treated as one type of grape. 

Many wine blends, apparently, are fermented separately and mixed later. There may be other ways, too, but I didn’t get it all. There’s probably some cool stuff I’m leaving out, but if there is, Larry may be able to fill us in.

Sylvanus overpowered the second white wine, a pinot grigio, which in turn overpowered a tocai Friulano--something I’d never had before. It tasted all right, but more in line with the light fruity taste that I expect from most whites.

A man came in later and asked if the winery had a Riesling. It didn’t, but the bartender offered the  man a sample of the pinot grigio. He bought two bottles.

Then we had three that weren’t on the menu. Two were called orange wines because they were in fact orange. They get that way because they are made of white grapes, and the skins and seeds are left in the mashed pulp for a while.

One smelled familiar. The bartender said “lychee” and both Joanna and I said “yes.”

It was strange—lychee-flavored wine. The second orange wine smelled and tasted like the orange rusk in Grand Marnier.

Then we had a red called Over and Over. This is like sour mash. Some of the wine of one year’s vintage is reserved and added to the fermenting grapes of the next year’s. Each year some of the old wine is added to the new. I think this is the one that went down with an aftertaste like good whiskey.

I once read about a Eucharistic tradition in the Middle East that goes something like that. Tradition has it that some of the dough that made the bread for the Last Supper was reserved and put into the dough for the next batch of bread. They kept doing that with each new batch of bread, so today’s bread still retains a small fragment of the original bread. I have no idea if there really is such a tradition. The writer could have made it up. I forget where I read it or who the writer was. Maybe a baroness. Maybe Sally Smith.

The wine menu had a rose made of cabernet sauvignon. This was pretty tasty, too. The description said strawberries, and maybe so. But not sweet at all.

Due Uve, another red, is made of syrah grapes with 16 percent merlot. This smelled and tasted kind of smoky.

Mudd was a red blend of five kinds of grapes. It got its name because some of the grapes came from a vineyard on the North Shore named after the Mudd family. The description says “aromas and flavors of black plums, cherries, brown spice, forest floor, black raspberries, black peppercorns, and cocoa.” What a mouthful. I think I caught what they mean by “forest floor” and a bit of the peppercorns.

Anyhow, I bought a bottle of that and the Sylvanus.

Today’s photo is a nose and pony tail study shot by Joanna. It’s Harry meets the vineyard.

The grape vines grow on frames in narrow rows and each row is covered by a huge hairnet. Maybe this keeps the birds out. It’s too low to have any effect on Luftwaffe dive bombers.

Somehow they get all the grapes to hang from the bottom of the vines. this arrangement, I am guessing, is the result of husbandry and is therefore unnatural. 

Next stop was the beach. The surf was loud and the tide coming in. Some of the breakers were so big that drops of spray hit us from more than 100 feet away. We may have stood on the beach for best part of two hours just to watch to foam get closer.

The horizon was hard to make out because the sky was gray and so was the water.

We wound up at a bistro in Southampton Village where we we sat at the bar to have an appetizer of smoked trout and some French onion soup. Also a cabernet sauvignon, a merlot, and a pinot noir, all from California and all very good.

I’m going out on the bicycle now, and will send this when I get a chance.

Everybody, be well.

Harry

Into the Other Virginia

Hi From Va.

Sept. 27

Harry’s playing Road Warrior again. I’m back in Tidewater Virginia.

Spent last night in North East, Md., in the same Best Western that I used at the end of June. Yes, I was allowed to go back.

They have cats there, by the way. Very mellow cats that sit outside the door with the smokers. One is a scruffy red cat and the other is bigger and mostly black. They just check you out as you walk by and don’t bother anybody, and nobody bothers them.

The motel registers pets for a $10 fee. I could see Maggie Velcro in there. She’d claw up the furniture for sport and then piss on the bed.

I met my sister Jamy and brother-in-law Bob at a place called Steak & Main, which is about three miles from the motel, on the main street of North East. I was thinking about walking to the place, but when I saw the highway, I thought again.

The place has a variety of steaks, as the name suggests, some terrific local taps, and best of all, oysters. I had a half dozen raw oysters followed by half a dozen oysters Rockefeller and then a half dozen more carbonara. I had an IPA. I forget the name of it, but it had a pirate head on the tap. I also had the house brand, Steak & Main pale ale, which is made in Baltimore. I followed that with a Flying Dog Octoberfest, which was good enough, but overshadowed by the ales. If I’d taken the Octoberfest first, I would have enjoyed it more.

The pirate-head IPA was best of the lot, very hoppy and full flavored. The pale was good.

The oysters were terrific. I read somewhere recently, probably on a website, that oysters are the No. 1 food for getting iron in your diet. Clams are second, and spinach is way down the list.

So at my age, I figure oysters aren’t an indulgence; they’re medicinal. Maybe I can take them as a medical deduction.

There is a sign near the bar that says if you can eat some godawful quantity of beef in an hour—36-ounce Delmonico, 16-ounce something else, 12-ounce New York strip, 8-ounce filet mignon (how did that get in there?), a total of 144 ounces—you could have it all free and a hundred dollars besides. If you lose, you pay $140 for the food.

There’s an episode of “Man Versus Food,” a Travel Channel gluttony program, in which the host tried to do that. I’ve seen maybe an episode and a half of that show, and I think I saw that one. Unless they use a steak challenge more than once on the same series.

I went back to the motel for a couple of beers more. This is a road trip, so I can pack beer in the trunk.

I’m in Hampton now, at the Candlewood Suites onButler Farm Road. This is a business trip and I have an event to attend in a little while. It’s an open house at an advanced computer lab, the Center for Advanced Engineering Environments at Old Dominion University. They have virtual reality setups, but the thing I want to try is a headset that reads brainwaves and lets you control a computer by thinking commands. I’ve seen it demonstrated in videos. Clearly, if I get to try it, you’ll hear more about that later.

On the way down I left I-95 to fill the tank at a town called Ladysmith, Va. I had some letters to mail and was hoping to find a post office so they might be postmarked Ladysmith, but had no luck.

So I got onto the Jefferson Davis Highway for a change of pace. To Floridians and Northerners, the road is U.S. 1.

Just south of Carmel Church, there is a historical marker titled “Lee and Grant.” I wasn’t able to read the sign, but guess they tangled near there. A few hundred yards south, there’s another marker about “Lafayette and Cornwallis.” You’ll notice that the local favorite comes first in both instances. But anyway, two different sets of big names facing off in less than 90 years. This must have been a very popular battleground.

I have to change out of my driving suit into my slightly less rumpled and newer event suit. Because this is technically a business trip, even though it’s after five in Amsterdam and in London, too, I can’t stop for a beer on the way. I have to behave. This lab is run by a friend of mine, Ahmed Noor, and some of the bigwigs expected to show are his bosses.

Bye for now.

Sept. 27

My father’s dream meal: a dozen oysters on the half shell, followed by oyster stew, followed by fried oysters. Dessert: lemon meringue pie.

Beatrice

Sept. 27

My son's take on cats: "They're not pets. They're small tigers. Just look at the way they look at you. They'd eat you in a second if they could."

Clearly, he's a dog fan.

Alan

Sept. 27

As someone who writes about computer stuff all the time, I think cats are hard-wired (not reprogrammable, i.e. not trainable) and dogs are soft-wired and therefore trainable.  Over the years we have had up to five cats at a time in the house and up to five dogs.

JackT

Sept. 27

Godless killing machines.

Karl

Sept. 27

The pirate head ale was Loose Cannon if you want to look for it again.

Happy trails.


Jamy

Brain Power and the High Blue Line

Sept. 28

I got to play with the brain power headset. It works.

There was lots of engineeringy stuff on display at the open house—high-def 3-D that lets you pick up and manipulate prototype objects, glasses that could show you a projection of a blueprint or a technical drawing while you’re working on the machine or whatever, and a huge 3–D simulation of an entire plant so you could show a technician where to go, what to expect, and what to do to fix something.

The headset was what I really drove 400 miles to see. Well, 250 miles. I drove the first 150 to have dinner with Jamy and Bob.

As we all know the course of true adventures never did run smooth. If it did, they wouldn’t be adventures. A grad student got up and demonstrated the headset. He was able to open Internet Explorer and make Google.com appear on the command line, just by thinking it.

When he’s done, my friend Ahmed Noor, who runs the lab, says to the group—about 12 people from different companies and the engineering school, some visiting profs, too—“Harry came all the way to try this. Come up here, Harry.”

So I get up in front of everybody and now there are two grad students trying to put the headset on me. There are 18 contact points, and in a diagram on the computer screen, they are all supposed to show green. Mine were all black.

They fiddled with it around my skull. Sometimes I’d get a few green lights; then the lights’d go black again. Finally, they figured out that I have too much hair. So they worked some electrodes under my front hair and put others on my forehead and behind my ears.

Bingo. I got 15 green lights. Out of 18, that’s not so bad, so we said it’s a go.

They open the program and right away, I’m trying to do something. Anything. Move, cursor. Open, Internet Explorer. Nothing doing.

They open another page and there’s a scanner graph on it, with lines going up and down in steps. “The blue line is your frustration line,” they said. This got me my first laugh because it was the highest of the three.

I said, “I know it’s high because I’ve been trying like hell to get that cursor to move.” They opened another window that said “mouse” and clicked a button on the screen. Now, wherever I looked on the screen the cursor was there. It was effortless, and a little freaky, too.

There’s something about giving commands that I didn’t get. Something about blink and maybe grit your teeth to show you mean it. As I say, I didn’t get that. But that’s all right. I know it takes practice.

That was pretty amazing, but then we went for the Holy Grail. At one point I had to clear my mind. Don’t think about anything, not even elephants. Maybe this was it.

Another page came up, this one with a list of commands. They clicked on “push.”

There was an image in a window on the page and in the center was a box floating in the air. They told me to think hard about pushing it. So I did. This time I was gritting my teeth, even leaning into it, but with my hands in my pockets.

Nothing happened. I wondered where my blue line was, because I couldn’t see the graph. It probably would have gotten me another laugh.

Then the screen changed a little. Turns out, this was how you train the headset to read your intentions. It was making a record of my “push” brain waves. A good record too. Because when I tried it this time, that box just started to travel away into space.

It was a strange sight when you realize you’re doing it just by thinking it. That is, unless there was some guy watching with a game controller and messing with my head.

But even then, the gag would be great.

Hampton and environs my be the only area in Virginia where you can’t get decent food. Even the Waffle House wasn’t that good.

I was lost for over an hour and couldn’t find a bar that served dinner. Or any place that served something other than fast food. This is a big military area, so it’s full of kids and McDonald’s.

I’d been here before so I packed my own beer in the trunk—a couple of bottles of Guinness Foreign Extra, which tastes more like a sweet English stout than a dry Irish one, and some Exit 4 American Trippel, a 9.5 percent ale by Flying Fish (not to be confused with Flying Dog) in Cherry Hill, N.J. Exit 4 is where you leave the Turnpike to get there.

I’ll definitely get more Exit 4—good hops, good bite, good kick.

I had one of each with (get this) pepperoni pizza from 7-Eleven. I don’t know how many 7-Elevens I saw. Not as thick as in Thailand, but close.

It was only after I had bought the pizza, along with yogurt and other stuff for breakfast, had gotten lost again, and gotten directions that I passed a Lone Star steakhouse. Nothing to write home about, but it’s better than 7-Eleven or McDonald’s for dinner, and they have beer. But I was too tired by that time, and anyway, I already had the pizza.

I left the Candlewood shortly before nine this morning and barreled home. I stopped once for gas in Maryland and that was it. Joanna was making chicken, and I needed to get back to the real world.

Thanks for your notes yesterday, everyone. When I get around to posting this on the travel blog, I’ll include them, including the choice observations about cats. They are all true.