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