Winemaker Eric Fry, of Lenz Winery, a 28-year-old veteran of the North Fork.   (Photo: Ofer Wolberger)

Lynne, the oenophile co-CEO of New Line Cinema, bought Bedell in 2000 for a cool $5 million, along with another landmark North Fork winery, Corey Creek, for which he paid $2 million in 1999. Peggy Lauber, the original owner of Corey Creek, recalls that it was Lynne who enabled both Corey Creek and Bedell to buy modern equipment: “We never had a proper winery until Michael put in the money. He wasn’t out to make a cash killing on these domains.”

Others, however, have been very interested in the cash. In the same year, 1999, Peconic Bay Winery was sold to Manhattan UBS investment consultant Paul Lowerre for $2 million, and a consortium of Chilean investors snapped up Laurel Lake Vineyards for $2.7 million, the first foreign capital to enter the scene. In 2000, telecommunications tycoon Vincent Galluccio bought Gristina Vineyards for $5.2 million and hired French guru Michel Rolland to make more “international” wines. The Entenmann cake empire now owns Martha Clara Vineyards—a $4 million tasting room is being completed—while Leslie Alexander, owner of the Houston Rockets, has laid out $1.5 million for a new venture in Cutchogue. Raphael, with its ostentatious $6 million, 15,000-square-foot facility, is owned by Long Island’s Petrocelli Construction. Such lavish public facilities are a lesson learned from Napa—this is where easy money can be made. For many wineries, 60 percent of their revenue comes from their tasting rooms.

Nineteen-ninety-three was the annus mirabilis for the North Fork, the first great Long Island vintage. As wine critic Gerald Asher noted, “The unique character of North Fork wines came together in 1993 in ways that will be of lasting consequence for this newest of American wine regions.” A ’93 Bedell I tasted is opulent and aromatic, perhaps reflecting the technical influence of Bordeaux winemakers like Paul Pontallier of Châteaux Margaux and May de Lencquesaing of Château Pichon-Longueville, who first visited Long Island in the late eighties (Pontallier is now a consultant at Raphael).

In many ways, however, the rejuvena-ted Bedell is Lynne’s creation, the incarnation of a sensitive outsider’s money. The potato farm–cum–winery is now a hip tourist installation, with a formidable tasting room accented in black and finished in minimal style; Arte Italica culinary wares are for sale, along with Riedel stems with the Bedell logo and Martha Stewart–y oddities like Corey Creek chocolate-Merlot sauce. The walls boast Wine Spectator awards and plaques from the New York Wine Experience. Both here and in the guesthouse, one stumbles across items from Lynne’s superb collection of modern art, pieces by Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, and Sarah Morris (Lynne is on the board of MoMA). The cottage itself has a huge Barbara Kruger photo adorning the kitchen—a woman laughing (or is it screaming?).

“I looked everywhere for a vineyard,” Lynne said on his way to Cannes in May, “Italy, California, France. But I’m a New Yorker and I wanted something close to the city. A friend took me out to the North Fork, and I was amazed by what I saw. And the wines we’re making are trying to gravitate towards France, not California.”

But aren’t new owners like him transforming the North Fork in very Californian, new-money ways? I asked. “Not necessarily,” he said. “There’s been a lot of change of ownership over the last seven years or so, it’s true. But what that’s meant is the inflow of investments, which the original owners simply couldn’t afford. A lot less wine, but higher in quality. For the first time, Long Island is set to be a global wine power, if you’ll forgive the phrase.”

Louisa Hargrave lives today in a pretty farmhouse near Jamesport. Now divorced and somewhat removed from the wine business, she still quivers with its rarefied passions. With her slender frame and short blonde hair, she emanates a regal glamour and an acid intelligence.

Back in the seventies, Hargrave was splendidly countercultural—the newsletters she put out were dated from the winery’s founding like documents of the French Revolution, so that 1981, for example, was “Year Nine of the Noble Vine on Long Island.” A whiff of Utopia was in the air. “At first,” Louisa wrote in her 2003 memoir The Vineyard, “we thought of ourselves more as poets than as pioneers.” They thought of themselves, too, as a farming frontier resisting the juggernaut of suburban development.

“People say that Long Island has finally figured out how to make wine,” she says now. “Well, that’s crap. The wines were always good here. Aging is the critical issue—these wines have to age like any others—but the economics now make aging impossible. We’re living in an instant-gratification economy. Long Island is judged, wrongly, on the basis of these really young wines.” (Louisa gave me an interesting parting gift—some rare old wines of hers from the eighties, which I later drank with friends in the city. A 1980 Cabernet was one of the best American wines I have ever drunk. Nobody at the party I brought it to could guess where it was from, though all thought it was French.)

In 1999, the Hargraves sold out to an Italian prince, one Marco Borghese. The original Hargrave Vineyard in Cutchogue, imposingly renamed Castello di Borghese, cost the prince a handsome $4 million. The wines now made there have little to do with those made by Hargrave. “Wine is like cheese, namely a kind of game with bacteria,” she says. “It’s a tight-rope between complexity and disaster. In wine, you’re provoking bacteria to eat acids. But you’re playing with fire. It’s like sex, too: You accept the rancid, sweating human body in all its mystery.” Such wines, in other words, are sometimes flawed but always alive.

Industrial winemaking has a horror of all this. Its financial models abhor any suggestion of uncertainty, unpredictability, or—gasp!—the occasional corked bottle. So obsessed with technical perfection have Napa wineries become that they seem to be breeding strange fermented drinks for consumption at trade shows and competitions rather than wines destined for the mouths of mere mortals.