Louisa Hargrove, the North Fork wine pioneer, who sold to an Italian prince.   (Photo: Ofer Wolberger)

Although wine writers often describe these dueling models as New World and Old World (opposing, say, California and France), Fry refers to them as the Bordeaux and Burgundy models. Put simply, they represent differing approaches to fermentation. In Bordeaux, the estates are huge and production is on a large scale. Efficiency, therefore, is a prime consideration. Grapes are hurried through a first alcoholic fermentation for about three days. During this period, the juice is often moved from tank to tank and racked—that is, purified. It’s then put into steel tanks for a second fermentation, known as malolactic. In this fermentation, bitter malic acid (like that found in green apples) is split up by bacteria into softer lactic acids (like those found in yogurt). This will last about three to four days. The proto-wine is then barreled for aging.

This Bordeaux method ensures both a clean wine and a quick fermentation turnaround, ideal for wineries with thousands of barrels to process. But in Burgundy, it is very different. There, estates are small and production limited. A winemaker can supervise a smattering of barrels in his cellar with a personal care impossible in a larger winery. Fermentation can be much longer, more nuanced. A Burgundy malolactic fermentation can last months—traditionally from autumn until the following spring—during which time the winemaker tinkers, nudges, cajoles his wines. It’s the method that Fry has adopted at Lenz because, as he sees it, it gives his wine more detail, more authenticity. It’s called “reductive winemaking.”

“Smaller quantities, more complex fermentation,” says Fry. “What’s weird in Long Island is that we’re applying a Burgundian method to Bordeaux grape varietals like Merlot. But it gives our wines that distinctly complex, mushroomy funkiness that the French call sous-bois.”

When I visit Charles Massoud the following day at Paumanok, he confirms that his methods are also Burgundian. As we drink a glass of his excellent dry Riesling, which has appeared on the list at Alain Ducasse, Massoud admits that making this kind of wine is not a good business model. “It’s the fanatic’s route, if you will,” he says. “A way of life that is beyond money.”

This costly method does, however, enable Massoud to price his wines as elite products. His top Todd Hills Lane Cabernet rose from an initial $22 a bottle to a staggering $109 because of furious demand. A magnum of it has reputedly sold for $380. “It’s a question of supply,” explains Massoud. “I can sell 50 cases at any price I want. But 500 cases . . . I cannot be so cavalier. The market is much more difficult now for expensive wines.”

'We’re not at the point where we can ask $100 a bottle. That day may come—if the Big Apple starts drinking it seriously. But we’re cheap compared to Mondavi!’

Price is a vexing issue for every winemaker. At Lenz, Fry let me taste his top Merlots, which retail for $55 a bottle—relatively cheap by global standards, but in some perverse way perhaps not expensive enough for the New York power-restaurant scene. Wine is a fetish commodity, and its prices have little to do with objective notions of quality. “This is a great wine, in my opinion,” Fry says, raising one of his pipettes and looking at the ruby liquid trapped within. “But we’re not at the point where we can ask $100 a bottle. That day may come—if the Big Apple starts drinking it seriously. But we’re cheap compared to Mondavi!”

Working the other side of the street from Paumanok and Lenz are mass-production wineries like Pindar, Duck Walk (one of three vineyards on the South Fork), and Martha Clara, whose technically clean industrial wines are huge commercial successes. Pindar reportedly imports tankers of Californian wine to supplement its production and thrusts thousands of $7.99 bottles with names like Spring Splendor and Summer Blush onto a market infatuated with gimmicks like California’s Two Buck Chuck. Pindar’s owner, Herodotus “Dan” Damianos, a doctor who made his fortune in nursing homes, may well be Long Island’s most successful wine entrepreneur, his tasting room packed with bargain-hunting tourists.

A good deal of Long Island wine comes from a single place, the Premium Wine Group’s custom crush facility in Mattituck. With almost 100 fermentation tanks processing hundreds of tons of grapes per harvest, the plant can be used by any winemaker who doesn’t have the facilities himself or the capacity to mass-produce. It’s used by Martha Clara, Lieb Family Cellars, and Sherwood House Vineyards, among others.

Wines like this used to define Long Island in many people’s minds, and while they are now being somewhat eclipsed by the more serious artisanal producers, they’re still a far better business.

The vine life attracts a good share of idiosyncratic dreamers, and among them on the North Fork is Joe Macari Jr. A Queens native, he has grown up to be a fierce advocate of radical organic agriculture and its applications in winemaking.

The Macari family, which owes its fortune to the real-estate and construction business in Jackson Heights, has been on the North Fork since Joe’s father bought land there in the sixties. Their first idea was a golf resort, but that was blocked, and years later, when the bankrupt Mattituck Hills Winery was put up for sale, the Macaris bought it.

Today, the Macari estate is both huge and magnificent, gracefully abutting Long Island Sound. It is there that Joe Jr. lovingly practices “biodynamics,” a mystical form of organic farming that uses astrology, dousing, and other alternative techniques to supplement a pesticide-free method of creating harmonious ecosystems. In the wine world, it has been made glamorous by star producers in France like the Loire’s Nicolas Joly, but Macari has struggled to pull it off on such a grand scale.