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Dreams of a Napa by the Sound

Cruising around his property in a truck, we careered around the system of dirt tracks that connects the various plots of vineyard with the internal farms that breed longhorn cows or manufacture organic fertilizer and compost. We stopped near a strange-looking tower.

“That’s an Irish energy tower over there,” he explained. “It brings in cosmic energy to nourish the soil.”

A little farther on, we stopped by some beehives, for “bringing back the bees to the land.” Macari also grows nettles, from which he makes tea, and imports dead fish from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to make his stupendous compost heaps.

Joe beamed with pride when he opened one of his wines, a $65 bottle of Merlot called Alexandra. The biodynamic wine tasted, well, biodynamic—clean, potent, and energetic. “I think wine should be kinda visionary,” he said. “It should come out of a total environment. Most winemakers can’t be this thorough. But we’re determined to break the destructive cycle of exploitative chemical agriculture!” Then he added, ruefully, “We hope to break even in about four years.”

A few weeks later, I would learn that the Macari vineyard is up for sale. Its wine has been widely praised and featured in top restaurants such as Craft, but the rigors of biodynamic farming, not to mention the scarcity of profits, had worn the Macaris out. While Joe hopes to run a smaller operation, they’re looking for someone to cash them out of the main business—at a reported asking price of $9.5 million, which would mark an all-time high for the area.

One afternoon, I found myself wandering through the fields of the Shinn vineyards in Mattituck. The potato farmers in their tractors on the neighboring lots drew a sarcastic roll of the eyes from David Page, the New York chef who runs this small-scale vineyard with his wife, Barbara Shinn. “I think,” he said, “they would sell out to the developers in two minutes. Good money for them.”

Shinn and Page are also owners of the West Village restaurant Home, which is the only New York restaurant devoted wholly to Long Island wines. Page is clearly a man of the sixties, with his ponytail and carefully acquired rural erudition. As we strolled down rows of Bordeaux varietals, he named flowers and plants with a lyrical ease. Yet the trellises are also organized with a fanatical attention to detail. Page and Shinn are ambitious: They are not out merely to ferment a bit of plonk for Saturday nights: They want to put their wine on the Manhattan gastronomic map.

“We can make great wine here; it’ll just take a bit of time,” said Page. “When people criticize so-called new money here, they forget that wine regions always depend on such investments.”

Shinn and Page are virtual expatriates from Manhattan, comfortably ensconced in a low, modern house on top of the cliffs that look over to Connecticut. While they made dinner—always a celebration of Long Island produce, as at Home—I wandered past the gazebo and peered down at the milky waters of the empty beach. It was difficult to imagine what such real estate must already cost. “The rise in property prices,” Page later confirmed, “has been astronomical. The North Fork has become New York’s wine country. Shame, though, that so few New Yorkers actually drink our wines. I’m assuming, though, that the more they come here for weekends, the more they’ll drink.”

And indeed, I couldn’t help feeling that David and Barbara, the lovely house on the bluffs, the gazebo, the organic asparagus, were all part of a new metropolitan American middle-class paradigm: urban money aspiring to rural gentility, a canny convergence of skillful careerism, civilized domestic reclusion, and what could be called ecological hedonism—the pursuit of high-minded Jeffersonian pleasures, especially those of the table. The urban farmer is no longer an oddity, because for the first time people can flee the city and make a living, so to speak, cultivating their vines. For the time being, anyway.

“We’ll see if anyone can do it twenty years from now,” Shinn said a little gloomily.

What Shinn and Page wish is that Long Island becomes to the city what the Loire is to Paris or Napa is to San Francisco: a wine hinterland molded by a food-driven touristic hedonism. Metropolitan wealth, in other words, looking for a pleasurable outlet.

Later, back in the city, I opened a bottle of a wine called Home which the Shinns make on the side—a straightforward unblended Cabernet Franc. It’s the kind of simple, exquisitely rustic wine that California used to make out of its Zinfandel. Will it win any medals? Certainly not. But I thought that if Long Island is going to take the high road to acquiring local soul, this is the kind of wine it ought to make. With a little support from Manhattan’s sippers, it may well happen.