Wines With A View

For oenophiles planning an outing to enjoy wines where they are made, Long Island offers a range of tasting rooms that reflect not only their location, but also the personalities and intentions of the owners. Some are decidedly laid-back, in a rural frame of mind; others are more formal, with architecture that references other cultures, or ultra-modern chic. To sell wine directly to consumers, they all need to find ways to appeal to a target audience. Will they focus on attracting a large and diverse number of visitors, or narrow visitation to fewer, more wine-knowledgeable consumers?

Many vintners here, including McCall Wines in Cutchogue, have embraced the spare Yankee aesthetic of existing farm buildings to their own tastes and purposes. Keeping the scale small, but the wine quality high, the McCalls will greet you in an old potato barn on the family farm, repurposed for wine tasting. They know the wines because they have lived with the vines. Old farm tools on the walls and grazing Charolais cattle across the farm path set the tone for an entirely relaxed experience.

Farther up the North Fork in Southold, The Old Field Vineyards offers a similarly down-home feeling on a beautiful farm by Peconic Bay, where the waters magnify the sunlight, accelerate ripening and sparkle near rows of mature vines. There, family members offer tasters a warm welcome in a refurbished hen house (actually, those were fighting cocks in those cages 100 years ago).

Adapting the look of a traditional barn to a new, environmentally sensitive, LEED-certified building with all the bells and whistles, the Kontokosta family—who own the Kontokosta Winery and Harborfront Inn in Greenport—designed their tasting room to give visitors the experience of entering through the vines with a broad view of Long Island Sound. Wine club members can use the “private” balcony, too.

In Peconic, Raphael Vineyard’s impressive stone structure references owner John Petrocelli's Italian origins and the formality of a European chateau, while in Sagaponack, Wölffer Estate Vineyard’s Tuscan tasting room also evokes centuries of an international wine heritage. Down the road a few miles from Wölffer, Channing Daughters Winery’s intimately agrarian look reflects the artistic exuberance of its creator, Walter Channing. There, you can cavort in open Bridgehampton meadows around the property’s dancing tree figures.

Like the East End’s vintners, Europe’s wine producers are increasing their efforts to attract visitors who will buy directly from them. Nothing cultivates customer loyalty better than a personal visit to a welcoming winery. Bordeaux, Burgundy, Tuscany and the Rheingau have imposing châteaux, famous for centuries, but in emerging wine regions, vintners need to lure visitors with a more extended experience than the old-time tipple with a wizened cellar-dweller in a dark cave.

Not to disparage that tipple, for it can reveal the heart and soul of a wine. In southern Moravia, minutes from the Austrian border in the Czech Republic, I recently found myself laughing with a happy throng of tasters, meandering from cellar to cellar in Pálava, a Baroque village on a mountain of chalk where the caves are centuries old. Since 1989, after 45 years of Nazi and Soviet oppression, families—including the Nepras, who reclaimed confiscated cellars and founded Reisten Winery—have upgraded them to modern standards. Sonberk Winery, also in Pálava, has a modern winery designed to be environmentally sensitive, as is Kontokosta’s showcase here. Veering from the Czech taste for something sweet, Sonberk’s wines match international preferences for fresh, dry minerality.

The Moravian Pálava used to be part of the Vienna-centered Lichtenstein empire and predominant grape varieties—grüner veltliner, riesling, blauburgunder. Take a short drive, or bike ride, across the Czech border into Austrian villages, such as Falkenstein, with similar, strollable wine districts. Travel an hour south to the Wachau wine region on the Danube. The real heart of wine country there, where everyday wines are made in volume, is Langenlois. A vertiginously modern, wonderfully quirky hotel and wine attraction there, the Loisium, is designed to access 900-year-old wine vaults under the city and offers a museum with a tour and light show, Wachau wine shop (grüner veltliner, anyone?), and a tasting bar. Outside the Loisium, an exuberantly New Age hiking path called the “Wave of Thought” leads the stroller through gardens designed to represent “the thoughts of the winemaker at work—a joy, a longing, a hymn, a hope.”

The Loisium is “an area flirting with the longing of the vacation-seeking.” Much like our own vintners’s designs to attract visitors.