Albarino for Long Island

It has been a stellar year for wine, and an equally promising year for another of the East End’s signature crops—those tiny scallops freshly harvested from Peconic Bay—which gladdens my heart and makes my mouth even happier.

The bay scallop season, which began just before Election Day, used to start in late September, forcing some vineyards to rely on mechanical harvesting when the pickers jumped ship to work as baymen. Perhaps less sticky and more lucrative for them.

But this year, the brown tide killed most of the scallops, postponing the season to November, and the grape pickers returned.

I like to keep bay scallops pristine when I cook them: no breading, no garlic and no sauce, except for the butter they are seared in—and maybe a deglazing of the wine I’m drinking.

I’ve always advocated for pairing Long Island-based sauvignon blanc with bay scallops. Its bright herbaceousness cuts through the richness of the scallops and their butter. But this year, I’m pairing them with another seafood-friendly favorite, albariño, the signature grape of Rias Baixas in northern Spain, now grown by a handful of Long Island vintners.

The inspirational advocate of Long Island albariño is Miguel Martin, general manager and winemaker at Palmer Vineyards in Aquebogue.

“This variety has a lot of potential in our maritime climate,” Mr. Martin said. “Albariño loves to be grown near the water. I have been making albariño since 2010 and had nothing but great experience. The 2013 [Palmer Vineyards] Albariño is full of aromatics. The nose jumps out of the glass, with freshly sliced apples, along with honey [and] crushed oyster shells. On the palate, the minerality and acidity is palpable.”

Mr. Martin, who grew up in Spain and also has experience in Australia and California, planted an acre of albariño at Palmer in 2007, reasoning, “We share so many similarities to Galicia [in Spain] and it’s normal that this grape does well in our region,” considering albariño shows remarkable resistance to the mildews that damage grapes in maritime climates.

No one is sure where albariño originated, but its name derives from the Latin “alva,” meaning “white,” and “rhenos,” or the Rhine River. Some say the grape is a clone of riesling, brought to America by the Romans who settled in this region from their vineyards on the Rhine, now Germany, before 500 A.D. In fact, until recently, Spanish albariño was characteristically sold in long, tapered bottles to reinforce this identity.

Richard Olsen-Harbich, winemaker at Bedell Cellars in Cutchogue, planted an acre of albariño in 2011 and finds many aromatic similarities between riesling and albariño, such as “apricots, peaches and other TDN-derived monoterpenes [a quality often described as “petrol”],” he said.

Still, the genetic evidence is not clear, and some think albariño is a clone of petit manseng, brought to Spain by Cistercian monks from Burgundy in the 12th century. As much as the Rias Baixas vintners worked to market their wines as riesling-related 20 years ago, today, in branding their region, they prefer to regard it as an indigenous, or mystery grape, variety all their own, and they no longer bottle it in hock glass.

Mr. Olsen-Harbich, himself an avid student of varietal authenticity, told me as an aside that recent DNA analysis has proven that, due to a nursery mix-up in the 1980s, Australia’s “albariño” is actually “sauvignin,” another variety altogether.

Other Long Island growers are as excited about albariño, no matter its DNA, as Mr. Martin and Mr. Olsen-Harbich, who says, “Overall, I love the variety for the North Fork. It seems to really love it here.” He uses it as “a really beautiful blender for our white blend program of Taste White.”

At Jamesport Vineyards, owner Ron Goerler Sr. planted three acres of albariño three years ago. Calling it by its Portuguese name, “alvarhino,” he finds it gobbles potassium in the field, but said he looks forward to his first harvest next year. In 2013, when other varieties were beset with fungus, his alvarhino “were perfect,” he said.

Alice Wise, a grape specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County on Long Island, has been growing albariño since 2007 in her experimental vineyard, finding it to be an early-ripening, disease-resistant grape with plenty of sugar and acidity. She said she also loves its “bright and interesting” flavors.

In my own comparative tasting of Palmer Vineyards 2013 albariño alongside several Rias Baixas albariños, the Palmer showed more tropical fruit and floral qualities, reminiscent of guava and honeysuckle, with far less of the Spanish wines’ sap-driven herbal aromas. Pale in color, it has great purity and surprising depth on the palate.

Just right for those bay scallops.