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Video Transcript - Wine Making In Long Island Ready For Harvest

Written By: ClassicWines.com Team on Thursday, March 13, 2008

Brian Freedman: Welcome to the Classic Wines Minute brought to you by ClassicWines.com, I am your host Brian Freedman and we are at Bedell Cellars with winemaker John Levenberg; John thanks so much for joining us today.

John Levenberg: Pleasure, pleasure.

Brian Freedman: Now, I know it is a bit hectic out here today. You are starting to bring in some of the fruits. So, what is happening right now?

John Levenberg: Now, it is everything at this point. So, we have our interns in, they are going to training, we are prepping and receiving fruit as we speak. At this point we have only received about four-and-a-half tons. We have got three days of picking and we will be looking at whole class repressing about 20 tons in the next three days, which means roughly about 12 hours a day for those next three days.

Brian Freedman: Who needs to sleep when you have wine to make?

John Levenberg: No, it is the good time, you got to fire up for this time; this is the time you excited.

Brian Freedman: So, what have you brought in so far?

John Levenberg: So far, just Viognier and a little bit of Chardonnay.

Brian Freedman: Okay, can you take us through a little bit, I think a lot of people do not understand why you would bring in certain grapes earlier than others?

John Levenberg: Okay, the way that it starts basically, especially in this climate, we want to watch the vineyards and watch the vines and let them tell us when they are ready to harvest. So, specifically gewurztraminer is an earlier ripening fruit. That is coming in or showing that it gets ready and there we were out there, tasting it a moment to go, it is saying, I am ready, pick me.

Fruits starting to desecrate, berries are coming down, the vines are starting to collapse a bit. Same thing with the Viognier that we pulled in, the chardonnay that we brought in was for sparkling. That is something you are going to pick earlier because it is a sparkling wine you are making.

Brian Freedman: You want the acidity to be higher in the grapes.

John Levenberg: And you want the sugar lower. So, it is a combination to you so, throw that one out of the equation, the reality is what we do as a winemaker is walk around the vineyard and look at the vines and try to get a feel for when they are ready, how much more energy they have, how much more they can give to that fruit.

Brian Freedman: So, it is a very hands-on process.

John Levenberg: Definitely.

Brian Freedman: A lot of intuition.

John Levenberg: Lot of gut, lot of gut.

Brian Freedman: Well, from tasting your wines, it seems like you have, good bit of gut. But you are not brining in any reds yet.

John Levenberg: No, yet and reds are tasting great right now, right now it is looking fabulous, but the reds are still ways off, good two, three weeks. We have already moved beyond anything herbaceous in all the fruit that I am testing which is a very good stage this early. So, another two, three weeks of good ripening weather like this is perfect. It will be in great shape.

Brian Freedman: Right, yeah when the grapes aren’t ripe enough, you get those herbaceous qualities that taste green.

John Levenberg: The dyconomy it goes from really green herbaceous like cigarette and ash and bell pepper through the riper characteristics and depending on variety we are going to get red fruit, raspberries or the blacker fruits and even coffee when it really gets to that ripe level.

Brian Freedman: Okay, so you do not want to pick it too early, but if you pick it too late, it is almost like too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

John Levenberg: It is actually something about Long Island that is unique in the wine world. You really cannot pick too late here. The fruit is such that the sugar levels do not really get that high, not like California and the acid levels maintain in relatively substantial volumes.

The numbers that I have dealt with last two years here were my goals for acid editions in California. So, these grapes naturally are at a level as a winemaker that you want to be at and a winemaker from California, I was naturally adding acid to get to levels that we are at here just without any additions and just normal viticulture practices.

Brian Freedman: Which is all the more reason to really experiment with the wines from the Long Island, to really be open to everything that you are doing here because it is extraordinary stuff.

John Levenberg: We are about to put the change in the wine world because these wines 12.5% alcohol, I cannot make a wine under 14% alcohol in California and --

Brian Freedman: Louis and I were speaking earlier, it is very difficult to pair that with food, it is overwhelming.

John Levenberg: It is impossible, my wife and I together, we are 250 pounds and we would open a bottle of the wine before dinner in California, we would need a nap between the time we started cooking and the time we actually start the meal.

Here it is food, you open a bottle, it is 12.5%, it pairs well and the viticultural changes that we have done in last couple of years and some of the changes in the winery are resulting in wines that span that spectrum between having fruit forwardness (ph) a.k.a. California and having a real developed and complex mid pallet a.k.a. bordeaux. That is what Long Island can do, we can do the best of both worlds and it is unique in the wine industry.

Brian Freedman: It is appropriate seeing as you are the prongs of the fork are pointing towards bordeaux on Long Island and California is about equidistant the other way. It’s poetic.

John Levenberg: No, it is exciting stuff now.

Brian Freedman: Great cannot wait to taste it later? John thanks so much for joining us on behalf of ClassicWines.com and the Classic Wines Minute, I am Brian Freedman. Cheers!

John Levenberg: Get out here and taste it, this is good stuff.

Brian Freedman: I agree.

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