Posts Written ByLenn Thompson

Uncork the Forks: Harvest 2015 Offers Abundant Optimism

Editor’s Note: This is the lastest ediction of my biweekly column for The Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review.   After writing grape harvest reports for more than a decade, I’ve learned a few things. One, every winemaker is hopeful this time of year. Comments like “This will be an outstanding vintage” and “XYZ will be a great year for Long Island wine” abound. I’ve also learned that it’s not always true. It’s easy to get caught up in the romanticism of wine and wine country, but this is a business — the business of selling wine. That salesmanship begins before the…

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Support Fossil & Till’s Indiegogo Campaign

If you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, you may or may not remember the name Mark Grimaldi. He’s served on tasting panels for us in the past (including our Wines of the Year tastings), he used to coordinate our “Drink Local Dinners” when we had them and he’s also a personal friend of mine. His wife Olivia owns a great little wine and cider shop in Ithaca, NY now, and he is a partner in the new Aurora Ales & Lagers Co. and with partners Eric Clemons (Coeur Wine Company) and Ian Barry (Barry Family Cellars) he’s working to…

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Barry Family Cellars 2013 Tuller Vineyard Pinot Noir

Barry Family Wines 2013 Tuller Vineyard Pinot Noir came and went — only 50 cases were made and they sold quickly — but it’s a wine that I’ll remember. We always remember the good ones, don’t we? Barry Family cellars co-owner and winemaker Ian Barry started working with John Tuller and his fruit during Barry’s first vintage in the Finger Lakes, when he was working at Heron Hill. At the time, Heron Hill bought all of Tuller’s fruit, including pinot noir, chardonnay, riesling and cabernet franc. “I always thought his fruit was unique, but particularly his pinot noir, which I would often keep…

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New York’s Next Wave: A New Generation is Earning Attention With Quality and Experimentation

Editor’s Note: This is my latest New York-focused piece for Beverage Media Though they haven’t saturated the metropolitan New York market by any means, New York wines aren’t the new kids on the block anymore. Rather than look to distant lands for “the next big thing,” enough intrepid buyers have looked in their own backyard to raise the profile of New York State wine to at least a known quantity. Many of the top — the classic ones, really — are known quantities. Wines from stalwarts like Hermann J. Wiemer, Paumanok Vineyards, Dr. Konstantin Frank and Channing Daughters Winery hold…

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Uncork the Forks: At Harbes, Come for the Corn, Stay for the Wine

Editor’s Note: This is the lastest ediction of my biweekly column for The Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review. When I hit the North Fork in search of farm-fresh produce, I don’t go to just one farm stand. I have my favorites for certain things. If I’m buying tomatoes, I usually go to Sang Lee. We get fresh goat cheese at Catapano. When it comes to sweet corn that you can eat raw, right off the cob, even without the typical butter and salt, I head to Harbes Family Farm in Mattituck. Picked in the morning and on my plate that evening,…

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Kemmeter Wines 2014 Sonero

“Balance” is a term that gets bandied about in the wine world. Collectively, “balance” has a meaning that most agree on — a wine is balanced when all the different components (fruit, residual sugar, acidity, tannin, etc.) come together in a harmonious way. A balanced wine doesn’t have protrusions or awkward components. But even if we can agree conceptually on this definition, there is a lot of room for interpretation. A wine that you find perfectly balanced, I may find too oaky. Similarly, what I consider balanced might have too much acidity for you. Context matters too — and that gets us…

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Domaine LeSeurre 2012 Semi Dry Cuvee Classique Riesling

As you may remember from my recent post, I don’t write reviews based on at-winery tastings. I do use those tastings to help identify wines that I want to taste again or learn more about. Such is the case with Domaine LeSeurre 2013 Semi Dry Cuvee Classique Riesling ($19). My visit to the tasting room over the summer was a bit of a let down. It was too warm in the tasting room, leaving the reds well above cellar temperature. The glassware was small and weighty — the kind of glass you expect at a wine-tasting festival perhaps, but not at…

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New York Cork Club: September 2015 Selections

The September 2015 wines for the New York Cork Club will ship soon — thank goodness that the hot weather has started to subside. It’s shipping season! (If you missed our announcement about the rebirth of New York Cork Club, check it out here.) As we head into harvest season this fall, a lot of us start to drink a bit more red wine — but not heavy, oak-laden ones. With that in mind, we’re doing two reds this month, but both are bright and decided not oaky. Just what we like as the last of the summer’s tomatoes move through our…

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McCall Wines 2014 “Cuvee Nicola” Sauvignon Blanc”

Earlier this week, I read two articles (you can read them yourself here and here) lamenting the rise and dominance of dry rose in America — not because the authors don’t like rose, but because other summer-ready wines have been been marginalized. There is a lot of rose being made in New York right now — more than ever. Much of it is delicious and I drink a lot of it (all year long), so it’s probably not unusual that so many end up being reviewed on this site. That said, rose isn’t something I consider my “summer wine.” Finger Lakes riesling…

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A Changing of the Grapes

Editor’s Note: I’ve been writing a biweekly column for northforker.com since November 2014, but this is my first piece after taking over the wine column space in the print editions of The Suffolk Times and Riverhead News-Review from long-time wine columnist Louisa Hargrave. I’ll be publishing an excerpt of each column here on NYCR and linking over to the full piece. How do you replace a pioneer — an icon, really — who was literally there when a wine industry was born? You don’t because you can’t. I can never fill Louisa Hargrave’s shoes, but I do hope to fill her old column…

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