By Tom Mansell, Science Editor

In our annual wines of the year tasting, the NYCR staff tasted many, many delicious wines. One of the big winners of the day was Paumanok Vineyards, whose wines swept the three Long Island categories in which they were nominated — Merlot, White Wine and Ice/Dessert Wine).

Interestingly, all three of the winning wines (and a fourth wine that was also nominated in the white category) were bottled under screwcap closures. All of the submitted wines showed interesting and in some cases unique aromas and flavors, often bordering on exotic and tropical.  

The Wines

The NYCR tasting note on Paumanok's 2009 Sauvignon Blanc read: 

The nose is extremely tropical — typical of the sauvignon blanc musque clone — with aromas of papaya, passion fruit, peach and mandarin orange with just a subtle grassy note beneath that fruit cocktail.

Similarly, when I tasted the 2009 Late Harvest Riesling during our wine of the year tasting, it showed a powerful tropical and stonefruit profile in addition to a spicy botrytis edge. It was so aromatically charged that a few of us (tasting blind) thought it could have been a muscat or gew