A couple weeks ago we packed our bags and headed home to Long Island, my home that is. I grew up on Long Island all my life and there is one thing I had never done there, and that is to go to the Long Island wineries! Of course for the first 21 years of my life I couldn't exactly go out there but that leaves the better part of the past decade (well almost decade). Anyway you get the idea. I have been dying to go to the wineries for so long now since I love wine tasting (who doesn't?) and it's so close to home. But alas for one reason or another we never got our act together and planned a day out there. Life was so busy for so long with the wedding planning and graduate school I feel like I lost a good chunk of time right now, so now is the time in my life where I am making up for lost time. One way or the other I was determined to make my way out there. Of course a designated driver would also come in handy as well for this little outing since I planned to sample all this wine. So I enlisted Mom, Mike and Nohra to join me on this little adventure an off we went!
Turns out this hidden gem is only like 90 minutes away from my parents house. Of course thats without traffic and this is still Long Island after all, but we somehow managed to sail out there. Right when we got off the highway we started seeing far stands galore and then this gem popped out at us. This place was incredible, some of the best produce I have ever seen in my entire life. The zucchini were massive as evidenced by the pictures of Nohra inspecting them, and yes my mom totally bought those huge zucchini. After we had stocked up on some produce and taken our picture with Popeye we were really for the main event!
Just up the road a little bit was our first winery destination, turns out almost everything is just up the road a bit, it doesn't get an easier than that, everything is on "Main Road" (also Route 25). I made a list of places that we should try to go to for the day, this was the first,
Paumanok Winery, and I have to say probably one of the best of the day. Walking up to the winery it was so quaint and beautiful. It turns out both my Mom and Nohra have never been to any wine tasting before, they were wine tasting virgins, so I explained to them how the process works and we chose our wine flights and we were off. I think these were probably my favorite wines of the day, I really enjoyed all of them, I wish that we had bought a bottle there, but we didn't so we'll just have to go back again! I highly recommend this winery.
Our next stop again, just down the road, was a beautiful cottage (a rather large cottage) type house by the name of ,
Sherwood House Winery, there wasn't too much outdoor space at this one, so it would be good if you were going wine tasting on a rainy day. I have to say we were all rather less than impressed with the wines at this place, while it was pretty, I didn't think much of the tasting room and it was somewhat small. I think I would pass on this one if I were going back in favor of trying some other places, but was still beautiful to see and experience once!
By this point after only 2 wineries we were already in desperate need of some food, so we headed towards the "town" of Mattituck, the town is really only one block long. Turns out there's also only one lunch game in town as well,
Love Lane Kitchen. So we put our name in for a table and proceeded to walk around the little town. While we were there we went into the
Village Cheese Shop to pick up some cheese and crackers to save for a picnic later on. I'm not going to lie, they weren't overly helpful in the cheese shop and we were a little overwhelmed by the choices, but the two cheeses we did end up choosing turned out to be delicious.
Once we had our table for lunch we were ready to eat, however as it turns out they were not ready to feed us and it ended up taking quite a long time for lunch, I'm not even exaggerating when I say it took them about an hour to bring us our lunch and we were starting to get quite impatient about it. At least when the food did come it was all quite delicious, the fish and chips were really good as was my sandwich, I don't want to say it was entirely worth the wait because it was a really long time but I'd like to hope that was out of the norm, it did put a damper on my itinerary for the day but I got us back on schedule in no time.
After lunch we needed to get back on track for our wine tasting so we stopped at
Pellegrini Vineyards next. It was so nice, which the courtyard does face the road it is pushed back and it was such a nice atmosphere. One of the nice things they offered there was you could pay a bit more for a larger tasting and you could take it to a table and drink it at your leisure instead of standing by the bar, what a great idea! I would def stop back here again and do that next time. The wines were also pretty decent and we did buy one bottle here of their BBQ Red.
Our next winery that we decided to stop at was
Peconic Bay Winery. We knew right away when we pulled in that this was going to be different than the previous 3 we had gone to. The parking lot was packed to the brim with cars and a ton of limo's and buses. It did have a nice outdoor space with a bar and a band and would be a nice place to just hang out, outside but it was so crowded. So we headed into the bar. Only Nohra and I decided to do a tasting here. I have to say this was absolutely our
least favorite wine of the day, Norha and I got different wine flights and neither of them were good, we def did not like the wine here. While it was stored in beautiful bottles, it would look better unopened than actually drinking it. I'd pass on this one next time.
Continuing on our drive on the Main Road we headed further east out to Greenport, which I guess you would call the main town out there. It was actually quite large and had a ton of shops to walk around, I'm sure there was a ton of restaurants too. Someone, not to name names was getting kind of impatient by this point so we didn't walk around too much. But Nohra and I did have a great time trying on some hats as we walked around.
Before we headed back home we wanted to find one more vineyard to go for an endcap. We headed towards
Shinn Estate, it was a bit off the beaten path slightly and was not located on the Main Road. It did look pretty from what we saw but the back tasting area looked a bit crowded so we decided to pass on this one and look for another winery to stop at instead. Which lead us to
Laurel Lake Vineyards, however they were closing up to host a wedding there for the evening, I would have love to have gone to a wedding there I bet it is beautiful.
After all of that we found ourselves at
Martha Clara Vineyards, which I would say is one of the larger more popular vineyards out there. This wound up being the perfect way to end our day. They had a ton of outdoor seating space and even a live band out there. Instead of all doing a tasting flight here we decided to get one bottle and take it outside and have a little picnic with our wine and cheese that we had picked up earlier. The woman in the winery recommended their Riesling and it was perfect, we all really liked the wine. Our cheese and crackers went perfectly with our wine and we all loved our little picnic, it couldn't have been a more perfect ending to our day at the wineries!
Oh wait there was one other perfect ending, outside of the wineries, we literally had to drive right by the outlets, so since we were passing we
had to go into the Coach outlet. Mike was not pleased about this one. I ended up getting a sunglass case, a mini wallet thing to hold my ipod in, which has worked out fantastically since I was forever losing it every day the case is perfect, and I got a keychain that has the Eiffel Tower, a red British phone booth, a NY skyscraper and a luggage on it, it screamed out Rachel. All and all it was an absolutely fantastic day, we had so much fun, I can't wait to do it again, we'll have to bring Matthew back with us next time, and Bridget wants to plan a group day trip there this fall, I hope we can find a date because I would love to go back!!!
