Suffolk Closeup: Toasting the Hargraves, pioneers of Wine Country

Two pioneers in 1973 began something that changed the face of Long Island — Louisa and Alex Hargrave started a vineyard.

Nearly four decades later, what they created has multiplied into 51 vineyards and more than 40 wineries producing wine from 38 different varieties of grape.

It’s a major new industry for Long Island. Most of it is on the North Fork but there are vineyards and wineries on the South Fork, too, and in Riverhead and to the west in Sayville.

You now pass one vineyard and winery after another, driving on the North Fork. And if it weren’t for wine, much of this farmland, most of which had been used to grow potatoes, would have gone to development. The once mighty Long Island potato has faded in the face of stiff competition. Growing grapes on Long Island for wine is, financially, a far better use of expensive Long Island land.

Long Island wine has won a national reputation for excellence. And it has begun to go international. Next month, Riverhead-based Empire State Cellars will be showcasing its wine in Shanghai, China.

Ms. Hargrave has written a charming, touching book, “The Vineyard.” In it, she relates: “I was 25 and Alex was 27. With no farm experience and little life experience, we really didn’t think the vines would need much attention. Before we bought the farm in Cutchogue, neither one of us had grown so much as a vegetable garden … The idea of the vineyard at that point was still a fantasy whose only tangible basis in reality lay in the 10,000 rooted, grafted vines we had bought.”

“At first,” she writes, “we thought of ourselves more as poets than as pioneers, but nearly 30 years of growing tender grapevines on Long Island has proved that it was our pioneering enthusiasm to get the job done and to challenge the legacy of failure for this type of crop that made a success of this new viticultural area.”

Last week, Ms. Hargrave was reminiscing about how she and Alex were directed to Long Island. John Tomkins, a pomologist for Cornell Cooperative Extension in Ithaca, “advised us, ‘There’s this guy on Long Island who has been growing table grapes.’” That was John Wickham, who worked some of the oldest continually cultivated land in the U.S. on a 287-acre farm in Cutchogue that went back to 1661. “It was the day before Thanksgiving, 1972,” recalled Ms. Hargrave. Mr. Wickham told the couple how “I was called crazy” for moving away from potatoes to grow peaches and cherries and other fruit on Long Island. “He took us to bodies of water and explained how they moderated the climate” — and made this possible.

Thus, hoped the Hargraves, they could grow cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir and merlot and chardonnay here, the grapes from which the great wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy — which the Hargraves love — were made from. They were right.

By 1999, Business Week was publishing a story headlined “A Wine Region That’s Aging Beautifully.” The Hargrave “vision has come to pass,” according to the article. It also chronicled the winemakers who followed the Hargraves. “Every winemaker seems to have a story. Mostly, they’re about dreams that have come true.” That year, the Hargraves sold their winery and 84-acre farm. And they divorced.

But Ms. Hargrave has remained deeply involved with Long Island wine.

A graduate of Harvard and Smith Colleges, she writes in newspapers and on the web (“VinGlorious,” her blog is titled) and is a consultant to the wine industry.

She was a founder of the Long Island Wine Council and director of the Stony Brook University Center for Wine, Food and Culture.

The center’s purpose “was to present the idea that sustainable agriculture is part of the heritage of the region” and to impart an “understanding of how wine and food are important to our culture here,” she said. The center, after doing excellent work for five years, was eliminated by the Stony Brook University administration in a budget cut in 2009.

“It was very unfortunate that the plug was pulled,” comments Ms. Hargrave. “We just had a $30,000 stainless steel kitchen donated to us and we were about to launch a Food Studies Program.” That kitchen remains at Stony Brook Southampton, a campus soon afterwards virtually shut down by the Stony Brook University administration, although in recent times there have been signs of a rebirth. Re-establishing the center would be a good thing.

“One of the things we did in our original concept pretty much created the paradigm for the other vineyards: having an estate vineyard so people making the wine are also growing the grapes,” says Ms. Hargrave, who grew up in Cold Spring Harbor in northwest Suffolk.

The Long Island wine industry has been a huge boon to Long Island tourism. There are tours of wineries, and tastings, classes and musical events. The Long Island Wine Council website (liwines.com) says now there are more than a million “visitors to Long Island Wine Country” each year.

Important to the story, too, was creation of the Suffolk County Farmland Preservation Program through which many of the vineyards have been preserved for agriculture. Under the program, launched by Suffolk County Executive John V.N. Klein in 1974, the county purchases the “development rights” of farmland on the condition that the acreage remain in agriculture in perpetuity.

The Long Island wine industry has also benefited from town preservation programs. Mr. Wickham, who died in 1994 at 85, was a major figure in the preservation effort. He was long both vice chairman of the Suffolk County Planning Commission and chairman of the Southold Town Planning Board.

Alex Hargrave is in retirement in Connecticut.

The vision of Louisa and Alex lives on on Long Island. They deserve a hearty toast.

Editor’s Note: Louisa writes a wine column for Times/Review Newsgroup. You can read her columns here.