The Lenz Winery

The Lenz Winery is one of Long Island's pioneers, planted in 1978 and quietly producing some of the region's most age-worthy bottles.

Lenz farms 60 acres on Main Road in Peconic and has anchored the serious-collector end of the North Fork since Patricia and Peter Carroll bought the property in 1988. The estate is best known for its Old Vines Merlot — fruit from blocks first planted in 1978 — which has put Long Island Merlot on the map for serious tasters and routinely outscores Right-Bank Bordeaux in the comparative blind tastings the winery has staged for press over the years. In the cellar Longtime winemaker Eric Fry, a UC Davis graduate who cut his teeth at Jordan in Sonoma before moving east in 1989, has run the Lenz cellar for more than three decades — almost unheard-of continuity in American wine. His house style is Burgundian by temperament: small open-top fermenters, long native-yeast ferments, very judicious new oak (rarely more than 25 to 30 percent on the reds), and serious bottle age before release. Reserve reds are routinely held back five to seven years; the Cuvée RD sparkling spends at least five years en tirage before disgorgement, and Fry will tell you he wishes he could give it more. That patience is the single biggest reason Lenz bottles drink older than their birth dates. What I order in the tasting room I start every Lenz visit with the Gewürztraminer, dry and lychee-perfumed, because it's the one wine on the North Fork I can't get anywhere else at this level. From there I go straight to the current-release Estate Selection Chardonnay (barrel-fermented but never overdone), then the Cuvée RD, then the Old Vines Merlot, then — if it's open — the Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. If the team has a library Merlot uncorked, ask about a side-by-side with the current release; the contrast between, say, a 2013 and a 2019 is the best free education you'll get on what Long Island Merlot does with time. Skip the casual flight and book the Reserve flight if you can; the markup is small and the wines are a different conversation. Best time to visit Late October through early December is the quiet sweet spot. The crowds have thinned, Fry and the cellar team are between harvest and bottling and often pour, and the fire pit out back actually gets used. The shoulder months also tend to be when the library pours come out. If you can only visit in summer, target a weekday morning — Lenz isn't a scene winery, and the room feels best when there are five tasters in it, not fifty. The signature bottle Old Vines Merlot is the wine to buy. The blocks were planted by Peter Lenz in 1978, making them among the oldest commercial Merlot vines on the East Coast, and Fry treats them accordingly: hand-picked late, fermented slowly, aged roughly 18 months in mostly neutral French oak, and held back in bottle until he thinks they're ready. The result is a Merlot built more like a Right-Bank Bordeaux than a New World wine — restrained alcohol, savory aromatics, fine-grained tannin, and a structure that begs for another five to ten years in the cellar. In a serious vintage (2010, 2013, 2017, 2019) this is the bottle I'd build a Long Island cellar around. It is, full stop, the wine that taught me Long Island Merlot could age.

Old Vines Merlot, Cuvée RD Sparkling, Estate Chardonnay

Lenz is the place I send wine-savvy friends who think they already know Long Island. The Cuvée RD outperforms most Champagne in its price band, and the Old Vines Merlot is the bottle I'd build a 10-year cellar around.