I totally agree with you on the Bedell Taste White – a wonderful wine and one of many Long Island whites that highlight our ability to make great aromatic whites.

With all due respect however, I profoundly disagree with your comments on the Merlot Alliance, which to me are way off the mark. The group was founded as a quality alliance – the first of its kind on Long Island – to promote research and increase dialog between producers who share a common goal – to make better red wines. The group is far from "screaming" anything. LIMA is relatively low key, with our efforts going mostly to raising research monies that go back into the industry. In fact we've been criticized by some in the wine media for being too quiet about what we're doing. In the past 3 years, no group has funneled more research dollars into local red wine research in the past 30 years than LIMA. We know better than anyone that making great wine is not "ultra-easy." It takes hard work and like any other successful wine region – it also takes research support.
The Long Island wine industry did not come up with a master plan to produce lots of merlot and merlot-based blends – rather we have let the terroir drive the effort. The variety works well in the vineyard and in the cellar – as do others such as Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc. Focusing on the grape varieties that have affinity for your climate and soil are what developing wine regions need to do to succeed. Its a rather old model. Impatience? Coming to some reasonable conclusions after 30 years of growing grapes and making wine seems to me to be a responsible way to move forward. Ironically, I see your comments and others generated by folks who visited us for 2 days last week – and have "figured out exactly what we need to do" – to be a little presumptuous. Frankly, thinking locally is all we've been doing. I hope that you will continue to delve further into the wines of our region and spend more time with our wines and our producers to learn more about us. As for us, we'll continue to learn, work hard, get our hands dirty and keep trying to move this very special region forward.