Channing Daughters Winery

Long Island is a cool-climate wine region and the South Fork, also known as the Hamptons, is actually even cooler. The growing season is typically ten or so days shorter, making it perhaps better suited to white wines than red. Channing Daughters Winery, one of three wineries in the Hamptons region is doing some of the most exciting things with white wine on the entire East Coast. But, they think it's only natural.

"Like Friuli, we are a maritime, cool-climate wine-grape growing region," says winemaker Christopher Tracy. "This is an excellent opportunity for white grapes to achieve optimum ripeness, flavor and acidity levels year in and year out. The soil and the landscape of the Isonzo region in Friuli especially bear these resemblances."

Tracy's evocation of Friuli is a unique one on an Island where everybody talks Bordeaux.

This wine, L'Enfant Sauvage or "Wild Child", gets its name from the fact that it is a Chardonnay fermented only with native, or wild, yeasts. The grapes come from Channing Daughters' Sculpture Garden and Brick Kiln vineyards, which were hand harvested and whole cluster pressed. The resulting juice took over a year to complete fermentation and spent 14 months in new French oak.

This is a wine I look forward to every year. Although still relatively young, it’s already a winner. Lush, intricate, and balanced, it is an ordinary enough light gold -- a color that belies it's full body, wonderfully complex aromas and delicious flavors. Fresh and roasted pears, vanilla spice, marzipan and baking spice mingle in the nose and on the palate, with faint honey notes and nicely balanced acidity and a little minerality.

Reviewed January 13, 2007 by Lenn Thompson.