Trip to Long Island Wine Country

What did we do on our day off? After the harvest is in and the wines are fermenting, what a better time than to go to Long Island to visit Wine Country. It's fair to say that we can't get enough of wine and learning about wine.
We had a specific reason for going to Long Island and it dates back to Our First Visit with Charles Massoud at Paumanok in 2011.
As it turned out, Monday was a beautiful day and when we reached Orient Point, the temperature was 64 degrees! Last year, when we made this same pilgrimage, the weather gods were kind to us and provided us with possibly the only two beautiful days in an otherwise very miserable fall of 2018.

We had an 11:30 appointment with Charles and Kareem Massoud at Paumanok.
We were a little early for our appointment so we made a detour to Lenz Winery, one of our other favorite wineries to visit on Long Island.
A new thing that I saw at the tasting room was that the winery now offers something called "tastings" in which you can select specific wines to taste for a slightly larger pour than the regular flight of tastings. We opted to taste a 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon, 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon and a 2014 Merlot. My husband and I really liked both the 2016 and 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon so much that we purchased some bottles to take home with us. After this small detour, we headed to Paumanok.
We met up with Kareem and he showed us his 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon which had finished fermentation and was now being pressed. It was just amazing to see so much Cabernet Sauvignon being pressed. The aromas coming out of the juice was just amazing!

During previous rendezvous, Charles always brought out all kind of cheeses and pates for us, so this year, we brought some light bites from Connecticut with us, including smoked bluefish and summer sausage, complements of our hunter.

We met up with Charles and had a wonderful visit and then it was time to run off to catch the ferry back to New London. We thank Charles and Kareem for their hospitality!