An Elder Uncle of Long Island Wine
The unpretentious craftsman who helped to codify the region sees a bright future.
By Lenn Thompson

PECONIC—Compared to the classic wine regions of the world, Long Island is impossibly young. But that blink-of-an-eye in wine history has consumed the better part of a lifetime for veteran winemaker Richard Olsen-Harbich, who has seen nearly 30 vintages come and go on the Island. Along the way, he’s authored Long Island’s three American Viticultural Areas (AVAs), which designate the origin of nearly every bottle of wine made here; helped found a merlot quality and research organization; and worked hard to define and express the region’s unique terroir with his wines.

No, he’s not the founding father or mother of Long Island wine—those titles are reserved for Alex and Louisa Hargrave. But he’s one of the region’s elder uncles. Think of him as the cool, fun uncle who really just wants people to drink and enjoy his wines. He’s the uncle that you want to watch a Mets game with and drink merlot as you munch on peanuts

Yes, merlot with peanuts. It’s an unconventional pairing Olsen-Harbich suggests, and it’s that sort of anti-pretension that sets him apart from many in the wine industry. These days, Olsen-Harbich is the winemaker at Raphael, presiding over a winery that he helped set up in the late 1990s. But that’s just the current chapter in this do-everything winemaker’s enological career, which in many ways mirrors the evolution of Long Island wine itself.

The Hamptons’ First Winemaker
Olsen-Harbich came to the region in 1981, working with David Mudd of Mudd Vineyards. He was hired—while still attending Cornell University—to help with vineyard installations and other vineyard work. At the time, only Hargrave Vineyard had a winery built and vineyard planting was “full force” as the new wine region brought more people—and money—to the East End.

Two years later, his diploma and an unofficial grape farmer degree from Mudd in hand, Olsen-Harbich moved to the South Fork to work as vineyard manager at the new, but now-defunct, Bridgehampton Winery, where he helped build what was then the East End’s second winery.

He lived on the Bridgehampton property with his wife and two young children and remembers those long, arduous hours fondly. It may not have been the sort of “Hamptons” life most recent college graduates dream of living, but it suited him just fine. “I was very into doing what I was doing. I lived in the Hamptons, but didn’t live the Hamptons.”

While serving as vineyard manager, he apprenticed with consulting winemaker Hermann J. Wiemer, spending innumerable hours at Wiemer’s winery in Dundee, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. It was during that apprenticeship that Olsen-Harbich learned the art and science of winemaking. That year, he made both a riesling and a steel-fermented chardonnay—pioneering that style of chardonnay on Long Island.

The low-lying vineyard location for Bridgehampton Winery drained poorly, making it far from ideal. Having a soggy vineyard was both a detriment and an opportunity, however. Even though they grew grapes in Bridgehampton, Olsen-Harbich bought fruit from and cultivated relationships with many North Fork growers and vineyards. “We actually purchased a great deal of fruit from the North Fork because we didn’t grow many reds and our vineyards were marginal to begin with,” he said. “So over the 10 years that I worked there, I saw a lot of different fruit from many different vineyards.”

Defining Long Island
That familiarity with both Forks came in handy in 1984 when Olsen-Harbich, along with Bridgehampton Winery’s owner Lyle Greenfield, decided to apply for the region’s first American Viticultural Area (AVA), an officially designated wine grape–growing region in the United States. The name of that first AVA, which still appears on wine labels for wines produced with grapes grown in the region, is “The Hamptons, Long Island.” Six months later, Olsen-Harbich authored the “North Fork of Long Island” and then, in 2000, he authored the Island’s third AVA, simply “Long Island.”

Having these terms on wine labels might seem esoteric, but without the AVA system, consumers would have little idea where the grapes were grown that went into any given wine. Olsen-Harbich calls the AVA system the “only regulation in place that respects the wine’s origin.” It also offers wineries the ability to showcase their unique terroir. As such, it’s an important marketing tool as well.

Louisa Hargrave, currently the director of Stony Brook University’s Center for Wine, Food & Culture, thinks that distinguishing Long Island from the rest of New York State is highly important. “The Finger Lakes are 500 miles away and have totally different conditions from Long Island, right down to the kinds of grapes that can and cannot be grown. No one considers Bordeaux as being the same as Alsace. This is a similar dichotomy.”

After Greenfield sold Bridgehampton Winery in 1993, Olsen-Harbich worked at Hargrave Vineyard later that year, Jamesport Vineyard in Jamesport for two years, and worked as a consultant with fellow pioneer Larry Perrine under the name WineWorks. During this period, Olsen-Harbich worked with nearly every grape grown and wine made on the East End. It quickly became obvious to him that merlot was the red variety best suited to Long Island’s unique geography and climate.

“It was clear to me that the best red fruit I saw every year was merlot. It was the most ripe, balanced and always needed the least amount of intervention from me” in the winery, he says.

Think Red
In 2005, that realization led Olsen-Harbich, along with winery owners and winemakers from Sherwood House Vineyards, Shinn Estate Vineyards, Pellegrini Vineyards and Wolffer Estate, to found the Long Island Merlot Alliance (LIMA), a group dedicated to the “advancement of quality in the production” of merlot wine on Long Island. Ask him about LIMA, and Olsen-Harbich is quick to reiterate that it is not a marketing organization—nor are its members suggesting that merlot is the only grape that can thrive on Long Island. “Marketing is secondary,” he said. “Research is the key and it hasn’t been funded by industry consistently on Long Island before now.”

This year, working with Cornell University researchers both upstate and at the Long Island Horticulture and Research Center in Riverhead, the group is studying the effects of “fruit zone leaf removal” on growing vines—that is, reducing the number of leaves in order to expose grape clusters to more sun—a practice that can be crucial to the reduction of green, vegetal flavors in red wines.

Last year, the group sponsored an intern, Christopher Grassotti, a student in the master’s degree program in viticulture and enology at Ecole Nationale Supérieur Agronomique in Montpellier, France. Working closely with member wineries, Alice Wise at Cornell’s LIHREC and others at Cornell University, he helped to identify the dominant and strongly identifiable aromas and profile of Long Island merlot and identifying the differences found in other quality wine regions. The research group has identified unique traits that serve as Long Island merlot’s signature and Olsen-Harbich thinks they’ll be reporting on those findings sometime within the year.

Ask Olsen-Harbich “Why is merlot so important?” and he doesn’t talk about it being Long Island’s most-planted grape or how it finds its way into most local red wines. Instead, he focuses on quality: “Take merlot out of the equation, and the region’s overall quality drops.”

Merlot is vital to Raphael’s success as well—and not just because merlot covers 25 of the vineyard’s 55 acres. While Olsen-Harbich makes a delicious sauvignon blanc and has received critical acclaim for his cabernet sauvignon, it’s his merlot and merlot-based blends that consistently shine. Year in and year out, Raphael’s everyday-priced Estate Merlot impresses as a value. Olsen-Harbich’s 2004 La Fontana ($22), a blend of 70 percent merlot, 20 percent cabernet sauvignon and 10 percent Malbec, fills the mouth with plums, raspberries, spice and hints of the earthiness that many point to as unique to Long Island. Most impressive of his current releases is the 2002 First Label Merlot ($30), an extremely aromatic wine with blackberry and blueberry fruit aromas accented by notes of leather and mint. Full-bodied and well-structured in the mouth, ripe tannins bring just the right grip and point to a long life in the cellar. There are few, if any, better local merlots at this price point.

Experience and Vision
Over 27 years, Rich has earned a place as a central figure in the local wine community. Richard Pisacano, vineyard manager at Wolffer Estate in Sagaponack calls Olsen-Harbich a “walking wine and grape encyclopedia,” adding that “he has been such a important contributor to the LI wine community that when Rich Olsen-Harbich talks, people listen.”

Ben Sisson, who manages the McCall Vineyard in Cutchogue and used to work with Olsen-Harbich at Raphael, thinks that it is his “commitment to supporting locally done research, and advancing the entire region’s reputation” that helps Olsen-Harbich establish himself as a leader.

Olsen-Harbich laughs remembering how, in the early 1980s, he was forced to make barrel-fermented chardonnay because “that was what everyone wanted—big, big chardonnay.” Now, the market has swung the other day and most local wineries are making less and less of that oaky, buttery style, focusing instead on the stainless steel chardonnays that Olsen-Harbich made from the very beginning.

He has learned with every other grape grower how important bird netting is on Long Island, saying “Without it we couldn’t hold onto our fruit as long and achieve the levels of ripeness we need to make great wines. Before the advent of netting, many growers picked fruit based on the amount of bird damage they were able to withstand. Because of netting, we all harvest a lot later in the fall than we used to. Twenty years ago most wineries were done picking their last red grapes by Columbus Day. Now we’re usually not even starting to pick then.”

Nowadays, local winemakers almost expect ripeness year in and year out, but that’s the result of many years of trial and error in the vineyard. “What was hard about growing and making wine on Long Island is now passé,” said Olsen-Harbich. “Actually, it's still hard; we just know better how to do it now.”

Because Long Island wines are getting the positive attention and press they deserve, Olsen-Harbich is glad that the region is focusing less and less on validating itself. “Our wines today are as good from a quality standpoint  as any wines made in the world. What we need to do is get more people to try them to find this out. I would go so far as to say that the percentage of poor-quality wines found on Long Island is lower than in most other wine regions because we are small, our producers work on a smaller scale and the margin for error is much, much smaller.”

Still, in the hyper-competitive world wine market, Long Island faces many challenges. Casual observers often complain about the prices of Long Island wines, calling them overpriced for the quality, implying that they are not good values. Not surprisingly, Olsen-Harbich has an educated opinion on that too, “[If] you can find a hand-crafted wine made in small-batch production, grown sustainably, at the quality and price we are delivering at—go find it for me. Yes, you can always buy cheaper—no matter what the product or service is, but as my father-in-law Herb always said to me ‘you don’t always want to go cheap.’ I think he was onto something.”

The Craftsman
“Craftsmanship is what makes our wines different from the average wine on the shelf. It is the physical manifestation of passion—of paying attention to small details and doing the little things that all add up to producing a high-quality product. It means understanding what this region has given us and nurturing our grapes and wines into becoming all that they can be without forcing them to become something that is familiar to us from another region. It means sacrificing quantity for quality and patience for expediency.”

Olsen-Harbich doesn’t think that Long Island can or should compete against “mass-produced, industrial-style wines” that people can buy for $7 per bottle. Instead, he says that winemakers must work to get “true East End flavor” in their wines. To do so, he thinks that producers need to be very hands-on and diligent in the vineyard, but more “conservative and trusting” in the cellar. “It’s kind of like raising a child,” he says “You are there a lot in the beginning but at some point you need them to be independent and trust they will grow up to do the right thing.”

When it comes to his own wines at Raphael, Olsen-Harbich works very hard to “always over-deliver,” making wines that people will enjoy at a price under what the wine could probably fetch. He considers getting his wines into as many hands and mouths as possible an important goal “so they can try them, taste them, see what they are all about. Long Island has not had a ‘culture of wine’ for very long. It takes time. When people try Long Island wines, they are very surprised. There is skepticism that is being overcome by letting people try our wines.”

After living both Long Island wine’s past and present, where does Olsen-Harbich see the region’s future? He thinks that the region is only now starting to define its style, pointing to “rich, earthy, classically styled reds” and “flowery, thirst-quenching aromatic whites.”
And even though chardonnay is the region’s most-planted white variety, Olsen-Harbich doesn’t think that those wines are the future of Long Island whites because people are demanding aromatic white wines, and chardonnay can be somewhat less interesting aromatically, unless oak barrels are used to bring scents of vanilla, spice and toast.

Without hesitation, he states that “Sauvignon blanc will be the most important white variety” going forward because of its expressive aromatics of citrus, herbs and minerals. Given Olsen-Harbich’s knowledge and experience, it’s hard to imagine anything other than success for sauvignon blanc. He’s been a part of Long Island wine country’s past, is firmly entrenched in its present and no doubt is uniquely qualified to anticipate the future—a future he’ll no doubt be a large part of.