Shinn Estate Vineyards

I'm learning to spend money on things.

Which is maybe the opposite of what the rest of the country's learning to do these days, and it isn't easy, particularly given a writer's salary. But in our house we do a lot of talking about "the value of things," and so, for instance, last week I ordered contacts from the opthamologist down the street, instead of from an online megastore, because while it costs a few dollars more, living in a neighborhood with a locally owned shop on its main drag, instead of a megastore, has value to me.

Ditto for the bookstore.

I'm also training myself to stop cringing at a $6 price tag on a pint of sweet, marble-size organic strawberries, or comparing them to the $2 plastic double-pints of strawberries at the grocery store, which I know well are tasteless and watery and were grown with pesticides, genetically manipulated to travel well, and are carbon bigfoots, having crossed the country in a refrigerated truck. The two are both strawberries in name alone.

I've discovered, too, that paying $6 for a few portions, instead of $2 for a whole mess, makes a person more inclined to savor each bite and not let a single berry go to fuzz.

These days, when I see an unbelievably low price, I'm learning to think Why? before Yay! (Part of this comes thanks to Charles Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect, which with great storytelling, solid research, and perfect eloquence Fishman addresses how reasonable people's thinking about what an item should cost has been changed. Think what you will about Wal-Mart, but do the world a favor and read this book.) Our dollars are our voices, and I'm afraid we've become happy to say very little.

As you might guess, this is a topic on which I can become the world's most self-righteous jerk in seconds flat.

Except when the conversation turns to wine — which I may or may not even have time to discuss, given my busy urban Sherpa routine of ecstatically lugging home as many bottles of $4 Trader Joe's wine as I can manage.

It's a bit of hypocrisy I failed to note as I read the recent New York Times article about the Shinn Estate Vineyards on the North Fork of Long Island, which runs a sustainable vineyard, or while I excitedly booked R. and me two nights in their farmhouse inn.

And nothing beyond bliss came into my purview as we crunched up the gravel driveway to Shinn's tasting room on a hot afternoon, were poured flutes of their ultra-smooth blanc-de-blanc, and looked out at their calm, lovely rows of grapevines and the soft grasses and flowers growing between them — which I'd read, enrapt, was to attract "good" bugs to kill the "bad" bugs, and additionally that the tubing running between the vines was to drip a natural compost "tea" of seaweed and crabshells and other vitamin-rich things, in place of bug spray.

For the next few days we enjoyed the world's most fun dog, a beautiful room, and multi-course breakfasts — homemade granola on yogurt, still-warm scones with homemade jam, fruit smoothies with local honey, frittatas and sunny-side-up eggs from the ducks and chickens up the road, and bacon smoked in a shed off the tasting room — courtesy of David Page, who began his culinary career as a mushroom forager for Alice Waters.













































My brain stayed obliviously happy until someone mentioned that many of the nearby vineyards use Roundup. Later, R. and I were standing with Page in his barrel room, where he was being gracious enough to offer us a sip of his 2008 merlot. (Feef? I'd asked, as he dipped a glass contraption into the barrel. No, THief, he enunciated again, using it to steal a few sips for us.)

The vineyard, which Page owns with his wife, Barbara Shinn, is tiny, as are most New York wineries, which I've known to be the justification for their not-low prices. Through graduate school, I worked at a winebar/wine shop that poured only New York wines, and over and over my colleagues and I explained to customers that from a "boutique winery" you don't get Gallo prices.

You also don't get grapes harvested by hand, in small batches, which is what Shinn and Page do, because it makes for better wine and more respectful treatment of the vineyard's soil and vines.

Still, as the three of us stood there savoring that merlot, the conversation meandered to my favorite topic — valuing things — and Page told us, "We've done everything to lower costs, within reason, and I can't sell a bottle of wine for less than $14. ... With a $10 wine, you have to ask yourself what you're really drinking."

Alas, the lightbulb: What had we really been drinking?

As a winemaker, Page saw a direct correlation between his desire to respect the earth, respect the product, and make something he's proud of, and what he could charge as a result of that.

Volume, again, is a major aspect of one's ability to keep prices low. It's not villainous to sell cheap wine. And certainly table wines have an essential place in the world. Trader Joe's sells a $6 organic wine, which I assumed was simply the result of tens of thousands of acres, or of a glut of excess juice that needed to be sold off, and that may be exactly the explanation. But I didn't look into it, the way I might with other things. I just handed over my credit card.

Page's comment, though, illuminated an area where I've been doing more celebrating than questioning. Like I would with milk or produce or fish or meat, it's time to start paying attention to what I'm really drinking, and asking why.