Sun Sea Soil Wine

<p><b>Long Island's longest-tenured winemaker weighs in on what makes the North Fork so unique for fine wine production.</b></p><p>Growing up a stone's throw away from New York City in a small house on suburban Long Island Richard Olsen-Harbich always dreamed of being a farmer. After graduating from Cornell with a degree in viticulture he found himself back on the Island at the heart of an emerging wine region that was struggling to find itself. Starting from the ground up with little information or experience Olsen-Harbich began a lifelong quest to master the art and science of growing wine grapes less than 90 miles from Manhattan.</p><p>In the last half-century the North Fork's bucolic seaside towns and humble potato farms were transformed into one of this country's most compelling agricultural success stories garnering praise from wine critics around the world. Olsen-Harbich charts the meteoric rise of North Fork winemaking from the historic failures of colonial times to the modern triumph of becoming one of the most important wine-producing districts on the East Coast. Through a poetic interweaving of personal anecdotes with scientific reporting about climate soils geology and botany Olsen-Harbich drills deep into the topic giving the world a new language for talking about wine. In doing so he redefines what it means to make wine in the New World.</p>