Aquebogue’s Paumanok Vineyards, celebrating 30th anniversary, nominated for prestigious award

Paumanok Vineyards in Aquebogue, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, has been nominated by Wine Enthusiast magazine for the American Winery of the Year award.

Wine Enthusiast will name the winners of its 2013 Wine Star Awards in a special Dec. 31 issue and honor the winners at a gala in New York City in January.

Paumanok is the only East Coast winery among the five American wineries nominated this year.

“Our focus has always been quality,” Paumanok co-founder Charles Massoud told RiverheadLOCAL in an interview at the winery this spring.

Paumanok wines have won numerous awards over the years. Last year, Paumanok’s 2010 semi-dry riesling was chosen as one of the Wall Street Journal’s top 12 wines in the country.

Massoud’s first venture into winemaking was in 1971 in Kuwait, where Massoud, then an IBM marketing executive, had taken a job transfer. Alcohol was illegal in the Muslim country, and Massoud, like his IBM colleagues and customers, experimented with making his own.

“Technically it was a violation, but… [the government] turned a blind eye,” he said.

He tried his hand at making both beer and wine, he said. “The beer was horrible so I never continued that project but the wine, surprisingly, was quite good,” Massoud recalled.

“I purchased 20 crates of table grapes which were pretty hard and hardly had any juice so I had to press them with my bare knuckles. The following day I go to the office and they said, ‘Charles, I didn’t know you were doing karate … look at your knuckles,’ and I said, ‘That has nothing to do with karate – I was crushing grapes.'”

Making and tasting wine then became a hobby for Massoud, though it was more of a family lifestyle for his wife. Ursula is a German transplant whose maternal grandfather and numerous other relatives were vintners. The couple dreamt of one day owning a vineyard of their own.

In October 1979, a year after Massoud transferred to the U.S. and moved his family to Stamford, Conn., he read a N.Y. Times article about vineyards being planted on Long Island.

In January 1980, the Massouds traveled to the North Fork to meet L.I. wine region pioneers Alex and Louisa Hargrave.

“We spent an afternoon with Alex and Louisa and came back home inebriated with the idea of, ‘my God, it’s quite doable,'” Massoud recalled.

“I didn’t sleep all night long, thinking about it and the next day I said, ‘What happened last night? Did I go crazy? How am I going to give up my IBM career?'”

The Massouds looked at properties for three years and settled on what would become the Paumanok estate on Main Road in Aquebogue.

“I remember my father planting our first grape vines in 1983,” eldest son and winemaker Kareem recalled. “I was 10 years old and I was walking behind him dropping a tomato stake for every vine.”

It took Massoud between two and three months to complete Paumanok’s initial 14,000 vine planting – 10 acres of chardonnay and four acres of merlot.

“We purchased a truck load of stakes and I thought it was going to be no problem, I thought, ‘Putting a stake in – that’s easy,'” he said. “On the first day I filled my wife’s station wagon with stakes and drove it right into the vineyard between two rows. By the end of the day, I had put out, like, 500 stakes and I said, ‘My God, this is going to take a lot longer than I imagined.'”

After the vineyard began to produce, Paumanok spent its first years merely selling fruit to other vineyards and Massoud held onto his job with IBM to keep afloat financially.

“Growing grapes is not a money-making operation,” Massoud said of his industry. “Today we are finally running in the black and not many people are, but that’s not what’s important. What is important is if you’re enjoying the lifestyle. Are you happy? You couldn’t pay me enough not to grow wine because it’s priceless.”

Paumanok produced its first wine – barrel fermented chardonnay – in 1989. Eight or nine barrels worth of the white wine went on the market in the fall of 1991, Massoud said.

At that time, Massoud said Long Island wine was not easy to sell.

“Nobody had really heard that Long Island was making wine so when my wife would go into stores and restaurants, people would say, ‘What? Long Island? Lady – Get out of here, we don’t have time to waste, go some place else,'” Massoud said. “Sometimes she would come home with tears over how she was mistreated or how people belittled her and everything we were all about and occasionally she would come with this huge smile because she sold 10 cases to someone who loved the wine and it went like that.”

Paumanok became the East End’s first to secure a tasting in the city after wooing Michael Aaron, then-CEO of reputable NYC wine shop, Sherry-Lehmann, which he said was instrumental in marketing the winery’s reputation for quality.

In June of 1992, the Massoud family moved to Aquebogue full-time, he was able to work his craft full-time, the tasting room opened and the money slowly began to trickle in.

Now the winery is the second-oldest winery operating under the same ownership. “Pindar beat us by a couple of years,” Massoud said.

“When my parents first wrote the intro brochure for Paumanok, which is still posted on the website as the history blurb, it talks about how it’s the beginning of a tradition,” said Kareem Massoud, the eldest of Massoud’s three sons, all of whom now work at the family estate winery. “Even though at first it was like, ‘How do you know?’ – That’s exactly how it turned out – Here we are.”

And when it comes to producing quality wine, he and brothers Salim and Nabeel, hope to continue the tradition of excellence their father began.

“I don’t see any sort of grand revision,” Kareem Massoud said of Paumanok’s future. “On the contrary — from the very beginning, my father recognized we could never compete on quantity, so quality has been our orientation from day one and it’s been a good philosophy to adhere to… My father has lots of sayings he likes to repeat and one of them is, ‘The harder you work, the luckier you get.’ There’s definitely some truth to that. In this globally competitive market, it’s extremely important to keep working hard and not to rest on your laurels.”

The winemaker said remaining innovative is an important element to staying on top in a globally competitive market.

In celebration of the winery’s 30th anniversary, Paumanok will release three brand new labels, which the winemaker said speaks to this innovation: a “minimalist” chardonnay, reflecting a hands-off approach in the aging process; a 30th anniversary red blend, which will sell for $100 a bottle; and Paumanok’s very first sparkling wine, a 2009 Blanc de Blanc, which will be released at the vineyard’s upcoming 30th anniversary celebration event.

The 30th anniversary celebration on Sept. 28 (6-9 p.m.) is a benefit for Peconic Bay Medical Center, where the elder Massoud is a longtime trustee. The $150-per-person event will feature food prepared by a culinary team headed up by Chef Tom Schaudel of Jewel, assisted by North Fork Chef John Ross. They will be joined by Christian Mir from Stone Creek Inn, Todd Jacobs from Fresh, Robert Rizutto from NYIT, Aldo Maiorana from by Aldo, Douglas Gulija from The Plaza Café, Michael Meehan from H2O, John Montgomery from Sea Levels and Matt Kar from Jamesport Manor Inn. Gerry Hayden will provide a sous chef from the North Fork Table & Inn.

Schaudel will provide live music with his band Hurricane.

Karen Rivara from Peconic Pearls will be shucking oysters along with local clams.

A cheese table will offer breads and artisanal cheeses from the East End.

There will be a live auction. Auction items include:
– Dinner for 8 at Paumanok with Rachael Ray at Paumanok Vineyards
– Chefs Table dinner for 8 at Jewel (in Melville, NY).
– Golf package for a threesome at Friars Head golf club (in Riverhead, NY), including lunch at their clubhouse.
– Special Edition 6 L bottle of Paumanok 30th Anniversary red blend.

There will also be a raffle for the first case of Paumanok 2009 Blanc de Blanc.

For event tickets, call (631) 722-8800 or email reservations@paumanok.com.