Wine, Women and Song

We have our South Fork vineyards, but the real Long Island Wine Trail is found to the north of us. For those of us in the Hamptons who don't have boats, that means a long drive around the Peconic Bay to Riverhead and back out the North Fork. While I have dreams of a drive down the Main Road, wandering from winery to winery, the only place I've managed to go so far is Osprey's Dominion (mostly 'cause they pay me).

Back in May, my band did our first official paying gig here, following it up with our second official paying gig that night at a restaurant in Hampton Bays. This was a repeat - not only were we back at Osprey, but we apparently didn't learn that 7 hours of performing in one day is maybe a little too much, and we booked the restaurant again for that evening.

The weather on Saturday was just beautiful - low 80's, sunny and breezy - so we played outside under a tent, with a great view of the grapevines. We could actually pull the car right up to the stage, which made this the easiest load-in in our gigging history. There was a good turnout of people who were all drinking lots of good wine, so everyone was in a good mood and feeling quite mellow. Often at gigs a listener will offer to buy us a drink, but this was the first time they had the bottle in hand! Our favorite table included a charming redhead who we named "Ginger Spice", who was singing along on the 80s music.

Osprey seems to be a bigger operation than Channing Daughters, my South Fork favorite. The staff is a little more harried, but when things calmed down at the end of the evening and we were ready to trade some of our hard-earned money for wine (the band gets a discount, of course) they were quite helpful in our quest to give our pay right back.

The visitors are a mix of locals and tourists, though the vineyards in the summer seem to be something like the Statue of Liberty in NYC - New Yorkers only go there if they are hosting a guest that wants to go. The outside picnic setting attracted a lot of families, but the usual vineyard guest is often fairly upscale. So that's one way to see how the "other side" lives here in the Hamptons - get a job somewhere that they go!