Stephen Scarnato is the founder of Long Island Vine Care and Co-Founder of New Roots Wine Club with his wife, Sarah Scarnato. Long Island Vine Care offers private vineyard management services. We spoke to Stephen to learn more.
Can you tell us about your background as a winemaker and how you got started?
I started making wine with my dad at home with kits we purchased as a hobby. When I was still in college, my parents and my wife (girlfriend at the time) took a tour with me at Paumanok back in 2009. By a happy turn of events, our initial tour had been double-booked and we got to go on an off-beat tour with Kareem Massoud, the wine-maker. He graciously answered all of my enthusiastic questions and recommended some pretty advanced literature. I left inspired to learn everything I could. I pored through textbooks on wine-making and applied to every summer internship I could find. Jim Thompson at Martha Clara (now RGNY) hired me that summer, and I got to experience the viticulture side. Living on the farm that summer, surrounded by the vines, I realized that was my true first calling and that care and attention in the vineyard, raising incredible grapes, would inevitably produce great wine.
I worked in a couple of tasting rooms, but most of my first jobs Out East were in vineyards learning about soil nutrition and plant health on a technical level. My wife, Sarah, and I started Long Island Vine Care, specializing in small private residential vineyards. Cedarhouse on Sound B&B was our first customer, but we have grown to 36 backyard vineyards and consult for half a dozen commercial vineyards. Working with these small vineyards, I was able to baby the plants and experiment in ways that are much more difficult to do on a larger scale. The wines we were producing for our customers were coming out amazing, and one thing led to another. We started crop sharing and making wines for ourselves.
You were inspired by your grandfather’s Brooklyn grapevines?
Yes. I always loved hearing about how he would tend little vines on the side of his building in Brooklyn. It is a beautiful testament to the resiliency of grapevines and the way they inspire family culture.
Your company, Long Island Vine Care, helps private homeowners cultivate backyard vineyards. What inspired you to start this business?
I was working for Long Island Cauliflower and doing vineyard consulting for their customers, and selling agricultural products, when I stopped at Cedarhouse on Sound B&B and asked if they needed anything. They needed someone to manage their vineyard, and I was very excited to accept that opportunity. It felt like a dream come true. I had been hoping and praying for a vineyard of my own to prove to myself that I had what it takes to harvest one of nature’s most fickle crops. Up until that point, I had been exclusively learning a lot of theory and apprenticing under others. They gave me a shot and became our first customer. Word of mouth brought me to a few other small private jobs that year. Enough people found us and liked what we were doing. The rest is history. Long Island Vine Care was born in 2014.
You also run the New Roots Wine Club. Can you explain the concept?
New Roots is run by my wife, Sarah. It’s amazing how things have unfolded. We created New Roots so that we could share our passion for wine education and getting people involved in the whole process of growing grapes and making wine. We have four releases a year, and each one is celebrated with a two-hour wine experience event. Events include a delicious paired tasting, a course on what is going on in the vineyard and the winery during that season, and then members take home four bottles of that release.
We also have special member content on our website that can be accessed post-event if they missed an event, or just anytime they want to peruse a library of our previous courses. Beyond the early access to our releases, wine club members can attend our events and purchase any of our wines at a 20 percent discount. Joining is free on our website, and each release/event is billed quarterly.
Tell us about your in-person events designed to demystify the vine-to-wine journey.
Our events are interactive and conversational. They’re a lot of fun for people looking for something different and more intimate than other wine clubs. The events are held as pop-ups at one of our private vineyards. Sometimes, we bring in other local artisans who can share their craft and partner with us on the pairing. We just had the most incredible time pairing our wines with Disset Chocolate. Ursula and I taught the class together, and it was an excellent experience for all involved. We attract a lot of foodies and nerdy wine lovers, people studying to be sommeliers, and simply people interested in learning more about terroir and growing practices. Those are our people.
You now have your own private-label, small-batch wines. Can you tell us about the wines you have created?
My philosophy is simple: the wines create themselves. We let the grapes take the lead, and we intervene very minimally in the winery. Before trying the wine, I always warn people. I’m not a winemaker first. I’m foremost a grape farmer. We are insanely meticulous in the vineyard, doing every task by hand, no tractors. Nothing against equipment, of course. However, growing grapes in a challenging climate like our own, we can balance each vine throughout the season so that harvest gives us not only the ripest fruit, but the healthiest and cleanest grapes around, which inevitably leads to a beautiful and healthy fermentation. We don’t sulfur the wines when they arrive to be processed, so it’s always a combination of wild fermentation and chosen yeast strains.
All of this means that when you taste our wines, they’re real, pure, unadulterated fermented grapes. I’ve always wanted to know what wine would have tasted like before technological intervention, and here it is! Another crucial element to our annual lineup is that we love fooling around with new and different varieties. The wines we produce each year depend entirely on how the season goes. 2024 was a very exciting season for everyone on the North Fork because of the uncharacteristically dry fall we had. We had conditions that allowed us to ripen Riesling and create an incredible sparkling with 100 percent Riesling grapes. Most of our red grapes hung on, and we were able to co-ferment them to create this year’s harvest release, called The Crucible. It’s a red blend I am very proud of.
We also have a lot of fun with our staple Sparkling Rosé. We use our most aromatic grapes that come into the winery for that one and play around with the blend until Sarah is happy because it’s not ready until she says so. So the rosé is different every year but always delicious. Everyone loves it. Overall, I am so thrilled with the wines we are producing. All micro-batch and limited edition, so inventory goes fast. We are bottling an authentic representation of what our little growing wine region can express — and it’s wonderful.
