Preserving Long Island: An Interview with Floral Terranes
Written by Via Wohl
Photographed by Via Wohl
Long Island wine has gotten a bad rap.
Perhaps because the image is either drastically scatterbrained or one crystal-clear-rosé note. Without an understood identity, Long Island has grappled with public expectations and regional growing pains since its beginnings, but a moment of reckoning is here. Popular assumptions of Long Island vines have deterred people from actually enjoying the best the young region has to offer. A region so close to New York City yet so far from most New Yorkers' cellars, with a carbon footprint incomparable to what we normally consume, it’s important to incorporate domestic drinking, and Long Island deserves the chance to reshape its ‘image problem’.
While outdated views of Long Island wine persist, many ancestral-practicing-new-age-minds have slowly taken root in an effort to bring the underrated terroir to the stage. The cool Atlantic breeze creates an amazingly hospitable climate for tons of interesting grapes, and modern winemakers on the island are not afraid to experiment, producing wines and hybrids that drink like a true celebration of where they are from, and perhaps finally giving Long Island a definition by taste. Embracing individuation and working with what rings true to the Earth given, fun(ky) things are happening on the east end.
One pair in particular, Erik Longibardi and Benford Lepley of Floral Terranes, have remained productive and thoughtful with a hard hand on Long Island’s ecology- past and present. Their impressive production of wines and ciders are born out of an 18th century single car garage turned cellar in the middle of Long Island suburbia, sourcing grapes and foraging apples from sites across the island. For them, winemaking is an act of artful cultural preservation. Both a nod to Long Island’s agricultural past and a benchmark for the future. Their ferments are fucking delicious too.
How did this all start?
Erik: 2017 was the first Floral Terranes vintage, I started with maybe two barrels of cider, one from the seminary and one from Old Bethpage Restoration farm. And then I made two wines.
Benford: This was when Erik was working on his own. We met on Instagram in 2015, we were both making cider, both from Long Island—
Erik: When I found out you were from Long Island I was like come hang out!
Benford: That day I came over and we sat by the fire and just tasted each other's ferments.
Erik: That was the first time I was just like blown away about what he made. Everyone’s trying to do it now, but what Benford was doing in 2015 was he was making these invasive species beverages.
Benford: I was doing all sorts of herbal meads, using mugwort, yarrow, mimosa blossoms, autumn olive berries. I had been living upstate, working for some cider producers. I moved back here in 2018 full time, and that’s the year we sort of kicked off working together. In 2018 we slowly got into it, then 2019 on, it was our thing that we were doing. We were really going for it.
Erik: It was hard letting go of the reigns at first, but when you have someone like Benford that you’re working with, you just trust them. They’re just so usually right. We really took the time to see how you could be a part of this. This project is not just about me, it’s us. I can’t do this without Benford. It gives us a flexibility; we can help each other in terms of other things we want to do. You really need a partner.
Benford: I think it’s been a really cool collaborative process.
Do you see production growing in the next few years?
Erik: Well, we don’t even know what this year’s going to be like, this upcoming year. Last year I think we just made up so much. It takes a lot… we are both working full time. Think about working your 9-5 during the harvest season, and then making as much as this. We spent every weekend I think from August through end of November doing this. Having two kids, having a wife, having a girlfriend and both of us having full time jobs…
Via: Who has the girlfriend?
Benford: Me, yeah.
Erik: Yeah no sidepieces.
So basically you have another 9-5.
Benford: Yeah, it’s another job. I even made some at my house this year, some was overflow for Floral Terranes where we were just storing fruit in my garage and it just made sense to do it there. It’s a lot of negotiating with work to take days off, and then you’re like fuck I need money, but we’ve got to press the apples—
Erik: And then it’s when am I getting paid, and then we wait on getting paid…
Benford: It was intense. This year was really intense, we both found it to be really intense. I think that we were both pretty burnt out.
Erik: I think this year we’ll probably scale it down a bit because the apples- this is a big apple year, and we knew that going in and it was kinda like we’re gonna get whatever we can now because we don’t know what 2022 brings. There could be no apples. Maybe we’ll make some cider and more wine. But this is the first year we have more cider than wine.
Benford: You just never know. A lot of the apples we’re not paying for. We just pick them and negotiate with people to get access. The thought was, if this year is going to be a lean year with apples, if we make enough cider in 2021 we could let it sit and release it over time.
Erik: Growing from a couple barrels to this in 2021, which is about 1000 gallons- I think that’s our cap. Speaking for me, having a family is really important. Wine is wine and I love making cider but there’s a balance between family life and doing this that I think is really important and something that often doesn’t get talked about in the wine world. How many hours you do in harvest and you’re away from your family and not seeing your kids, it becomes hard. I don’t want to put that lifestyle on anyone else. Speaking especially from this year, it’s not healthy.
I’m a firm believer that a happy winemaker makes happy wine, heck a happy anyone makes a happy anything.
Benford: I think there’s a way where doing work with Floral Terranes and my own stuff could probably support myself in a sustainable way. I’d rather be outside doing this type of work rather than what my day job is. But that’s just my situation and I go back and forth between is this actually possible and is this what I want. It’s kind of just figuring it out.
Erik: We’re in a really lucky position where we get to work with so many great people here that will, well, work with us in the first place, and that allow us to do whatever we want. We can tell stories through our voice. In the end we’re making wine for Benford and I and hoping people enjoy it.
Long Island in general is a really underrated place, wine region, et al. Why do you think the Island has an image problem?
Erik: I think that there’s so much shit talked about this place. Talking about modern winemaking on Long Island, the first vineyard was planted here in 1975 I think, 45 years old. It’s super young.
Similar to some regions in Washington, which seem to garner more respect, why’s this?
Erik: The thing with other young regions across the country is land is a lot cheaper. There are political aspects, land is not cheap here. You can’t do what you could do in Walla Walla at the price here because it’s cost prohibitive.
Benford: I get the sense that a lot of the wine here on Long Island is geared towards tourism. I think that does play a big part, as it’s quite successful for a vineyard.
Erik: We could grow and take capital from others, but then would have to owe others [in taste and production].
Benford: Yeah, you have to do this sort of stuff in a garage.
Why do you love it here?
Erik: I think Long Island is really special because of its particular climate. I think the ciders we make here, compared to the ones we made upstate, there’s a unique diversity of the landscape here, the winds, it’s so different from everywhere else, and in an interesting way.
Benford: It’s just a unique piece of land in America, sticking out into the ocean.
Erik: It's a weird place, it’s just not on a lot of peoples' radar I think. People don’t take it as seriously as it should be taken. I’ve talked to a lot of wine writers, and they just don’t believe in this place. That’s okay, I believe in this place. We do it here.
Benford: I’m a believer that you can make something great, anywhere, whether that’s grape wines or cider. I think you can make good wines here, but I think the ciders that we make are very distinctive. There’s still a lot to learn and be researched with regards to fermented beverage out here. But you can grow anything on Long Island. Pretty much it’s just an amazing agricultural area.
What makes the ciders distinctive?
Benford: If just comparing to other ciders we’ve made from site's upstate, I think just the acid profiles of the ciders of Long Island are really specific. You have some general sense of salinity and a lot of floral vibes. Maybe something in the body too. We’re able to work with some great old trees here too. I think it comes down to we have access to some very good sites with trees with very deep roots, that are very much not being farmed. They are kind of part of the ecological balance just through being there, there’s some symbiosis there. Apple trees on Long Island just figure it out.
Erik: Take this cider we’re drinking now, it’s all Macintosh from this tree that’s gotta be over 100 years old. There’s a picture of Benford in front of a barrel and a half of trunk girth. I’ve never seen a Macintosh tree like that. I just think we make very good ciders here. The future of Long Island is cider.
This project is geared towards ecological preservation, what’s the byproduct of these efforts?
Benford: I feel that comes out especially in the ciders, where we’re finding these sites and it’s a combination of just preserving the trees here through pruning and just generally getting them to live as long as possible. Taking out dead wood to encourage them to continue to express themselves. Ideally over time we’ll see the ciders evolve as we’re pruning these century old trees. We’re at the point where a lot of those trees die and their culture disappears. We see them dying. The other element is grafting the trees, at the monastery site we’ve got about 300 grafted trees of about 30 different varieties that are unique to Long Island. Most of them are unidentified, some of them are probably old heirloom trees, some are just naturalized seedlings, so truly a Long Island specific apple. Preserving through genetic material, those trees will get planted around for other cider producers to utilize, spreading the genes.
When did you realize wine + ferments were culturally important to you?
Erik: I started making fermented sodas and foods, just using wild cultures from the skins of things, I didn’t know any other way. That’s the way I figured it out. From making a really bad cider, a bad water kefir, you just learn from them and scale slowly. Every year you hone your skills and dial it in a little more. If you don’t believe in something, well…
Benford: I was living and working in Alabama with some friends who had learned from Sandor Katz, a fermentation expert. We were making ginger beer and kombucha and sauerkraut and farming vegetables very poorly. My friend Lindsay who had been making the ginger beer went away for two weeks, and my friend Pete and I were like, ‘we have to learn to make the ginger beer now’. As soon as I understood the principal of a sugary liquid with a wild yeast starter, I was like oh you can fucking do that with anything! It was kind of a fun, natural process of experimenting and being interested in ecology and flavors of plants and feeling very immersed in all that. I was also living in a dry county, so we’d drive an hour to Whole Foods to buy Samuel Smith hard cider, and I was like ‘what if we could make our own cider?’. In 2014 we were just knocking on doors picking pears from people’s yards and mixing them with parking lot picked crabapples. We smashed them with a rolling pin and pushed them through a cast iron sausage press we found, and made this great cider-peary thing. Ever since then I was just like, this is what I want to do. It’s part of the reason I moved back to NY, there’s way more apples here.
Erik: It’s cool because I feel like the way we learned was obviously through trial and error, but we made our mistakes earlier on. Now we have such a better understanding of what we’re doing. Like with Benford’s wines this year, you think about it a lot differently, it’s how you make your wines. Having that conversation between both of us, we both learned similarly but through different paths, it’s just been helpful to us making our stuff in a way that’s a little more dialed in.
Benford: I don’t feel very tied to any conventions. This stuff’s for sale, but we’re still learning.
Erik: I think tasting plays a pivotal role in my approach to making wines and cider. Obviously through the pandemic it was hard for us to get together, beside from working. We weren’t hanging out. Prior to that, we were tasting a lot of stuff together including our own wines, learning about things as they happen, and then correcting them. Or just being like, cider tastes a lot like riesling sometimes. There’s a lot of similarities we found just by drinking so many types of wine. I think that’s super informative of bringing this project to get better every year.
Something you’ve drank that influenced you?
Erik: Riesling. I say that because they’re so focused, there’s no tricks. They’re precise, layered in and bright. They’re low in alcohol, or they’re just Trocken and they’re great. Every time I drink a riesling I’m just like wow. A well made cider tastes like a riesling in a way, for me, that’s something I love.
Benford: I drank this Syrah recently, with a sandwich with some kimchi on it. After Thanksgiving, like a turkey sandwich with kimchi. I had drove home for lunch during work and was like, I’ll just have a little wine with my sandwich, and then was like, fuck that’s so good. I wasn’t expecting it, it was just a quick trip home and I was floored.