Carlo DeVito remembers that there were just a handful of people writing about East Coast wine and wineries when he created the East Coast Wineries blog in July 2005.
“You had the Virginia Wine Mafia, as they were jokingly called, and you had a great guy, Rich Auffrey, up in Boston. He was writing some things, and there was just a smattering of [other] people,” such as Leon Adams and Hudson Cattell.
Today, that number has increased 20-fold or more, accelerated by the Substack platform. “There’s way more people writing about wine on the East Coast than there ever were before — really, really good writers — and it’s funny because we’ve lamented the decline of the newspaper wine writer, right? Guys like Frank Prial and all that. I mean, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, I think, are the only two papers left that actually have a wine columnist.”
But DeVito — he is to East Coast wine writing what Derek Jeter is to the Yankees, who owns the record for longevity with 20 seasons in New York pinstripes — continues to pound out stories that head to his blog and are also posted on his Facebook page.
He had put up 152 posts as of Sept. 18 and noted a couple of weeks ago that his blog had topped 2 million individual page views since its inception. As he wrote in the post, thinking about all of the years covering East Coast wine, beer, spirits and cider, “It has been a long time. And I have been witness, and participant, to an incredible revolution. Watching this industry mature from well-meaning amateurs (in the main) to regions filled with educated, experienced professionals.”
He started chuckling as he talked about those early posts. “They weren’t particularly pretty, he said, before segueing into a story.
“I used to ride my bike to the Jersey Shore [from Trenton], and I used to pass this place called Cream Ridge Winery. I’ll never forget it. Tom Amabile couldn’t make wine. But he was the nicest, nicest man, and he let me come to the back of the winery and see how he made the wine. And he was a retired PSE&G guy, and he made a lovely cherry wine, actually. I used to drink that. That was the first. And then I started getting involved, going to local wineries in Connecticut, Jersey, New York, and that’s and the more places I found, the more places I wanted to try, and I was living in New York City, and they had all the wines from the Finger Lakes and Long Island at the Union Green Market at Union Square, and that was kind of like the weird progression of it, and I just started following it, and my wife and I went to the Virginia Wine Festival. We went to the Pennsylvania Wine Festival, and we just started doing it as a goof, and it evolved into a passion.”
A longtime book editor and publisher, he oversaw the wine book program of Wine Spectator as well as worked with Kevin Zraly, Oz Clarke, Matt Kramer, Tom Stevenson, Evan Dawson, Greg Moore, Howard Goldberg, and many other wine writers. In addition, he has written more than a dozen books, from “East Coast Wineries” and “Big Whiskey” to biographies on well-known sports figures such as D. Wayne Lukas, Wellington Mara, Yogi Berra, and Phil Rizzuto.
“I was living in New Jersey at the time, and, you know, I started going to like 4JG’s, and then I started going to Unionville. I mean, we were a club member at Unionville back in the ’90s. That’s kind of how it all started, and everywhere we went, we just thought, oh, if there’s a local winery, we’ll stop in. That’s not the reason we traveled, but it was just one of those things. It was curiosity more than anything else.”
As he pointed out in his post celebrating his page-view milestone, he has not only seen the industry that documents the wine industry grow, but he has also seen the East Coast industry itself evolve as second- and third-generation members of families take over, coming out of Cornell and UC Davis and Penn State and other programs that have developed in quality and stature, since as Surry Community College in North Carolina.
DeVito has tasted the wines of the veteran winemakers, such as Long Island wine legends Roman Roth at Wölffer Estate Vineyard and Rich Olson-Harbich at Bedell Cellars, for years. Now he’s seeing the one-time apprentices taking over and either maintaining or raising the bar at a number of wineries, including Marin Brennan at Bedell and Corey Creek. His posts on Brennan in early September couldn’t have been complimentary.
He wrote: “There comes a time when an artist, an understudy, or a talent in waiting, must come out from place where it has been hiding in shadow. Georgia O’Keefe eclipsed Arthur Wesley Dow, Frida Kahlo emerged from Diego Rivera, Mary Cassatt surpassed her teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme, Mary Shelley slipped the shadows of her mentor William Godwin and husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Virginia Woolf exceeded her father and mentor Sir Leslie Stephen. The list goes on and on. Today, we add one more name to the those rolls. Marin Brennan (Marin is pronounced /MA -rin/ like the county in California). Forbes proclaimed, “Marin Brennan Isn’t Reinventing Long Island Wine—She’s Refining It.” That is just about right. There are few winemakers whose releases I am excited about as Marin’s.”
He told The Wine Classroom, “I’ll tell you, she’s really emblematic of the whole region. She has been there for a while behind a guy like Rich Olson Harbitt, and she’s making wine for both Bedell and Corey Creek. And you just see the maturation of, not only just of the winemaker, but of the region. The wines were so unique and so different that she was doing for Corey Creek. They gave her an opportunity, and she really ran with it. She also does this lovely lavender wine, where they put lavender in the wine as they’re aging it. … She’s just really stretching what a small boutique winery can do, but on the other hand, she’s making really great solid wines for a brand like Bedell that’s making 150 to 300 cases per wine. It’s a much larger concern. They were making good wines before. It’s not like Rich was a mediocre winemaker. He’s been getting 90s forever.”
From there, he honed in on his point about Brennan as one example of what he is seeing from New Hampshire down to South Carolina.
“I thought, wow, this is what’s going on in the region, and when I say the region, not just Long Island, but on the East Coast. I mean, you’re really seeing, guys like you and me and Lenn [Thompson], and several others like Frank Morgan, and, you know, I don’t need to mention everybody, but when we first got into this, there was plenty of plonk to be had, and I just tried to write nice things about the wines I liked. But now there’s a lot more really good wine being made here on the East Coast. When I first got into this, fascinated by this business, it was a bunch of well-meaning amateurs who were getting into the business and wanted to start a mom and pop boutique winery, and now you’re seeing second-generation, highly-trained people with great imaginations taking over the business, and it’s just really great to see the the region, the coast, take on this whole new mantle of winemaking that’s coming around.”
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Paul, great post about "THE MAN" who put East Coast Wines on the US Wine Map! I met Carlo over 15 years ago and have followed his writing/posts/work ever since and occasionally run into him at wine events and wineries. His dedication and sincerity to the East Coast wine industry is a major reason for the recognition and expansion of what has now become a real player in the U.S. wine world! Thanks to Carlo (and you of course!) for making so much happen for our East Coast industry!
I, too, met Carlo some years ago, at the Eastern Winery Exhibition. I won't tell too many tales about the dinners and conversations we shared, but I will say Paul is absolutely right about Carlo's writing and influence. And Carlo is very serious when he says this journey has been all about his curiosity; it's a truth.
All this matters to me because I was a different kind of curious amateur, one with an interest in the wine but more interested in documenting the industry's evolution. Working in a parallel field today, I enjoy sharing with my audience how prohibition robbed not only our national treasury, but our beverage industry of talent and institutional knowledge. We eventually learned our lesson--one we should have learned from our Canadian brothers much sooner!--but the momentum was gone and we had to re-learn many things we'd forgotten.
The upside to all of that was post-war we had people like Frank Konstantin emigrate to the U.S. and teach us crazy new ideas that continue to--no pun intended--bear fruit. The Hudson Valley revival, New York's Farm Winery Act (thank you, Steve) that begat Connecticut's own Act, resulting in an artist in a small Northwestern Connecticut town having his wine served at a White House dinner, to Virginia's recent triumphs...
This is a GREAT time to be around east-coast wines, made all the more enjoyable by characters like Carlo.
I've gone off the rails here, so I'll stop. Carlo did a much better job than I ever would have: my sincere thanks, Carlo. I'll be looking for you in Lancaster, and I'll bring the story I promised when we last met, in Lancaster.
Cheers!