Amityville is getting a winery. Not a wine bar, not a tasting counter inside a shop: a working winery with its own cellar, rising right now at 292 Merrick Road on the site of the old Bulldog.

The people behind it

The application that went before the Village of Amityville planning board names Lilly Kanarova, one of the restaurateurs behind Salumi, the tapas and wine bar that has been a fixture in Massapequa for years, along with a sister restaurant in Garden City. Her partners in the project include Andrew Isaacson, the Advanced Sommelier who founded the Amityville Cellars label in 2019 and has been quietly making wine under that name on the North Fork ever since.

That is the odd, wonderful part of this story: Amityville Cellars already exists. The label predates the building. Isaacson produces its wines in Mattituck with grapes bought from Onabay Vineyard in Southold, and the bottles are already in local stores and on restaurant lists around Long Island. What is being built on Merrick Road is the home the label never had, in the village it was named for.

The paper trail tells the same story from a different angle. Amityville Cellars Holdings was registered with the state in August 2024 out of a Massapequa address, the village planning board took up the site plan the following spring, and the wine itself has been in production since long before either. This is the rare local project that arrives with a track record attached: the product came first and the building is catching up to it.

A different kind of Long Island winery

Nearly every winery on Long Island is an estate winery: a vineyard you drive to, with the tasting room standing in the middle of the vines that made the wine. Amityville Cellars works the other way. It is what the French call a negociant, a producer that buys grapes from a grower it trusts and makes wine under its own label. The model is common in Burgundy and rare out here, and it is exactly what lets a winery live on a village main road rather than in a field on the North Fork.

For a South Shore resident, that distinction collapses into something simple. The North Fork is a long drive from Amityville on the best of days. Starting next year, wine made from Southold grapes will be poured on Merrick Road.

The building on the old Bulldog corner

The plans the village reviewed describe a new one-story restaurant and winery with a cellar below, plus a greenhouse and outdoor dining, on the north side of Merrick Road just west of Bayview Avenue. The building runs about 7,000 square feet, and anyone driving Merrick Road can watch it taking shape now. The company's own timeline puts the opening in early 2027.

The corporate paperwork has been in place since 2024, the plans went through village review in 2025, and the project has moved from drawings to framing. In a village whose name still drags a certain haunted house behind it in every search result, a winery is a genuinely new kind of landmark.

What to do until 2027

The wines are not hypothetical. Amityville Cellars bottles are in stores and on wine lists now, which means the sensible move is to try one this fall and form an opinion before the tasting room opens and everyone else does. If the wine matches the pedigree, a sommelier picking the grapes and the Salumi team running the room, the South Shore is about to get a destination the North Fork cannot match on the one axis that matters every February: proximity.