Enology Wine Bar & Bistro in Saint James will hold its next Saturday afternoon wine class on August 22, and the theme is the one the calendar has been asking for since June.
A Saturday Afternoon with Summer Wines runs from 1 to 2:30 p.m. and costs $69 per person. The lineup, in the wine bar's own description, is crisp whites, bright rosés, and light reds, hand-picked by its sommeliers. Registration is required and seats are limited.
What the afternoon actually is
Enology's Saturday classes are built as guided tastings rather than lectures with a glass attached. The flight is themed, generally six wines, and the ninety minutes are split between three things: tasting the wines side by side, learning what the grape and the region are doing in each one, and hearing the story behind why that specific bottle was chosen.
That last part is not filler. Enology's list runs across six continents and 23 countries, and the selection criteria are unusually strict for a Long Island wine bar: high quality, biodynamic, organic and sustainably farmed, with heavy weight given to family-owned producers. Owner Jimmy Kilimitzoglou has put it more bluntly than any tasting sheet would. "The wine has to audition for me," he has said.
For a summer theme, the flight has an obvious job. Crisp whites, rosés and light reds are the three categories that share a structure: enough acidity to stay refreshing, moderate alcohol, and little or no drying tannin. It is also the group of wines most people serve wrong, whites straight out of a 37 degree refrigerator and reds at whatever an August living room happens to be, so a tasting where every glass arrives at the temperature it was meant for tends to be a mildly startling experience.
The room it happens in
The classes are held in Enology's dining room at 412 North Country Road, a space designed around stone, wood and metal, with a backlit library wall of bottles and book spines as its signature. Kilimitzoglou has described the intent as making the room feel like the inside of a wine barrel.
Class sizes are kept small, which is the reason these sell through rather than a marketing line. Ninety minutes of comparative tasting only works if everybody at the table can hear the person pouring and get through six glasses without a queue.
The rest of the season
The summer class is the first of three already on Enology's calendar, and the next two are more specialized.
A Saturday Afternoon with Pinot Noir follows on Saturday, September 19, 1 to 2:30 p.m., tracing the grape from Burgundy to the Willamette Valley with a few less obvious regions along the way. A Saturday Afternoon with Bordeaux comes on Saturday, October 17, same time, covering the Left Bank, the Right Bank and the art of the blend. Pricing on both is still to be announced, and registration is not yet open for either.
The education side is not an add-on at this particular wine bar. Enology is the study of winemaking, and the name was chosen on purpose. "A big component of enology is education," Kilimitzoglou has said. "We want to share our passion and expand people's palates."
If you are going
A Saturday Afternoon with Summer Wines
Enology Wine Bar & Bistro
412 N Country Rd, Saint James, NY 11780
Saturday, August 22, 1 to 2:30 p.m.
$69 per person
Registration required, seats limited
(631) 517-0277 | enologywinebar.com
Book ahead rather than turning up. The Saturday classes cap at a small number of seats and the popular themes go early, and a summer flight in late August, with the beach season closing out and the North Fork about to swing into harvest, is about as popular as the theme gets.
Loading comments…