The family name on the deed when this farm was settled in 1736 was Wines. Two hundred ninety years later, the land at Mill Lane and Main Road in Mattituck is finally going to live up to it. Vines on Mill, the winery taking shape across 66 acres of the old Ruland farm, is now cleared to make wine, state records show, and the North Fork wine trail is about to add its newest name.

The family behind Rose Hill and Croteaux

Vines on Mill is the third act for the Frankel family, who have quietly become one of the biggest forces in North Fork wine. Randy Frankel, a former Goldman Sachs managing director who also holds a part-ownership stake in baseball's Tampa Bay Rays, bought Shinn Estate Vineyards in Mattituck with his wife Barbara in 2017 and renamed it Rose Hill Vineyards, the Oregon Road property with a four-room inn and a tasting room built around a London pub bar from the 1920s. In 2019 the Frankels became majority partners in Croteaux Vineyards in Southold, the rosé-only farm with its 1749 barn that has become one of the region's most recognizable stops.

It is a family operation in the literal sense: one Frankel daughter, Chelsea, manages Rose Hill, and another, Amanda, runs Croteaux.

In July 2021 the family added the biggest piece yet, paying $3.2 million for the three parcels of the Ruland farm, 66 acres straddling Mill Lane just off Main Road in Mattituck. Frankel said at the time that the goal was nothing less than the most beautiful vineyard on the North Fork.

A farm that has been worked since 1736

The land itself is one of the oldest continuously farmed properties on the North Fork. The Wines family settled it in 1736, and stewardship passed to the Rulands through marriage generations later. The farmhouse on Main Road dates to roughly 1716, and the Frankels have been restoring it with its original character intact rather than replacing it. When archaeologists surveyed the property, they turned up buttons from British military uniforms of the Revolutionary War era.

That history is part of why the purchase mattered. Sixty-six acres of open farmland on the North Fork is a development site to plenty of buyers. This one stayed agriculture.

70,000 vines, 12 varietals, and fruit that is ready

Planting began in April 2022, with roughly 70,000 vines brought in from Northern California, spanning a dozen varietals including sauvignon blanc, cabernet franc and merlot. The rows run on both sides of Mill Lane, so the vineyard is not something you visit so much as something you drive through.

Wine grapes take about three growing seasons to produce a harvest worth making wine from, which is exactly the math that makes this fall interesting. Vines planted in the spring of 2022 are now in their prime early years, and the timing of the state's green light, entered into the record this week, lines up with an operation that has fruit and intends to use it.

The family's announced plans for the property include a production facility and a tasting room. No opening date has been made public yet, and the smart guess is that the pouring comes later: wine made this fall needs time in tank and barrel before anyone tastes it. But the hard part, the part that takes five years and cannot be rushed, is done.

What it means for the wine trail

The North Fork has dozens of producers, but genuinely new wineries are rare. Most changes on the trail are handoffs, an existing vineyard getting a new owner and a new sign. A farm planted from bare ground into a working winery is a different thing, and the last few years have produced very few of them.

For a reader who spends fall weekends out east, the practical takeaway is simple: there is a new name to watch on Route 25 in Mattituck, from a family whose other two properties, Rose Hill and Croteaux, have earned the benefit of the doubt. When the tasting room opens, the wine in the glass will have grown up within sight of it, on land that has been feeding Long Island since before the Revolution.

Until then, the vines themselves are worth the drive past. Mill Lane in October, with 66 acres of young vineyard turning gold on both sides of the road, is about as good as the North Fork looks.