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Long Island Wine Country

Two North Fork spots made a recent Travelzoo list of Long Island’s coolest towns. (Credit: Northforker file photo)

Long Island Wine Country

A graphic recently published by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog shows in easy-to-see detail that the greatest concentration of wineries not located on the West Coast is in the Empire State.

The map of the United States, displaying where the country’s breweries and wineries are, paints the west as king of American vino but also shows the significance of New York as a wine region.

With 373 wineries statewide, New York beats out Virginia and its 253 wineries for the title of biggest East Coast producer. Those numbers were provided by the New York Wine and Grape Foundation and Virginia Wine respectively.

That the profile of New York’s wines is on the rise was made clear when Wine Enthusiast named our state “Wine Region of the Year” in October.

Of the US’s 8,806 wineries in 2012, 3,754 of them were located in California, according to the Wine Institute. Washington State has more than 850 wineries, according to the Washington State Wine Commission and Oregon has more than 540, according to the Oregon Wine Growers Association.

Also of note is the number of wineries in unlikely places such as Florida and Wyoming.

“The map also shows that wineries are everywhere, and in places you wouldn’t necessary expect,” writes Christopher Ingraham. “It means that one day, somebody sat down and said ‘I bet people would like to drink Florida wine.’ And not just one somebody, but dozens of them!”

The number of wineries in the U.S. has grown 260 percent since 1998, the Post reports. But that number appears to be plateauing as the number of breweries up 175 percent, with almost all of that growth since 2010.

However, the growing number of breweries on Long Island barely makes an impression on the map, which highlights Colorado and California and the Pacific Northwestern states as the country’s biggest beer producers.

See the map here

 

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