Last November, at the Long Island Wine Country Legacy Awards Dinner, a couple hundred local wine industry pros gathered to honor one of their own: Kip Bedell. It was such a who’s who of Long Island wine that if a giant crater had opened and swallowed Cutchogue’s North Fork Country Club that evening, well, about 98 percent of the local wine-knowledge talent across a few generations would have been lost to history.
And perhaps, in the nascent days of Long Island wine country, it might have sometimes felt like the whole thing could come tumbling down. But that wasn’t in the DNA of the early pioneers like Bedell, who at the time may well have had no notion that they were building something bigger than themselves — they didn’t have time to ponder such lofty legacy ideals. They just simply couldn’t stop themselves. At 80, the foundation for quality created by the Bedell Cellars founder and his wife, Susan, is indeed something to step back and admire.
A who’s who of Long Island’s wine industry gathered to honor Kip Bedell last November at the North Fork Country Club. (Photo credit: Jeremy Garretson)
What was supposed to be a little five-acre hobby in 1979 turned into a 50-acre award-winning winery that garnered enough attention to be sought out and purchased in an offer Bedell couldn’t refuse by Michael Lynne, the former head of New Line Cinema, in 2000. It has easily become one of the flagbearers for quality and the excellence that can be achieved from our soils.
A Long Island native, Bedell is happy these days to embrace his first passion — painting — and spending time with his family but the gold standard he set at his namesake winery continues through its current director of winemaking, Rich Olsen-Harbich, whose work in setting sustainable standards for Long Island wineries was also honored this year, and through winemaker Marin Brennan, who embraces the tenet that Bedell created all those years ago: terroir-driven wines that turn heads.
Plain-spoken and not just a little humble about it all, Bedell took the time to talk with us about how it all happened. Here’s what he had to say…
Growing up…
I’m a lifelong Long Islander. I grew up in West Hempstead with my older sister and younger brother. It was great there. We’d go out in the in the morning and in the summertime the folks would say, well, you know, when the streetlights come on, you come home for dinner. There were no worries, you know? We went everywhere on our bikes. It was a different time, but I had a very nice childhood.
Summers by the sea…
My grandfather, Steven Bedell, bought a beautiful house out here in Mattituck, right on the Peconic Bay, and I have fond memories coming out as early as I can remember. I remember just loving being out here and being down by the water and going out fishing. I’ll never forget that, really. Which, of course, is one thing that brought us out here again many years later. While it’s different, it’s still a special place out here, for sure.
My grandfather was the one who started the fuel company. He was actually quite an entrepreneur. He not only started the fuel company, which became very successful, he was a builder, and he was the first president of the West Hempstead National Bank. There are two streets in West Hempstead named for him — one is Bedell Avenue and one is Steven Street, which he had his house on. He was quite a guy.
A family business…
My father took over from his father a fuel company called Nassau Mutual Fuel Company that my grandfather started in 1923, I believe, and at first it was a coal company. I remember as a kid seeing these huge piles of coal. So that’s going to be in the in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, even. When I joined the company, which was after I after I got out of the Army in 1970, I joined the fuel company too.
The artist’s way…
I went to a Waldorf School [of Garden City] for high school. Now, the Waldorf School was sort of an offshoot of the [Rudolf] Steiner School. It’s kind of a little different education, where they teach you all the regular stuff but they kind of emphasize the art. And whether it’s, you know, painting, drawing, dance, music or whatever, they definitely put an emphasis on the arts. I was there from eighth grade ‘til I graduated and that’s where I picked up quite a bit of interest in in art, and, in fact, applied to college as a fine arts major. I was realistic enough to think, well, I’m not going to be a Picasso, but I was thinking more like commercial art or architecture. So, I was [in college] for about a week, and as you know, you get there and you talk to all your advisors, and I changed my major from art to business administra-tion and that’s what I got my degree in. That was actually a smart move, I think.
Suddenly Susan…
I met my wife, Susan, at Stetson University in Florida. The funny thing is we were kind of like friends. She was dating somebody else, and I was dating somebody else, but we were good friends and we liked each other. When we both were out of school, she came up to work in New York and we started seeing each other again. And then we got to be much more serious, you know — instead of just being friends we were other than friends! She was a big part of the beginning, in the early days of the winery. She was instrumental in designing our original label with the two swans, the black and white swan.
A vision of vino…
It started with my brother, who gave me a winemaking kit for Christmas one year, and one thing led to another. I was starting to make some pretty decent wine and I got down the basics of it, and I feel like I have a pretty good palate. You really can’t be a good winemaker without having a good nose and a good palate. But I was trying to scrounge around to buy some grapes, and we heard about the Hargraves planting out here, and then Dave Mudd planting out here, and we came and talked to both of them. They were very gracious and had us in their house –– this was, like, ’74. I bought grapes from the Hargraves and some from Dave Mudd. It was probably chardonnay and maybe merlot — it was a long time ago! I got very, very interested in the wine-growing thing and we said let’s look around for a small piece of property. We were thinking, you know, we’ll get five acres or something like that, and we’ll have a little hobby vineyard. It sounded like a good idea, but somewhere along the line, Susan and I aren’t quite sure what happened, but instead of buying five acres we bought 50 acres.
A job and a family…
My son Kip Junior was born in 1970. Susan and I started coming out [to the East End], spending a couple weeks in the summers here, and we hooked up with Ann Wickham,
Tom Wickham’s mother. She and her husband, John, owned Wickham’s Farm at the time, and Ann not only worked at the farm but was also a realtor. We got to know her and ended up looking around at properties with Anne, and that’s how we ended up buying our property in 1979.
Our son Josh was born in 1980, and we planted that year about a month later. So he was a little teeny baby when we planted our first vines. In about 1980, I also took over as the president of the [fuel] company, too, and eventually my father retired. Instead of being, you know, a little hobby, all of a sudden it was a business. I tell you, there’s still some of that original planting out there, on the right behind the winery, a little bit to the west, you can go down there and see some of those vines. Their trunks are gigantic. They’re 40-something years old now.
One barrel to another…
From ‘80 to ’90 I was running the fuel company and doing the winery, and so we were kind of running back and forth. It was coming down to a decision time in the late ‘80s, when the vineyard and winery got busier and busier. I was spending more and more time out here because I was making the wine, which we started doing in ’85, and I was selling the wine, I was delivering the wine. You know, it was crazy. We had to make a decision because we were stretched too thin, and we had the two kids — something’s got to give. So, we decided that we thought that the winery could be a success. We could make a living at it, and so we decided to sell the fuel company. What I really loved was making wine. It was where I was able to put my creative stuff into instead of painting, which I just didn’t have time to do. There’s really a lot of art in in winemaking. Now, there’s also science. It’s probably a 50/50 deal. But you also have a lot of leeway to make that in your own style, and that’s where the art comes into it.
Building a dream…
Back in the early ‘80s, there weren’t that many of us here [making wine]. So we were all friends. We all swapped equipment and talked all the time about the winemaking, what worked, what didn’t work, what was good. And that goes for what happened in the vineyards, too. All the vineyard managers would talk about what was working in the vineyard, what wasn’t working. And of course, it was a process. You could see it in the wine from the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s, there was just a huge curve going up in the quality of the wines. And a lot of that was the work in the vineyards and all we learned how to do. To hedge and open up the canopy with leaf pulling and crop management. All that paid off in the quality of the grapes just getting better and better.
Rows and rows of stories…
It’s been a cool journey. After doing it for that many years and really enjoying every minute of it, when I left [winemaking at Bedell Cellars] in 2017 I got back into painting. The first year was pretty weird, and especially that first harvest of 2018. That was strange. You have to really experience a harvest in order to understand. It’s the culmination of the growing season. And it’s all this work of the growing season packed into, like, six weeks, seven days a week for 12 to 16 hours a day. It’s hugely exhausting, but it’s hugely exhilarating at the same time. I have to say now, I don’t miss it really at all. I’m very busy with other things, and not just the painting. I play golf. I’ve got a boat. I’ve got my family, my grandkids, so I don’t miss the winery, but I’m glad I did it. It was very gratifying because not everybody can do what they really love doing and do it for a living.
And Susan’s happy because she sees me a little bit more, you know, especially in the fall.
