Epoxy

North Fork

Suffolk County, New York, USA

Also known as North Fork of Long Island, Peconic Bay, Shelter Island, Orient

In 1973 a young couple bought a potato farm in Cutchogue and planted European wine grapes in it. Everyone told them the climate was wrong.

Alex and Louisa Hargrave had been steered here by a Cornell professor who thought Long Island had good sites nobody was using. The first wine came in 1977 and was not much. The 1980 merlot was, and it was the first merlot grown east of the Rockies.

The reason it works is on this board. The North Fork is a narrow arm with Long Island Sound on one side and Peconic Bay on the other, so water moderates the temperature from both directions and the growing season runs long. The soil is well drained glacial loam, which is also why it grew potatoes.

There are now something approaching ninety wineries across Long Island. The Hargraves sold up in 1999, and the original vines are still in the ground at what is now Castello di Borghese.

Details

Feature: Coastline
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Maple
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: May 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

How this one was made

Maple, and wall to wall. The flood covers the entire face and runs off all four edges before it comes back on the sander. On a board where the water is most of the picture, that is the right way round.

The lettering and the north arrow are the negative. Neither is engraved. Both stand at the original surface inside the poured area, so the epoxy goes over them and the sanding brings the tops back as bare maple with blue around them. This kind of lettering needs the cut clean at full depth, since there is no fill to tidy an edge afterwards, and maple gives the least sanding margin of the woods we use. Two things pulling against each other on the same board.

The geography is bays inside bays. A long peninsula down the middle, an island below it, and channels between them narrow enough that the dam walls nearly touch. Small islands scattered through the bay come down to a millimetre or two of maple ringed on every side.