Spectacular art work on a label is the perfect match for a sophisticated blend in the bottle: Bedell’s Gallery wine with a Ross Bleckner label, raises the bar on quality.

Long Island: Bedell Gallery white

This is a busy season for winemaking on the East End with vineyard managers fine tuning decisions on exactly when to pick each grape varietal; and vineyard workers putting in long hours on the labor intensive job of getting the grapes off the vines and to the crush pad in good condition; and the winemakers and their crews selecting and pressing the grapes, and starting the important fermentation process. Although wines from previous vintages can be released at any time of year, fall is a busy season on the retail end and an interesting time to gauge just what the wineries are up to. Today, and in several columns to follow, I will look at some of the more notable of the current releases.

Continuing its series of labels by prominent artists, Bedell Cellars has just released a white blend called 2005 Bedell Gallery, featuring a label with a specially commissioned artwork by Ross Bleckner, who lives in Sagaponack. Mr. Bleckner is in the top tier of contemporary artists, and the label, a print of a painting suggesting the fast freeze frame of a bird in flight, rendered in blue and white on a black background, is stunning in its simplicity and drama.

Drinking wine can be a complete sensory and emotional experience, and of course seeing the label influences how we taste the wine. (Forget blind tastings, or at least leave them to professionals.) Seeing a label tells most of us something about the people who made the wine, and this is true whether the label is recently created or has a pedigree and a look going back generations. The Bleckner label is both an indicator and an invitation. It sets you up to expect something rich and delicious and important, and the winemaker delivers. I don’t think that the label was intentionally created to match the characteristics of the wine, or the wine created for the label, but they happen to be a very good match. Looking at the label, you want and expect a wine that has clarity and depth that is alive and dynamic— and is captured by its creator at a peak moment.

I think this is the most important wine we have so far seen from the hand of John Levenberg, the very talented young winemaker at Bedell. It takes a certain maturity and assuredness for a winery to produce sophisticated blends along with more predictable varietals, and Bedell, with its Taste series, and now this Gallery wine, is certainly exhibiting that boldness. The 2005 Bedell Gallery is 52 per cent chardonnay, 32 per cent sauvignon blanc, and 16 per cent viognier. It is structured and complex—after all, this is a purposeful piece of winemaking—with a lovely fragrance and a balanced range of citrus, floral and mineral components. A tempered oak flavor gives it the richness you might expect in a classic white Burgundy, a Chassagne-Montrachet, for example.

I don’t mean by that that I think Mr. Levenberg is attempting to imitate any particular French wine. He has too much confidence to be a copycat. But in trying to describe the wine in a general way, France comes more readily to my mind than New World wine regions, although there have been precedents here on Long Island, most notably from

Channing Daughters. Channing’s 2004 Meditazione (now sold out) is a similarly ambitious and similarly successful wine blend that includes the same three grapes as well as small quantities of four other grapes. Ultimately, what Mr. Levenberg has achieved with this wine is to join the ranks of a few other highly accomplished East End winemakers and to help raise the bar for the quality of Long Island white wines—and that is a formidable achievement.

The 2005 Bedell Gallery with the Bleckner label sells at the winery for $45.