There’s no place like loam.

Unlike most of the winegrowing soils of Europe, Long Island’s soils are geologically new; the last glacier receded only 11,000 years ago, when tremendous mountains of ice ground rock into gravel, sand and silt. As the glacier melted, the resulting deluge carried and sorted the sand and gravel, which were deposited on a broad area known as the glacial outwash plain. As the ice kept melting, this plain was covered by water and wind-deposited silt, clay and fine sand, creating the topsoil of the island.