Explore Long Island

Actress Naomi Watts was on Shelter Island Thursday filming her latest flick, "Funny Games," a remake of the 1997 movie about two psychotic young men holding a family captive in a lakeside cabin.

At first glance, it is just an old race car. Emblems, a cage around the driver and number 54. History is what makes it special.

John Ross regarded the large, square plate set down before him. Smack in the center was a piece of seared foie gras drizzled with blackberry reduction. It sat on a slice of vanilla-scented French toast and was flanked by a chilled shot glass of late-harvest chardonnay.

Charles Massoud takes a seat on the back porch overlooking the sprawling Paumanok Vineyards in Aquebogue, but he may as well be sitting on top of the world.

Where wineries come, wine tours will follow.

Not just grapes are growing in North Fork wine country - tourism is, too.

The land stretches from the strip shopping plazas of Riverhead to the bluffs of Orient Point, 100 square miles of fields and creeks shaped by glaciers and reshaped by Indians, then English settlers, then Irish and Polish immigrants. Now it's changing as never before.

About five years ago, real estate broker Enzo Morabito recounts, he took Richard Gere to look at the North Fork, only to have the actor reconsider after realizing exactly how low-key the lifestyle was. He wasn't the only one.

Monica Harbes invites a visitor beyond the trademark whitewashed fence at the Harbes Family Farm in Mattituck to an 1800s-era barn that's expected to play an important new role for this North Fork agritourism destination.

Soft-spoken Ed Harbes of Mattituck may not seem like a player who helped change the way farming happens on Long Island, but he is. Earlier than many other farmers, he embraced what nowadays is often called "agri-entertainment."

Ruthie Ruffner doesn't like to gripe.

Almost 45 years ago, Jeff Hallock was a kid riding his bike past a creaky old house on South Jamesport Avenue, thinking the same spooky thoughts his friends were thinking. "To all of us kids, it was a haunted house," Hallock says of the 19th century Jamesport mansion. "When we got older, in high school, we'd sneak in on Halloween nights, just for something to do."

Ken Coulter grew to love the North Fork after owning a summer home in Cutchogue for eight years. When the 39-year-old tired of the frenetic pace of Wall Street, he left his job as a bond salesman and his home in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn to move to Orient to live there year-round.

In July, the Southold High School Class of '56 held its 50th reunion. Of the graduating class of 36, 31 are alive and half of them still call Southold home.

The only official senior communities in the Town of Southold are Peconic Landing and Founders Village. Pheasant Run in Greenport has a large number of older residents, but it does not have an age requirement.

Aldo Maiorana, man of contradictions: a North Fork fixture who was born in Sicily and raised in France, a baker and coffee roaster who prefers to cook, a business owner with little interest in making money.

Time was when Long Island had dairies that delivered milk to the doorstep, fresh and cold each morning. Long Island cows gave the milk for those dairies.

Eleven years ago, Sylvia Daley left a successful career in the world of international high finance to open Quintessentials, a bed and breakfast in East Marion.

Fred Lee grew up a Long Island farmer.

SPAT is the acronym for Southold Project in Aquaculture Training. It's also the word for shellfish in the larval state, and that's what SPAT produces.

It took a 9-year-old to save a farm.

The crisis for Braun Seafood came in the early 1980s.

By filling their tasting rooms with art, music, informative programs and food-and-wine events in the tradition of more seasoned vineyards in Northern California's Napa and Sonoma valleys, Long Island's stylish wineries have turned the North Fork into a year-round tourist destination. Since many are family affairs, they feature a variety of child-friendly seasonal activities (and all stock water or juice for visiting kids as well as designated drivers.) Also, their shops sell not only grape products, such as jams and jellies, but imaginative and well-priced theme gifts from crystal goblets to the inevitable T-shirt asserting "Life is a Cabernet."

At am art-filled chateau amid a sea of vineyards, a trio plays mellow jazz as fledgling enophiles intently swirl, sniff, sip (and sometimes spit) -- trying to fathom the difference between claret and merlot.

Sandwiched neatly between the East End's North and South Forks, Shelter Island is an often-overlooked splendor of winding nature trails, secluded beach nooks and simple small-town charm.

The clarion call "chicka-dee-dee-dee" ricochets around the tangled woods, and soon trailside boughs are dotted with portly little birds. Gently as falling leaves, one after another flutters down to delicately peck an offering of seeds from a visitor's outstretched palm. The black-capped chickadees of Morton National Wildlife Refuge have stolen another heart.

Bicyclists love Shelter Island for its laid-back New England atomosphere and gently rolling, tree-shaded byways – many ending at small beaches. To avoid the long weekend ferry lines in summer, savvy day-trippers leave their car in North Haven or Greenport, walk their bikes aboard the boat (or rent them on the island), then meander around on two wheels.