Ternhaven Winery is a producer of hand crafted red wines on the North Fork. Grapes from mature vines in the Wesley Hall Vineyard, located on Alvah's Lane in the heart of the Cutchogue wine country, have been vinified using traditional practices, and aged in small oak casks. These wines may be enjoyed when released, but will also repay your patience if given additional bottle age.

Harold Watts went from making wine in his New York City apartment to operating Greenport's Ternhaven Cellars, the North Fork's easternmost winery. The former Columbia University economics professor traded in his academic life for the challenge of operating Ternhaven Cellars in the late 1990s.

What motivated Mr. Watts to want to make wine? It all started while visiting friends in Pennsylvania, who were in the business. He found himself traveling to Pennsylvania more and more often, learning their techniques. Back in New York, he and his students scrounged around looking for used equipment they could install at the professor's apartment. Then, in 1994, he bought five acres of land on Alvah's Lane, just off Route 48 in Cutchogue.

"If you buy some land, you can always grow some cabbages," he jokes. Farming is something he knew from his childhood. He grew up on a family farm in Oregon. And although he gravitated to New York City, he still remembers the two-room schoolhouse he attended as a child.

Mr. Watts completed his undergraduate studies in economics at the University of Oregon and his graduate work at Yale University. Then he spent six years teaching at Yale and was assistant director of a research organization there before a fellowship took him to Norway. His academic career took him to Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., where he worked in President Lyndon Johnson's administration. Ever the academician, Mr. Watts won a Guggenheim Fellowship that took him to California and Europe, then spent a year back in Washington, D.C. at the Census Bureau, and another year at the Urban Institute.