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Condé Nast Traveler
25-05-2025
- Condé Nast Traveler
11 Best Wineries Near New York City for a Vineyard Getaway
Just beyond New York City, a different pace takes hold—one where vineyard rows stretch into the horizon and tasting rooms hum with warmth and character. The wine regions surrounding the city are rich and varied, from the breezy North Fork of Long Island to the lush, rolling hills of the Hudson Valley and the quiet calm of Connecticut farmland. These escapes are close enough for a weekend getaway, yet feel worlds away. New Yorkers who have yet to plan an East Coast wine outing might not know just how many options are in their (extended) backyard: You can find standout vineyards like Macari with its sustainable edge, Millbrook and Rose Hill with their Hudson Valley roots, and Paradise Hills in Connecticut, where wholesome and charming countryside meets modern winemaking. These regions, a stone's throw away from NYC, are dotted with wineries offering everything from elevated Chardonnay and earthy Cab Franc to pét-nats and skin-contact blends. Whether you're sipping on a sunlit patio or cozying up fireside with a flight, these vineyards deliver a mix of sensory pleasure and scenic calm. Read on for 11 wineries near NYC that make a lovely backdrop for a wine-soaked weekend out of the city, all reachable by car or train in three hours or less. Plus, where to stay nearby to make a weekend trip out of it. Hudson Valley Millbrook Vineyards & Winery Where: Millbrook, New York Millbrook Vineyards and Winery is nestled in the Hudson Valley, and is one of the region's flagship award-winning wineries. While the menu rotates monthly, the winery produces up to 15,000 cases of wine annually, so that guests can guarantee delightful sips on high-rated varietals of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet France, Tocai Friulan, Riesling, and more. The 130-acre property is an old dairy farm converted into an estate, now part of the Dutchess Country Wine Trail. It includes a 30 acre vineyard and walking trails through orchards, woodlands, and farms. Visitors can expect regular events with food trucks and live music, as well as outdoor wine tastings on the weekends from May to October. Otherwise, indoor tastings are offered daily year-round. (For groups of 10 or more, call the tasting room to schedule a wine tasting.) To make a day—or perhaps a weekend—of it, visit Clinton Vineyards and Milea Estate Vineyard too; each a 15-minute drive away. Get there and around: The winery offers a transportation service called the Vineyard Express. The $25 shuttle meets those coming in from NYC's Grand Central station via the Hudson Line at Poughkeepsie train station. (Be sure to make a reservation as space is limited, especially during the warmer months.) Otherwise, the drive from NYC falls anywhere between 1.5 to 2 hours. Where to stay nearby: For a romantic storybook stay: The Millbrook Inn For a lovingly restored country-home feel: Troutbeck The cheery outside seating area at Hudson Chatham Winery in Ghent, New York Hudson-Chatham Winery Where: Ghent, New York
Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Drugs, prison, wild affairs – welcome to marriage to the king of LSD
Even before meeting and marrying Timothy Leary, the self-styled prophet of LSD, who urged America to 'turn on, tune in, drop out', Rosemary Woodruff had displayed a distinct propensity for choosing unsuitable men. Her first husband, an air force pilot, whom she married at 17, beat her so often he caused a miscarriage. Her second was a Dutch jazz accordion player, who taught her 'how to snort, smoke and inhale', and according to one friend 'treated her like s--t'. The daughter of a magician's assistant and serial debtor, Woodruff had abandoned her job as an air stewardess and was living with yet another jazz musician, and a junkie when, in 1965, she met Timothy Leary. Having been dismissed as a lecturer from Harvard, where he was pursuing research into the mind-expanding qualities of psychedelic drugs, Leary had established himself at Millbrook, the rambling estate in upstate New York owned by the oil heiress Peggy Hitchcock, and founded the Castalia Foundation (named after the intellectual colony in Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game), undergoing a transformation from tweed-clad professor to self-styled high priest of what William Burroughs would dyspeptically describe as an LSD fuelled 'religious do-good cult'. Arriving with a friend for a guided LSD session, Woodruff was swept off her feet by – as Susannah Cahalan writes in a new biography – 'the alluring silver-haired psychologist', who had 'high cheekbones on a handsome face that projected a high IQ'. 'You remind me of someone I once loved,' he told her. The practised inventory of pick-up lines, and the fact that Leary's first wife had died by suicide, might have sounded a warning note. In most histories of the psychedelic 1960s, and of Leary himself, Woodruff is largely overlooked. But The Acid Queen, an eye-widening account of the madcap melange of drugs, radical politics and idealism, and the quixotic search for kicks and deeper truths that made up the 1960s, places her centre stage in Leary's life as collaborator and inspiration at a time when his evangelism for LSD led to him being being described by Richard Nixon as the most dangerous man in America. Leary was a brilliant, charming trickster, whose initially sober scientific research into mind-expanding substances had become cloaked in messianic fervour. According to Leary, LSD connected the user to 'the long telephone wire of history that goes back two million years' – 'a key evolutionary touchstone for humanity… one of the most important discoveries of the century, up there with the atomic bomb'. (There was much more of this kind of stuff.) Woodruff was 15 years younger than Leary. But she found 'unbelievable alchemy' between her sun in Taurus and his in Libra, their shared moons in Aquarius and ascendants in Sagittarius. What could possibly go wrong? Under Leary's spell, Cahalan relates, 'the superficiality of Rosemary's life before became impossible'. Among the hipsters and well-heeled bohemians at Millbrook, she was quickly established as Leary's 'first lieutenant', 'wearing smock dresses cut from fabric she found in the communal clothing heap… a sublimely gorgeous, blissed-out model of earthly transcendence'. Life was less transcendent for Leary's two children from his first marriage. 'No-one is real until they have children,' Leary pronounced, but his son Jack would later recall that he would 'moan about us being millstones around his neck'. Following Leary's advice to drop out of school, Jack spent much of his adolescence at Millbrook, subsisting on peanut butter sandwiches, getting high on LSD and DMT, and endlessly playing The End by the Doors – no doubt paying particular attention to its theme of patricide. He would subsequently cut Leary completely out of his life. Leary's daughter Susan, meanwhile, was sent off to boarding school. On a family trip to Mexico she was busted at the border after trying to conceal Leary's drugs from the police, and sent to prison; her mental health deteriorated and she attempted suicide. She would die that way in 1990, hanging herself in a Los Angeles prison, where she was being held after shooting her boyfriend. Leary became a figure of public fascination and notoriety. He toured lecture theatres and television talk shows, the PT Barnum of acid, describing himself as 'the wisest man of the 20th century' and talking blithely of 'turning on' everyone in America. Woodruff, the 'blissed-out model of earthly transcendence' stayed at home, cataloguing the lectures she had helped to write, 'smoking hash, doing yoga and cleaning up mice droppings'. In 1970, Leary was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for possession of marijuana, a sentence that reflected the threat he was perceived to present to the nation's youth rather than the magnitude of the crime itself. Woodruff collaborated with the far-Left terrorist group the Weather Underground to spring him from prison, and, adopting a new identity fled with him to Algeria, where Eldridge Cleaver, the leader of the Marxist revolutionary Black Panthers, had also been given sanctuary. Cleaver, a former jail-bird and self confessed rapist – who, bizarrely, would later market his own range of trousers featuring a grotesquely exaggerated codpiece, with the slogan 'you'll be cock of the walk' – would, not surprisingly, prove to be a less than congenial host. Scornful of Leary's love-and-peace philosophy, he ordered them to undertake political orientation classes, 'lending them five volumes of Kim Il-sung's biography'. Broke and in fear of their lives, they duly obliged, with Leary now urging audiences to 'off a pig who threatens your life or freedom' and Woodruff talking of wanting to 'go back to Amerika… and blow things up'. Freed from Eldridge's malevolent grasp by an international arms dealer, Leary and Woodruff found refuge in Switzerland. From the outset, it seems, Woodruff had been torn between her emotional dependence on Leary and a growing realisation that he was an egomaniacal grifter, concerned only with perpetuating his own myth, and always ready to put his interests before hers. Finally abandoning him in 1973, she fled to Sicily, taking up with a count who, Cahalan writes, 'looked like a Roman emperor crossed with Serge Gainsbourg'. They 'made love in a secret grotto by a waterfall, drank grape brandy and helped raise chickens'. Accusing her of betrayal, and now co-operating with the American authorities to secure his own freedom, Leary turned his attention to the socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith. 'Perhaps she will not feel, as I do,' Woodruff wrote, 'that she was duped into supporting something that was less than human.' Woodruff made it back into America, but was forced to live under an assumed name. She was working at a bed and breakfast establishment in San Francisco when, in 1992, out of the blue, she received a letter from Leary. who had been left by his most recent wife, telling her 'you are very dear and radiant in my memory banks.' They reconciled, as Leary put it, as 'best friends, not husband and wife'. He arranged a lawyer who managed to get all the outstanding charges against her dropped. After 24 years on the run, she was free to become Rosemary Woodruff once again. Leary, meanwhile, reinvented himself as a guru for the cyberspace age, lionised by a new generation, appearing in ads for Gap, and talking of having his head cryogenically frozen. He called his announcement in 1995 that he was dying of cancer 'the best publicity move I've ever made'. Cahalan tells an incredible story, but The Acid Queen is an odd book. It's part psychedelic Mills and Boon – Leary, we're told, 'had a kind of animal magnetism – a hot heat'; is there any other kind? – part paean to the psychedelic movement, and part morality tale. One finally leaves it with the thought that Woodruff, smart, and in her own way courageous, was less 'a psychedelic pioneer', than a victim of Leary's manipulation. Leary died at the age of 75 in 1996; Woodruff died in 2002 at the age of 66, leaving behind an unpublished memoir from which large parts of Cahalan's book are drawn. Late in life, she confessed to a friend that after hundreds of acid trips, she 'hadn't learned a thing'.
CBC
21-03-2025
- General
- CBC
As the elver season opens, a First Nation is pushing back hard against DFO
In the coming weeks, Matthew Cope will anchor his cone-shaped fyke net along a river, and as the overnight hours creep by and the ocean tide comes in, he will catch tiny but highly lucrative juvenile eels. He will do so, however, without authorization from the Department of Fisheries, asserting that as a Mi'kmaw harvester, he has a treaty right to fish for the young eels, known as elvers, even outside of federal regulations. He expects to be stopped, and even arrested by fisheries officers, as he was last year during an elver seizure at a transport facility in Dartmouth, N.S. "I'm going to tell them what I always tell them," he said in an interview this week on Millbrook First Nation in central Nova Scotia. "I'm going to say I'm not hiding from you, I'm doing what I'm constitutionally allowed to do. I'm fishing in pursuit of a moderate livelihood, and I have every right to do so." The regulated season for elvers is set to open this weekend along Nova Scotia and New Brunswick rivers, with DFO imposing a number of regulations aimed at bringing control to what's been a chaotic fishery in recent years. But earlier this month, Millbrook Chief Bob Gloade issued a strongly worded letter to DFO officials, outlining the band's refusal to abide by the government's elver management plan and warning of unspecified actions if fisheries officers "harass" its members. "We are not regulated by your colonial commercial licensing schemes, nor do we accept your proposed management plan," said the letter, which was addressed to Jennifer Ford, the elver review director at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. DFO has been concerned about widespread unauthorized harvesting in recent years driven by skyrocketing prices for elvers, which are shipped live to Asia and then raised for food in aquaculture facilities. Some of those fishing outside of DFO's licence regime have been Mi'kmaq asserting an Indigenous and treaty right to catch elvers and sell them. Others are non-Indigenous, simply cashing in on the boom. This season, DFO has plucked half the overall quota of 9,960 kilograms from commercial licence holders, many of them pioneers in the fishery, and handed it to 20 First Nations in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. But Gloade argues that when the quota is divvied up among so many groups, it doesn't amount to much for each fisherman. The band has tried for several years to assert its rights, he said, but has been frustrated by DFO's insistence that Millbrook must follow federal rules. "It's the big brother mentality, that philosophy that 'Our way is right and your way is wrong,'" Gloade said in an interview at the Millbrook band office. "And that's the attitude that we no longer want to accept. I said, 'We can govern ourselves, we can create our own plans.' We don't need DFO to tell us how to do things." Gloade said Millbrook's own elver plan is set to be approved by council next week. He emphasized that safety along the riversides, which have been the site of threats and even violence in previous years, is crucial for Millbrook harvesters. The band has hired two former DFO officers, he said, and there's a team in place to run the fishery. There will be logging requirements and accountability, he said. His letter said harvest numbers and river locations will be shared with DFO under the band's "good neighbour policy," but only at the end of the season. In a statement Thursday, a DFO spokesperson said the department is committed to reconciliation, and "has a fundamental role to support the implementation of treaty rights." But the statement also said the courts have upheld the federal government's role in licensing the fishery, including the exercise of inherent and treaty rights. One of the major changes this year will be the requirement for anyone with an elver fishing or possession licence to log reports through a traceability app. "All aspects of the fishery, from the river to the point of export, are subject to compliance verification by fishery officers, who conduct inspections across all fisheries regulated by the department, including commercial, communal commercial and rights-based fisheries in the pursuit of a moderate livelihood," the statement said. "Fishing activity occurring without a required licence or not in compliance with conditions of licence is subject to enforcement action." Gloade said Millbrook will pay for lawyers for members fishing under the band's plan who are charged by DFO under the Fisheries Act. In his letter, he said fisheries officers will only be allowed on Millbrook land with the permission of the chief and council, and are otherwise barred from inspecting elver holding facilities. "Should any of your fisheries officers continue to harass or infringe our members' rights, you and your department will be at risk of actions against you," the letter said. For commercial licence holders, DFO's talk of enforcement needs to be backed up by more arrests and stiffer fines. Riverside cameras set up this month have already spotted people fishing before the season opened. "For the most part, I think most First Nations communities see the benefit of working with DFO in this fishery," said Stanley King, with Atlantic Elver Fishery Ltd., a commercial licence holder whose quota was cut without compensation. "I think we have a few that don't want to play by the rules, which means that there's not going to be any accountability, it's going to hurt traceability, it's going to undermine market value of the fish."
