Channing Daughters · Bridgehampton, New York
Before he made the wine, he joined the club.
Christopher Tracy and Allison Dubin arrived with questions. At Channing Daughters, those questions became a working life.
A good question can change the person asking it.
The appealing part of this story is not that a customer eventually got a job. It is that curiosity had somewhere to go.
In a 2016 Northforker profile, Christopher Tracy and Allison Dubin recalled setting out in 1999 to visit every winery on eastern Long Island. At Channing Daughters, they connected with Larry Perrine, joined the wine club and kept returning with questions.
Tracy eventually poured in the tasting room. He also proposed a Chardonnay fermented with ambient yeast in new oak. Perrine supplied six barrels and the juice. The experiment became the first L’Enfant Sauvage. Full-time work followed in 2002; Tracy became a partner in 2006.
It would be easy to hurry past the barrels on the way to the partnership. They are the part worth stopping for. An idea had moved beyond conversation. There was something to look after now, something that could disappoint, surprise or reward the people who had agreed to try it.
A company with more than one kind of intelligence
The earlier lives came along.
Christopher & Allison
The two co-founded the Momentary Theatre in 1993. Tracy also trained at the French Culinary Institute and worked in professional kitchens. Dubin’s background includes theater production and visual-arts public relations. The winery now identifies them as winemaker/partner and chief operating officer/partner.
Larry & Abel
Perrine brought soil science and Cornell wine research to the enterprise, becoming managing partner in 1996. The winery lists him as partner/CEO emeritus. Its profile of vineyard manager Abel Lopez describes year-round vineyard work and responsibility on the bottling line.
Read together, those official biographies make the familiar phrase “creative business” feel more substantial. A theater must get made, not merely imagined. A kitchen must get dinner out. A vine needs attention when there is no audience.
The romance of wine can crowd out that last part. A bottle looks finished and self-contained. Its making is neither. The people tending plants and handling the less photogenic work belong in the story as surely as the person whose name becomes associated with the vintage.
The curiosity is still in the bottle.
Channing Daughters describes a Bridgehampton home vineyard and relationships with growers on the North Fork. Its range includes grapes less readily associated with Long Island, including Tocai Friulano, Blaufränkisch and Dornfelder. It makes wines with both ambient and selected yeasts, using different vessels and approaches rather than treating one method as the answer to everything.
That is a useful distinction. Experimentation can become its own uniform, just as easily as convention can. The winery’s stated emphasis on flavor and place leaves room to choose a technique because it serves the wine.
A closer look · Ramato
The winery’s 2024 Ramato offers a concrete example: Pinot Grigio fermented on its skins, following a Friulian tradition that produces a copper-colored wine. Its published notes describe roughly eighteen days of skin fermentation, then eight months in stainless steel.
The same grape need not arrive in the glass wearing the same expression. This is not novelty invented out of thin air. An older practice can become a fresh proposition in another place, in another pair of hands.
The wine descriptions reward that sort of attention. They explain decisions, not just tasting adjectives. A reader can follow an ingredient into a method and begin to understand why the result differs.
And the wine club still offers early access to releases and member events. No membership promises the extraordinary path Tracy and Dubin took. But their beginning gives this particular club a history more interesting than a list of benefits.
A place worth leaving room for.
The founder’s imagination was not confined to wine. Walter Channing was also a sculptor. The winery’s account of his sculpture garden describes inverted trees and a forty-foot pencil. Those are wonderfully unreasonable things to find beside the reasonable, repetitive work of growing grapes.
There was another, quieter expression of his relationship with the property. In its 2024 Channing Fields profile, the Peconic Land Trust described working with Channing from the early 1990s to acquire and protect more than fifty acres in Bridgehampton. He donated conservation easements protecting land that includes vines, meadow and woodland.
Art asks someone to look again. Conservation asks what will remain available to look at. In Channing’s story, both sit alongside a working vineyard. The unusual object and the protected field are different ways of refusing to treat a place as disposable.
This is what makes the wine-club beginning feel larger without needing to exaggerate it. People found a place where their curiosity could become useful. Other people had already spent years making that place possible. And some of the most consequential work was intended to outlast them.
A good bottle is a finished thing.
A good place keeps making room.
A few useful details
Before you go further.
Where is Channing Daughters Winery?
Channing Daughters is in Bridgehampton on Long Island’s South Fork, New York. It also sources grapes from vineyards on the North Fork. See the winery’s visit page for current tasting arrangements.
Did Christopher Tracy and Allison Dubin begin as wine-club members?
Yes. Both began their involvement as wine-club members before becoming part of the winery’s working team. Tracy is now its winemaker and a partner; Dubin is its chief operating officer and a partner.
What is Channing Daughters Ramato?
Ramato is the winery’s skin-fermented Pinot Grigio, made in a traditional Friulian style. Its copper color comes from contact with the grape skins. It belongs to the broad category often called orange wine.
Is the sculpture garden open to visitors?
As checked on September 29, 2026, the winery says its sculpture garden is temporarily closed to the public. Check the official sculpture-garden and visit pages before planning a trip; tasting-room access and sculpture-garden access are separate matters.