Two of Four Parcels Listed by Osprey’s Dominion in Contract

For potential buyers of a famed North Fork winery, the glass is half full. Less than half, actually.

Two of the four parcels of Osprey’s Dominion are in contract, according to Behind the Hedges.

All that’s left is the tasting room, which includes 4.5 acres, and an adjacent 46-acre vineyard at 44075 Route 25 in Peconic. Asking price: $8.2 million. (The brand, inventory and farm equipment are part of the package.) But development rights for the vineyard have already been sold.

The Osprey’s Dominion properties, 90 acres altogether, had been on and off the market for years before being listed last fall for $13 million. Unknown buyers have since signed contracts for a 25-acre parcel in Peconic and a 17-acre Mattituck plot. Listing agent Rita Rooney of Douglas Elliman did not immediately return messages.

North Fork vineyards are attracting new kinds of buyers in the bustling post-pandemic Hamptons real estate market.

Stefan Soloviev bought the 53-acre Peconic Bay Winery in 2019. In 2021, Laurel Lakes Vineyards was bought by media mogul and ABC legal analyst Dan Abrams. Later that year, Long Island’s oldest vineyard on the North Fork, the 82-acre Castello di Borghese in Cutchogue, went up for sale.

Last year, former Houston Rockets owner Leslie Alexander put two North Fork tracts totaling 92 acres on the market. The larger one, 68 acres in Mattituck, is in contract; the asking price was just $2.9 million because only four of the acres have development rights intact. The smaller parcel remains available.

Castello di Borghese’s listing agent Joseph DiVello said in 2021 that demand for North Fork farmland had never been higher than after the coronavirus pandemic, when city dwellers left in droves to seek refuge on the East End.

Douglas Elliman’s Thomas McCloskey previously told The Real Deal that, while North Fork vineyards have traditionally attracted billionaires, a new kind of buyer was emerging.

“A lot of these projects originally were started as hobbies for billionaires, but that appears to be changing,” he said. “Those places were not necessarily run to be profitable, but now I’m seeing people come in, take these places on and make them viable businesses.”

Many of those endeavors are for hospitality venues, as modern hotels are in relatively short supply on the North Fork. But large, open tracts are often not available for substantial development because of agricultural zoning or their development rights having been sold to the Peconic Land Trust.

A 2 percent tax on all East End sales goes toward the trust and other preservation funds.

— Nicole Rosenthal