Kontokosta Winery

Vines in 2002, first bottling in 2006, tasting room in 2013

Brothers Michael and Constantine Kontokosta run the winery. The first vines went in during 2002, starting at 23 acres and reaching 62 acres of grapes in total. The first bottling followed in 2006, and the tasting room opened in 2013.

That tasting room is part of the pitch. It runs roughly 9,000 square feet as a combined tasting and winemaking facility, built with about 90 percent recycled steel and wood and designed toward LEED gold. Those figures come from press coverage of the 2013 opening rather than from the winery's own event pages.

The only North Fork tasting room sited on the Sound

Most North Fork wineries sit inland along Route 25 or Route 48, or look south toward the bay. Kontokosta is on the bluffs above the Long Island Sound itself, on the north shore of the fork, which puts open water behind a ceremony rather than a row of vines and a road.

That siting is the reason to pay a Greenport site fee rather than a Cutchogue one. It also means wind. A bluff top tent in October behaves differently from a tent in a sheltered field, and the tenting company will have opinions about staking and sidewalls that belong in your first conversation.

Greenport village is the other half of the argument. Guests coming east for a Sound side wedding can stay, eat and drink within a few minutes of the property, which is not true of every North Fork vineyard on this list. The shuttle run is short, and the Shelter Island ferry leaves from the same village if anyone wants a Sunday.

The planting is the third element. It started at 23 acres in 2002 and now runs to 62 acres of grapes, so a tent on the bluff has real acreage behind it rather than a lawn beside a tasting room. It also means the property is a working farm during your event window, and North Fork harvest lands inside the tented season.

$25,000 to $35,000 buys the site and nothing else

The published range covers Friday through Sunday events in summer and fall. Winter, off peak and midweek rates are described as available on enquiry and are not published, so the range you can see is the top of the market rather than the whole of it.

What that money does not include is everything that makes a wedding. Food, beverage, rentals, the tent itself and staffing all appear to sit on top, and none of them is published. There is no per person figure on the winery's site and none on WeddingWire either.

So a couple cannot infer a total from this number, and should not try. What the published range does give you is a genuine first party anchor, which is more than any other North Fork vineyard in this batch offers. Use it to decide whether to make the call at all.

300 outdoors from May, 80 indoors for the rest of the year

The seasonal split here is hard and the winery publishes it. Tented outdoor functions of up to 300 guests run May through October only. The indoor space is available year round and holds up to 80.

There is no middle option. A 150 person wedding in April or November has nowhere to go on this property, and a 300 person wedding has no indoor equivalent at any time of year.

That also disposes of the rain question. The outdoor space is tented, but an 80 seat room cannot absorb a 300 guest event, so the tent is the plan rather than a fallback. No formal weather contingency is published, and the honest reading is that there is not one to publish.

Nobody has written down a catering rule

The winery publishes no approved caterer list, no outside vendor policy and no vendor fee. The wine is obviously the winery's own. Food arrangements are simply not described anywhere on the private events page.

For a venue selling a $25,000 to $35,000 site fee, that is a large blank. A site fee model usually implies you bring a caterer, and a caterer at 300 guests is the biggest line in the budget after the room.

There is no published food and beverage minimum, no service charge, no administrative fee and no statement about whether more than one event can run on the property at once. All of that is fair game for the first email.

Southold Town, a bluff, and an end time nobody prints

The winery publishes no end time or curfew. Southold Town regulates winery events generally, and the winery does not describe how those rules apply to its own bookings, so we are not going to characterise them for you.

This is the question to take to the town as well as to the venue. Ask the winery what its permitted end time is, whether amplified music outdoors has a separate cut off, and whether any of that changes between the tented season and the indoor one.

Get the answer before the deposit. A tent, a band and a bluff over the Sound is a fine plan right up until the music has to stop at an hour nobody mentioned.