PECONIC, N.Y. (AP) – In the wine country of eastern Long Island, the 2005 harvest was cause to raise a glass and toast the good times.

It was a spectacular growing season for grapes in the burgeoning wine region, everyone agreed. The grapes for Chardonnay and other white wines were mostly harvested, and wine makers were optimistic that 2005 would be a very, very good year.

Then came the rain, for eight straight days. Not a drizzle, but in torrents.

By the time it stopped Saturday, more than 12 inches had fallen in some areas, leaving winery owners like Ray Blum of Ackerly Pond Vineyards and others to fret about whether they can salvage their Merlots and other red varieties of grapes still on the vine.

“The is the worst rainy season I’ve seen,” said Blum, a former air traffic controller who has been growing grapes for the past 27 years. “I mean eight days of rain is unprecedented for Long Island!”

Sitting at his kitchen table on Friday morning as the rain pelted his crop outside, Blum said he and his workers had just started picking the Merlot grapes in their 65-acre field when the harvest was halted by the weather. He uses some of his crop to make his Ackerly Pond wines and sells the rest to other wineries.

His customers who already received harvested fruit from the 2005 Merlot crop “were ecstatic on how great the quality was,” he said. “And now it has deteriorated somewhat.”

Alice Wise, a viticulturist with the Cornell University Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County, said farmers will have to wait until the crops dry over the next few days to determine the extent of damage.

“It’s just a hard thing to predict,” she said. “Some of it will depend on the vineyards’ managers and winemakers. You may have to be a little more selective with your harvest, but there will be some fruit with rot that will have to be sorted out.”

When the grapes are ready to harvest, the skins become soft and are more subject to inclement weather, Blum explained.

“With the red varieties, the flavors come from a combination of the pulp and the juice and the skin,” he said. When raindrops hit the grape, they can bruise it, causing rot and deterioration inside. The rain also helps spread disease, he said.

Up the road at Lenz Wineries, winemaker Eric Fry said another concern is dilution.

“The vines and the grapes have taken up a lot of rainwater and right now they taste like water,” he said. “They’re all diluted out and very thin and the flavors are not really there.”

He said ideally it would be best to let the grapes dry out, but there’s not much time.

“When the grapes swell up, some of them will burst and so now you’ve got juice on the clusters, which can cause disease,” said Fry, a winemaker for 30 years who started at the Robert Mondavi winery in Napa Valley, Calif., and has worked in Australia and France.

Like others, he said the timing could not have been worse. “The last two weeks are so incredibly important to the ripeness and to the final product,” he said.

In the past three decades, 3,000 acres of wine vineyards have replaced vegetable and potato farms, mostly on the eastern Long Island’s north fork, although the Hamptons on the south fork are dotted with vineyards as well. There are 39 wineries on Long Island, producing 500,000 cases annually.

The rain woes have not been limited to Long Island. In the upstate Finger Lakes, 10,000 acres of vineyards were also inundated with rain.

“I’ve got about five tons of riesling still out there, and I don’t need any more rain,” said Peter Saltonstall, owner of King Ferry Winery on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake. “It will cause the grapes to swell and to crack. When and if that happens, obviously the sugar content goes down and you get the promotion of botrytis – the nice term for it is noble rot.”

In New Jersey, the grapes picked before the rain are going to make the best wine New Jersey’s fledging vineyard business has produced since 1991, said Gary Pavlis, a Rutgers Cooperative Extension agent. But the late-season varieties are going to need some time to dry out.

Blum said an old farmer once told him that every 50 years, a situation like this crops up.

“Well,” he said, “I went back to him and said now I want 49 good years.”

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Associated Press writers Ben Dobbin and Geoff Mulvihill contributed to this story.

AP-ES-10-16-05 0924EDT