At one time, I thought that a subway ride’s most unlikely destination was a lonely Rockaway beach where I’d go surfing. That trip took an hour on the A train from Columbus Circle.

One day last week, I took the E train (and a city bus) to a destination that is, perhaps, even more surprising than a beach: a young and thriving two-acre vineyard of chardonnay, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and cabernet franc.

The first vintage of 270 cases of a red wine blend, harvested last year, will be released next June: Call it Cuvée Queens.

This Vineyard is situated at the Queens County Farm Museum in Floral Park, a 47-acre working farm that, miraculously, has been continuously productive since 1697. It could just as well be Old MacDonald’s farm, with its contingent of pigs, sheep, goats, free-roaming chickens and guinea hens, ducks, geese, and a brown cow named Daisy. There are apple and pear trees aplenty, an aviary, and, at the rear of the farm, a cornfield that doubles as a maze, as well as patches of sunflowers, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, pumpkins, and watermelons. But it’s that immaculately trellised vineyard in the northwest corner of the farm that stirs the blood of a wine-lover.

While the farm has long been owned by the city, the idea of creating a vineyard is of more recent vintage.

“We had a tremendous number of programs here that appealed to younger folks, so we were looking for an element that might also appeal to an adult audience — something that would be agriculturally accurate,” the farm’s viticultural manager, Gary Marshall, said last week at the farm.

Three years ago, experts from the North Fork’s winemaking community guided the planting of 1,200 vines, oriented north-south in what Mr. Marshall calls “rich loamy soil composed of sand and clay.”

Due to the youth of the vines, no chardonnay was harvested last year, but a healthy crop of merlot and cabernet sauvignon was picked by night and transported in the morning to the “crush pad” of Premium Wine Group, a winemakingfor-hire facility two hours east in Mattituck, L.I. The 2006 vintage is currently resting in barrel at the winery. Mr. Marshall visits it periodically, and finds that the wine is already “mellow and drinkable.”

Until recently, Mr. Marshall, 45, knew little about growing grapes. Last year, he took a short course in viticulture at the University of California, Davis. Even after completing the course and nurturing the vineyard, Mr. Marshall said he is still an amateur since “people spend decades learning the ins and outs of grape growing, because it’s part science and part art form.”

Mr. Marshall didn’t seem like an amateur as he led me through the vineyard, explaining that snapping stray shoots off the vines and pulling leaves away from the grape bunches enables more sunlight to reach and ripen them. He added that leaf plucking also increases air flow over the bunches and through the remaining leaves, discouraging powdery mildew, which can attack the vine. Weeds were growing profusely at the base of the wines, but they aren’t signs of slack vineyard management, he said. They counter the natural vigor of the vines by forcing them to compete for abundant nutrients in the rich soil.

Mr. Marshall definitely looked the part with his dusty John Deere T-shirt, his heavy khaki shorts, mud boots, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. As he moved, the aroma of pipe tobacco moved with him.

Later this month, as the grapes reach the coloring stage called veraison, Mr. Marshall will be testing his grapes daily with a refractometer, a hand-held device that measures fruit sugar. The first variety to ripen, probably at the end of September (“so long as we don’t get a real rainstorm”) will be chardonnay. Likely, that will be followed by merlot, cabernet sauvignon, and, finally, cabernet franc. “I’m hoping to eventually do a red blend that in the mouth will give you merlot up front, cabernet sauvignon in the middle, and a touch of cabernet franc at the back end,” Mr. Marshall said. The North Fork model he aspires to is Macari Vineyards’ Bergen Road Meritage, a Bordeaux-style blend.

As we walked between merlot rows, a gray rabbit popped out from under a vine and briefly froze before dashing toward the chardonnay. Do rabbits eat grapes? “I don’t think so,” Mr. Marshall said. “Our only enemies are the birds. As soon as ripening starts, we’ll drape netting over the vines.”

Just like any other viticulturist striving for quality, Mr. Marshall will soon send in his crew of six field workers to begin “dropping” up to a third of the abundant grape bunches in order to increase the flavor intensity of those remaining. “It’s a practice that horrifies the uninitiated,” he said.

If Queens County Farm can escape illtimed, catastrophic weather, such as the torrential rains that hit Long Island just before the 2005 harvest, Mr. Marshall expects an excellent 2007 vintage. Once again, he and his crew will pick by night so that the fruit can be rushed by truck to the crush pad in Mattituck in the morning. Before heading out the gate to grab the Q46 bus back to the E train, I stopped at the farm’s produce stand to buy heirloom tomatoes, plump cucumbers, and fresh eggs laid that day. Come next summer, I expect to include in my shopping a bottle of Cuvée Queens County Farm red wine.

The Queens County Farm Museum, 73-50 Little Neck Parkway, 718-347-3276, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m, free. Farm Stand, open daily, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.