Winemaking relies on a set of tenets. When it comes to blending grapes, Maggie Harrison tosses aside many of them. Based in Oregon's Willamette Valley, she has declared a "war on wine," eschewing certain common practices as she seeks out "the ignition of beauty." At Antica Terra, the once suffering winery that she has spent nearly 20 years making her own, terroir is only half the story.
KCRW: To understand your unique point of view, can you start at the beginning?
Maggie Harrison: I am one of the luckiest people I know. I was raised in a suburb of Chicago by parents who were really committed to supporting the arts and also filling their lives with art. There were major artworks on every wall — in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the den, over the TV. I was raised by people who, every time I tried to point to a career path or a goal or a life goal that would equal something traditional or that was sure to make me a living, they would always turn back to me and say, "Are you sure you don't just want to be an artist?" Typically, when people want to study literature or art history, their parents say, "Well, how are you going to make money?" My parents, every time I veered away from something that was artistic or aesthetic, they said, "Well then, how are you going to be happy?" So they were incredibly supportive of anything that had an aesthetic vision.
How long did it take you to find the world of winemaking?
It didn't take long because what I was really trying to do was make some money. When I graduated from college, I just wanted to travel. I wanted to get on some planes and travel around the world as much as I could. While I had some job offers that were exciting, it was going to take me a while to accumulate enough cash to buy one-way tickets and backpacks and tents to get on a plane. So I went back to Chicago and worked in restaurants so I could save some money and see more of the world.
Finding wine happened swiftly because I ended up working in these restaurants that had very exciting wine programs with very educationally-oriented wine buyers and wine directors. I started learning about wine so that I could be better at selling it but the more I learned and the more I sold, the more I got to taste and the deeper I got and the more in love I fell, until I realized I had gotten so deep that it was probably the only end that I was interested in.
Maggie Harrison strolls the vines at Antica Terra in Eola-Amity Hills of Willamette Valley in Oregon, where she commits to every detail of winemaking, approaching the process with her head down, in search of beauty. Photo courtesy of Antica Terra.
How did you move from selling wine in a restaurant setting to making wine and farming?
Well, it's a very long story. I'll tell only a nice snippet of it because it has its roots in Los Angeles. I had been traveling. I spent a year in Europe then a year in South America and a year in Africa. Somewhere along this journey, I realized that I was not going to follow my stated career path and I really wanted to learn how to make wine. I started asking anyone who would listen to me if they knew anyone that worked in a winery that might offer me a job. It turned out my sister was working at a Los Angeles restaurant called Les Deux Cafes, Michele Lamy's restaurant. Her manager was a friend of Elaine and Manfred Krankl and knew that they had just started their own winery, Sine Qua Non, and that they needed some help. "Some help" in lowercase.
They were doing everything by themselves and just needed somebody to come mop the floors. My sister put me in contact with the Krankls and, frankly, they had no reason to hire me at all. I was a server with a backpack. I had no experience. I had never set foot in a winery. I'd never even been in a tasting room. But it was the '90s and there was no internet yet so they didn't have a more reasonable way to find someone to come work in their winery. I sort of stood in front of them and wouldn't get out of the way. They took a chance and they taught me everything. They gave me everything and they taught me everything.
Is there one lesson or a cluster of lessons, in particular, that you learned from him?
I remember a moment exactly. I had been working there for maybe six years. Manfred turned to me one day, and he said, "So, Harrison. Do you know the secret?" All of my days there, I was intimidated by my bosses and mentors only because I have so much respect [for them]. I froze and I said, "There's not a secret. There's no secret." He told me that was the wrong answer. The secret was — and the only thing that you had to know was — it's all in the details. That's all there is. Every moment, and the choice that you make in that moment for that exact thing that you're doing in that moment, that's the whole of the operation.
That's how I continued to run this business that they encouraged me to start and how we make all of the wines today — keeping our heads down and whatever we're doing, whether we're selecting a cork or pruning a vine or answering the phone, we're looking at what's the most beautiful way we could do this thing and then actually doing it. I think that's the thing that separates some some people from the rest. Once you've identified the nicest way to do something, it's usually annoying. It's usually the most expensive, the most inconvenient, the most tiring. But if you just commit to staying high and holding that that's the nicest thing you could do and getting it done with fairly maniacal rigor, then you can string those moments together and they become something trustworthy and strong.
Blind blending is a tenet of Harrison's process. "We're trusting that if terroir created a moment of profound magic, in a certain place and certain time, it will be revealed to us at the blending table," she says. Photo courtesy of Antica Terra.
You've said terroir is a myth. Can you describe blind blending and why you take this particular approach to making wine? Maybe talk about a typical blending session.
I think saying "terroir is a myth," those four words are far too reductive to accurately express what the statement means. It is not to say that a piece of land, the soil, the micro organisms in the soil, the plant material, the aspect, the orientation, the climate, or the microclimate, don't play a part. They play a massive part. If we think of myth in a more Joseph Campbellian way, it is a way of explaining an otherwise unexplainable phenomenon, right? A nod to the indisputable fact that we haven't got all the answers. Terroir is half of the answer, in the same way that there's nature and nurture. All of the fruit is delivered to us with a certain mark. It is given to us marked by the place where it was grown and all of the components that are wrapped into a single idea of terroir. But what I would argue is that terroir is not enough on its own.
In blind blending, what we're doing is we're trusting that if terroir created a moment of profound magic in a certain place at a certain time, it will be revealed to us at the blending table by tasting blind. What that looks like is keeping everything completely separate. If you were in my cellar today, we could go through and I could dip a thief into a bunch of barrels and show you this vineyard versus that one, or this block of this vineyard versus another one, or the top of the hill versus the bottom of the hill. We keep everything completely separate through the winemaking process.
When it's time to figure out which of those barrels or portions thereof are going to find their way into the bottle, we pull a sample from each of the barrels of wine in the cellar, so about 150 different samples, and put them in numbered sample bottles. There'll be a long line and then a big stack of boxes of bottles, numbered 1 through 150. We sit down at the table, and there are three of us at the table, and we just move through. On the first day, we taste each of the 150 samples and write notes about each bottle. For the next nine days — we do it in three day blocks for about 10 hours a day — we put things together and take them apart and put them together and take them apart in every different way we can think of, looking for the ignition of beauty, the harmonies that exist in the cellar, uncovering every theme and then walking that all the way through to see how good and how clear and how profound it gets, as we build.
It's very much like when you go to the optometrist and they're trying to find your correct prescription. You're not looking at 70 different things at once and saying, "Oh, number 37 is the right one." They put one lens in front of you and say, "Do you like number one or number two?" And you say, "Number two." And they flick those lenses around again and say, "Number two or number three?" You just keep going from good to better to better to better to better until you can't make it better anymore. And that's the wine that survives into the bottle.
"Terroir is half of the answer in the same way there is nature and nurture," says Harrison. Photo courtesy of Antica Terra.
So amazing.
I don't know how people do it otherwise. It feels impossible that you would be able to see it otherwise. When we do this, at the end of that process, on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet in front of me, I'll have a name of a wine and then a long list of numbers under it. So only when we have all of those numbers and what's going to be in that wine, can we match up what those numbers mean and what those barrels hold. That's the moment, once we've decided what the wine is, that we find out what the alcohol by volume is, what the percentage of new oak contribution was, what the whole cluster inclusion was, and what the cépage is or what vineyards and hilltops and blocks and soil types this wine is being built out of.
It is always possible that we can have this reveal and say, "Oh, look! This wine came 100% from Hope Well vineyard." That's delightful but we wouldn't make a wine that came from a single vineyard only as an intellectual exercise to show difference, rather than finding the thing that was best, most beautiful, and most clear.
I have to ask you about your synesthesia. How does it manifest itself? And do you think the fact that you have it enables you to approach the making of wine differently?
I think it allows me to order all of these different parts and keep track of them. My synesthesia is not flavor-based. I never taste a wine and think "blue," right? My synesthesia is attached to numbers, letters, and words. It's the way I order my life. If you asked me what day I was going to be speaking to you, immediately a color comes up that's associated with this day on this date. That's how I remember when I get to come to the studio and talk to you.
In winemaking, because we're working with so many iterations and so many disparate parts, what is helpful is keeping all of those things organized. It is just mapmaking. It is very, very easy to get lost when you're working with 150 different parts. We might move through 45, 50, 70 different iterations trying to find each of the wines. To look at tasting notes and to remember this one had this sort of characteristic and that one, that tension, is easy for me. They all sort of get lost and it gets a little murky. But the synesthesia, because those numbers all have a very distinct and vibrant color, when I'm looking at different numbered iterations or the number of each bottle, the map that forms in my weirdo brain, it becomes really easy for me to find my way. I'm a terrible blind taster. The worst. It has nothing to do with my palate or my skills. It is honestly just keeping disparate parts distinct in my brain by a way of making a map that is very colorful.
Is there a particular wine that you make of which you're most proud?
There's a series of wines. Every time we get away with making wine, when we work with nature and make something of which we're proud, it feels incredibly gratifying. But having been raised, having been taught how to make wine on the Central Coast of California, making wine in California is an absolute gift. I still make wine in California today. I have a project called Lilian, which is Syrah, Grenache and Roussanne all from the Central Coast of California. Certain gifts are given to you when you grow fruit in Santa Barbara — grapes, especially.
I think the things that make me most proud here are when I encounter conditions that I never understood before. It rains on grapes in Oregon, kind of a lot, and that's something with which I didn't have any experience in the first multiple vintages of my winemaking career. So when I look at things like 2013 or the wines we were able to make in 2019, these vintages that were arguably pretty challenging with disease, pressure, and rain. By keeping our heads down and paring away everything that was imperfect, then getting to see those wines and how energetic and clear and precise and just crystal their storytelling is, I think has been the most exciting part of this chapter of my career. Meeting mother nature where she is, no matter how adverse or how challenging, and knowing, if you stay close to the work, that the results will always, always make you proud.