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By Alex Halberstadt
I first met Maggie Harrison in 2018 while on vacation in Portland, Oregon. She hadn’t planned on trying any wine, just enjoying the town’s special west coast rarity, however a friend she photographed for a food magazine said she had to meet this winemaker she portrayed as an artist. word “genius”. I told another friend about Harrison, who works in the wine business. He echoed the recommendation, vaguely describing her as someone who had “declared war on wine. ” Everywhere I looked online, Harrison received praise for the effects of an unorthodox technique for winemaking, which relied so much on portraiture: He has a condition known as synesthesia, in which data intended to stimulate one sense also stimulates others. , as it has done with classical notions of flavor and aroma. Some critics have noted that her wines have the complexity, tension, and narrative arc of a wonderful portraiture of art. So I emailed Harrison and got a reaction that started halfway: “Unfortunately, it’s well known that I don’t like many humans. ” She seemed to think so. However, she agreed to see me.
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In the instructions he sent, Harrison told me to look for “a trash can from a vineyard warehouse. “She was not modest. Antica Terra, his vineyard in the Willamette Valley, is housed in a sort of modern Quonset hut, with two loading docks and a row of dumpsters near the entrance. For Harrison, this is intended to discourage unwanted attention. Warm, funny and observant in person, she cultivates a grumpy personality, like an octopus might disguise itself as rock to shake sand sharks.
Harrison took me and some friends to a shopping area filled with fluorescent lamps and bland office furniture. Her apparent self-awareness and owl glasses made her feel as if she had been drawn through cartoonist Roz Chast. We followed her into a dimly lit room where barrels and crates of wine wood rose almost to the ceiling. The scent of oak floated in the air. The table of a farm was set with candles, a plate of caviar and the champagne of a perfect winemaker (that is, produced through a winemaker-winemaker that through a giant champagne house, have more character). The scene was so quiet and civilized, after the dirt. from the outside, it was like entering a chapel from the back of a Cinnabo airport. (At the time, I thought we were getting the red carpet treatment, but it turns out it’s Antica Terra’s popular tasting organization — you and your friends can also have the party for $125 depending on the day. )
We were there to flavor Harrison’s wine, but to our surprise, he started the tasting by serving us some of France’s most productive wines, i. e. some of the most productive wines in the world, and added one he had sought to taste. . , the Gevrey-Chambertin Vielle Vigne through Jean-Marie Fourrier, a pinot noir from a talented Burgundy manufacturer. (It was glorious. )
“I have you taste those wines,” Harrison explained, “to create a context in which to flavor my wines. “
To master the audacity of this claim, one will have to remember that Oregon’s wine culture is, speaking speaking, in its infancy. As far as we know, the first Pinot Noir vines in the state were planted in 1961, while the first vineyards in Burgundy date back to at least the first century AD. C. , then it is pronounced that I had created a context in which to listen to my work. This woman was joking?
Harrison’s most exclusive wine is a Pinot Noir called Antikythera (named after an ancient Greek astronomical calculator that is described as the world’s first computer). The wine comes from a strange little winery a short distance from the winery, a rocky hill guarded by rows of thin, stunted vines only have about a foot of soil to grow, so their roots will have to grow over the underlying bedrock and look for cracks on its surface to locate nutrients and water. The rock itself is dotted with bright white marine fossils from when it was on the sea floor millions of years ago, when all of Oregon was under the Pacific Ocean.
No wonder to locate a winery in what would possibly seem like an unpromising position. Grapes for wine are fundamentally different from other crops. If you grow peach trees, you will probably need to give them plenty of water and fertilizer, so that the trees maximum fruit. But the biggest focus on wine grapes is character, so the vines are occasionally planted in places where they can weaken slightly and must fight for nutrients. The grapes gain intensity in proportion to the amount of paints the vine will have to provide. Harrison calls this procedure “suffering. “But even contemplating this practice, this position was extreme. Why would anyone plant something on a foot of very sensitive soil on a very sensitive forged rock?
The first taste of Antikythera interrupted my reflection. Red burgundy tends to be sublime and fragrant, and the ones Harrison served us smelled of roses and fallen leaves. But Antikythera hit my mouth with something primitive that contained too many flavors and aromas. an overload of the senses. It’s the same grape variety – almost all of red Burgundy is Pinot Noir – but the wines had nothing else in common.
I can’t tell you what Antikythera tasted like or smelled like. The vine had produced an ordinary grape, a tiny tannic berry of intense, almost unsightly complexity. But the lists of flavors you see in the typical tasting notes amount to a kind of boasting of the sharpness of the writer’s palate, and they are also banal and misleading, much more than the pencil mine, the jam or the saddle, the wine tastes the same. What topics are the things that make you perceive, feel and think and how it lives in your memory. Tasting a good wine can be as immersive as watching a movie. But Antikythera took me somewhere beyond that. First, it made me see colors: the maximum indigo like ink and the bluish blacks, veined with silver cracks. Then I imagined anything coming out of a cave on a moonless afternoon, a thunderstorm, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. And I think of Jacques Lardière, Louis Jadot’s wonderful former winemaker in Burgundy, speaking of the “subconscious of the earth. “
“Then what do you think?” Harrison us.
Harrison produces some of the country’s most sought-after wines, and even Michelin-starred restaurants like French Laundry and Gramercy Tavern have to work for a stipend. Currently, consumers who want to shop at Antica Terra are on a two-year waiting list. (Bottles cost between $150 and $250, but they can charge a lot more at restaurants and the secondary market. )The wines created by Harrison have won over his outstanding enthusiasts like LeBron James and Pink, but they are the most productive sommeliers: the world’s wine curators, who constitute his most loyal audience. at the academic level. ” Hak so Kim, Per Se’s head sommelier in Manhattan and a former opera singer, likens Harrison to “an improviser who discovers a chord. “
Harrison, 52, grew up in a Chicago suburb. His father was an eye surgeon and his mother taught cooking categories at home. His hobby was collecting art. They tasted good. They bought works of art from painters whose reputation and costs increased. The walls of his otherwise mundane home were filled with portraits of David Hockney, Alex Katz and Chuck Close. Jim Dine was hanging in Harrison’s room. ” From a young age,” Harrison told me, “I learned that the most beautiful and exciting thing you can do is be an artist. “
His career almost went in a very different direction. While studying at Syracuse University, he spent a semester in Washington, where he trained in nonviolent conflict resolution. This led to a dream assignment being offered at Atlanta’s Carter Center. But everything stalled at Harrison. ” I had to do something else,” he said, “but I didn’t know what. “He asked for a postponement to begin painting and returned to Chicago, where he served tables to finance a vacation around the world. After his dining shifts, Harrison spent his tips on wine, and began to realize that was his only real interest. Depressed and unsure of her direction, she had a clarifying psychedelic party with the San Pedro cactus in Ecuador. One day, in a bar on an island off the coast of Kenya, a boy asked her what she did. Harrison began by saying that he was about to begin a task in conflict resolution when tears welled up in his eyes and he knew he would never move to Atlanta.
He started the business in 1998, when his sister, who lived in California, told him about a winemaker she knew who was looking for an assistant. None of them had a winemaking background, but they produced some of the state’s most acclaimed and beloved wines, and not in a Napa or Sonoma mansion, but in an old warehouse next to a junkyard in Ventura, a backwater on the Santa Barbara coast.
Harrison faxed the Krankls a resume and canopy letter saying he didn’t have any parties but wanted to know more about wine. There was no response. But Harrison was unfazed. As she recounts, she called the couple at their 3 phone numbers and left messages several times a day for about a month, until on the 30th, Manfred answered. “Okay,” he said, sounding resignado. DE AGREEMENT.
“During the interview, Maggie was dressed in lipstick and high heels, and she just wasn’t going to paint in a basement,” Manfred Krankl recalls with a smile. So there was nothing destructive about unlearning. She ran the popular La Brea bakery in Los Angeles and left Harrison in charge of the winery, forcing her to learn for herself. “There were so many things I didn’t know how to do. “She says, “And I would infrequently call a wine lab using a fake call to ask a bunch of stupid questions. “.
She had been in Sine Qua Non for 8 years when a friend of the Krankls told her about a winery in the Willamette Valley and encouraged her to look at it. But Harrison had no interest in Oregon. By 2005, she was engaged, making small batches of her own increasingly acclaimed wines under the Lillian label and busy and happy in Ventura. But the friend kept calling, and eventually relented, flew to Portland and climbed a hill in Amity. It looked gloomy. ” There were piles of black plastic and rotting hay everywhere,” Harrison recalled of the winery that would take the call from his winery. “The site was so beautiful, the perspective so transparent and the suffering just as transparent. I knew I could make the paintings to take care of the position and make the wines that this land was capable of. Standing among the cellars, Harrison called her longtime husband and told him they were moving to Oregon.
In 2019, he began teaching an annual seminar for wine professionals that he called School of Beauty. Unlike almost all other types of wine seminars or educational “experiments,” it aims to exercise an organization of wine professionals that is not on the intricacies of tasting or oenology, but on how to live an aesthetic life. To this end, he uses not only wines from around the world, but also probably unrelated objects: an old trailer, local wildflowers, letters from Vladimir Nabokov to his wife, Vera. If this proves unbearably valuable, it is partly redeemed through Harrison’s seriousness. She teaches good looks like any other user could teach herbal childbirth or taekwondo.
In his quest for wines of the utmost beauty, Harrison has developed the world’s most labor-intensive approach to production. For about 10 days, she, Mimi Adams (her associate winemaker) and their frifinish Nate Ready, owner of Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Orepassn, sit around a table and savor up to 150 unlabeled samples, each representing a barrel. and known only through number, combining them, says Harrison, “like little meth uploadicts. ” (Barrel aging adjusts a wine in all the ways one would expect, but it also has a hint of unpredictability, so even the same wine stored in two barrels will eventually taste different in each. ) Harrison thinks finishing blind is the only way to bias-distribute—his grapes come from 8 of the top-producing vineyards in the Willamette Valley, adding his own and two others in California—and he told me that the wisdom of origins of a wine would influence their sensory experience. Most blfinishes sometimes end in failure, but they allow flavorists to gradually orient themselves towards ultimate blfinishes. They are sitting around the table with rows of small bottles in front of them. Adams and Ready take a lot of notes. Every time they upload the occasional sample, they taste and spit and talk about what they taste, smell, smell and feel. It lasts all day, for 10 days. It is an improvisation. They gather each came in his head like a song. This era of blfinishing is where Harrison’s wines find their identity. “While they can be incredibly difficult,” Ready told me, “these blending sessions are about trusting yourself, believing in the process, and letting go of guessing. “
During harvest, the period of about a month in the fall that requires maximum physical labor and the longest hours, he works through the night, interrupting vigils 24 hours a day with 20-minute naps and endless pots of oolong. Harrison says the harvest is his favorite time of year. He also told me that every year, in the days leading up to harvest, he cries in the kitchen, dreading the paintings and the weeks he will have to spend away from the circle of relatives. and friends. ” Still,” Adams says, “I think Maggie loves the massacre. “
I visited Harrison last year, at the home she has with her husband, Michael, and their two teenage sons in the hills southwest of Portland. Michael is a soft-spoken graphic designer who works primarily on wine bottle labels (including Harrison’s). The area is cozy and inhabited, with lots of plants, a record player, and framed children’s drawings sharing the area with its many strange and charming objects. Being around Harrison is sometimes exciting and challenging. Its liveliness and not-easy taste clash with its preference for being generous and tolerant, and then it seems a little out of step with itself, like a radio connected between two stations. I never saw her absolutely at rest, a state Harrison would probably consider unnecessary and disappointing.
During my visit, I sat down with Harrison for a non-public mixing session. We made the decision to mix 10 barrel patterns of their pinot noir. We chose the number only for reasons of time and intellectual health, but even 10 turned out to be too much for me. Each pattern tasted and smelled strikingly different, yet after mixing five of them, I was assailed by perplexity. worse at the same time, and yet fatigue of the palate dulled my purple tongue to sophisticated differences. Within an hour and a half, I lost confidence in my ability to discern almost anything except the lack of water. Harrison seemed comfortable and absolutely in control.
She attributes her ability to map so many flavors in her brain at the same time to her synesthesia. The reasons for the disease remain poorly understood, but at least one study suggests that synesthetes would possibly have a greater capacity for creativity, perhaps due to greater connectivity between regions of the cerebral cortex, and are more likely to influence artistic professions. Nikola Tesla, David Hockney, Duke Ellington and Frank Ocean all said they had it. In “Speak, Memory,” Nabokov describes learning as a child who shared the condition with his mother through alphabet block play: “We discovered that some of his letters had the same tone as mine. “
Like Nabokov, Harrison has grapheme-color synesthesia, a way in which numbers and letters relate to colors, which proves useful in his work. As she tastes the bottled samples, her brain transforms each number into a distinct, colorful color, carving the wines in front of her a palette of Prussian, orange and blue shades that she combines into a definitive composition that craves what she describes as “emotional transparency” and a “perfect tension between intensity and lightness. “His synesthesia allows him to stay this overwhelming amount of sensory knowledge in his brain in the form of a color palette, “keeping it in the sensory realm,” he told me, “without having to translate it into language. “
The meticulous blending procedure that I have observed, which sets it apart from so many other still wine producers, is also why Harrison makes some people angry. His behavior violates one of the central principles of his profession: terroir. A French word that can be loosely translated as “sense of place,” terroir refers to everything that affects a vineyard: soil composition, climate, altitude, drainage, even the surrounding flora and fauna. In the world of wine, this concept has become a philosophy. An ideal winemaker is not an author pursuing a non-public vision, but simply a steward of the land, whose task is to enable his wines to explain the complexities of their individual sites through painstaking and largely hands-off work, before passing duty to the next. generation. The influence of this philosophy comes and goes. As demand grew in the 1980s and 1990s for the intensely fruity, smooth, high-alcohol wines that Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic of his day, admiringly called “fruit bombs,” the terroir it has become a rallying cry for consumers and sommeliers. looking for more complex and sophisticated things to drink.
Harrison’s techniques seem, at first glance, the antithesis of terroir. When my friend told me that Harrison had “declared war on wine,” that’s what he meant. Mixing so many samples from other barrels, and doing it blindly, is virtually unknown in wine production, and turns out to call into question the sanctified position of the winery in winemaking. Harrison recalls a presentation he gave at Oregon Pinot Camp, a kind of conference for buyers in the Oregon Pinot Noir industry held in the Willamette Valley, after which descendants of a prominent Burgundy estate stood up and denounced his wines with a heavy French accent. Like “Abzoord!” to erase the terroir.
“The earth is a myth,” Harrison told me. She sees wine, like art, as something “cultural, not herbal,” and she doesn’t see herself as a servant of the herbal world. It’s not that Harrison doesn’t recognize the importance of land. She simply does not believe that wonderful vineyards magically create wonderful wines. For her, wine is a totally independent human enterprise that requires intense effort and artistic commitment. relying instead on instinct and aesthetic vision, a technique that produces wines that are more unique and rarely stranger than any other.
In our discussions of his paintings, he occasionally mentioned his favorite artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Louise Nevelson and Ruth Asawa and almost never talked about other winemakers. Wine lovers compare their wines to the easily recognizable paintings of stylists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joan Didion. “If I hadn’t owned Maggie’s wines for 20 years and then tasted them blindfolded, I would recognize them right away,” said Mimi Casteel, winemaker at Hope Well Wine in Hopewell, Oregon, whose grapes Harrison obtained. . I’ve heard diversifications about this from almost everyone I’ve talked to. “In my lifetime, if I’m lucky, I’ll have 25 or 30 chances, once a year, to do something beautiful,” Harrison told me. I’m not going to settle for what a particular winery gives me if I can enhance something. “
I recently opened the 2016 Syrah Lillian Scissor Series, a wine Harrison makes from grapes grown in the hills near Santa Barbara. It reminded me of one of those big-screen videos from the 1950s, like “Written in the Wind” or “Rear Window,” in which each and every visual detail erupts in an insurrection of ultra-saturated colors. It had an intensity and liveliness, an almost electric quality, that I had not felt, but without any heaviness. A friend, testing it on the other side of the table, compared to a well-designed neon sign. These photographs lingered in my head long after I swallowed the wine, which made me think not of Syrah or California, but of Harrison herself.
It turns out that, like almost everything Harrison does, the Syrah from the Scissor series involved a ridiculously impractical amount of work. Harrison had wondered what if, instead of loading his grapes into a destemmer, a long golf cart device did its job almost instantly: He got rid of the stems by hand, cut each of the individual berries with a pair of scissors and left the berries intact. It’s an obviously absurd idea: Making a barrel of syrah costs about 950 pounds of grapes, and Harrison learned that in an hour, a user passing by the hand could scratch about 4 pounds. Even with every user in the vineyard cutting, having enough grapes to fill that barrel would take a week.
Still, he went to the closing of Walgreens, grabbed seven pairs of scissors, each and every pair the store had, and threw them on the counter in front of the cashier. Then he asked if they had more. The young woman behind the money poster cast a hard look at Harrison, who was wearing a juice-stained blouse and yellow rubber boots, and whose eyes were crazy with inspiration, and had to conclude that she was disturbed. She replied in a consoling voice, “You don’t want it anymore. “
In December, Harrison arrived in New York and she advised that we meet at the Alex Katz retrospective at the Solomon R Museum. Guggenheim in Manhattan. Katz, a painter his parents adored. Harrison wore a smoke-colored blouse under a dark gray coat. on your ankle. We were amazed by Katz’s ancient paintings, which are transcendent, almost summary studies of light that seemed to be in motion. We slowed down to welcome them. Previously, Harrison had referred to his paintings as seeking to create “moments of sympathy. “I asked her about the differences between her and artists who perform in other media. “People who do things to look good speak the same language,” he said. What I envy visual artists is their ability to revise. When I bottle a wine, there is no possibility of reconsidering or changing.
It’s exciting to hear Harrison speak like such a confident artist, Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic internal spiral of reinforced concrete. It happened to me that making anything that feels through the nose and tongue as exhausting as an art painting is not an easy task. More than anything, what Harrison shares with other artists is a tenacious specificity. As Hannah Williams said, “The terroir of Maggie’s wines is Maggie. “
Alex Halberstadt is the “Young Heroes of the Soviet Union,” which was named one of the New York Times e-book critics’ most sensible picks for 2020. Frank Ockenfels is a photographer, filmmaker and artist founded in Los Angeles with an upcoming exhibition at Fotografiska in New York in November.
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