“When I first visited Antica Terra [in 2005], it was a whole vineyard of Charlie Brown Christmas trees,” says winemaker Maggie Harrison of her plot in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. She’s referring to the episode of Peanuts in which Charlie Brown sees a twinkle of potential in a small, sad-looking spruce.
“The vineyard had this very beautiful south-facing edge and old vines, but they were teeny-tiny. I could put my thumb and forefinger around each one,” she says, “and I had a very maternal feeling. Like, somebody needs to love this more.”
And that’s exactly what she did. Like the Peanuts gang – who decide that the sad spruce “needs a little love” before transforming it into a resplendent Christmas tree – Harrison has since nurtured that original 11 acres of “garbage can vineyard” into one that makes some of America’s most rarefied and desirable wines today.
Harrison’s route here was meandering and unconventional. She was not born into a line of winemakers, but grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, the daughter of an eye surgeon and cookery teacher with a passion for collecting art. As a graduate with her eyes on a career in non-violent conflict resolution, instinct stopped Harrison from accepting a prestigious job in Atlanta, Georgia. While she thought about what to do next, she worked in restaurants back in Chicago – a period in which she tasted wine voraciously. Though she is clear that she is “not religious,” she experienced something like a calling.
Through the literal grapevine, Harrison heard that an irreverent Austrian winemaker in California, Manfred Krankl, was looking for an assistant at his winery Sine Qua Non. (Krankl’s Santa Barbara winery is in some sense a precursor to Antica Terra, removed from California’s celebrated winemaking regions like the Napa Valley, and overlooking a junkyard.) With no training or preconceived ideas about wine beyond trust in her own good taste, she got the job.
“The most comforting thing about making wine is that I don’t have to know anything,” says Harrison, “I just have to be willing to be authentic and rigorous in the work.” That she was, viticulturally-speaking, a blank canvas was (and remains) a strength, she says, before telling me proudly that she didn’t visit another vineyard until age 45. “In art,” she tells me, “you don’t need the theory to make something beautiful.”
And that’s just it: Harrison is an artist – an artist in a world which prizes science. Her approach is steadfastly instinctive which, in winemaking – a millenia-old industry replete with rules and received wisdom about how things should be done – is something of a radical act. She is bemused by the world of wine – by its rigidity, its language. “I can look at a Gerhard Richter canvas and just say that I love it,” she says, “No one expects me to use words like ‘totemic’,” or arbitrary tasting notes that describe things that are anything but wine – tayberries or stone fruit or white flowers. “You’re supposed to have this whole vocabulary.” And don’t get her started on the subject of wine professionals and blind tasting – an exercise in guessing where and when a wine was made, and by whom. “What an odd feat of strength,” she says, “a crazy gauntlet power test.”
What Harrison doesn’t explicitly say is how male-dominated traditional wine culture is, but it is what I hear, particularly when she puts forward her own approach, which hinges on concepts like “beauty” and “pleasure” and “feeling”. “Wine is aesthetic only,” says Harrison, “it is non-essential. This is the act of drinking something for the sake of beauty.” She is curiously serious about not taking wine too seriously. Similarly, about the notion that “wine is cultural, not natural”, which sits at odds with ideas about wine as a product of its terroirs (the natural i.e. geographical and climactic, conditions in which the grapes are grown). Harrison finds this to be oversimplified, arguing that “there is a human terroirs”, resulting from decisions that the winemaker has made. “That is how we fall in love with wines,” she says, “because they have an emotional transparency. Someone has made good decisions about which they had convictions.”
Harrison bottled her first wines from Antica Terra in 2009. She grows the classic Burgundy grapes: pinot noir and chardonnay – Oregon is known for its beautiful renditions of the former and, says Harrison, “where pinot noir grows well, typically so does chardonnay.” But when she moved here from California, she found the chardonnays underwhelming. “Chardonnay is monstrous,” Harrison tells me, “if it grows where the sun shines reliably, it can be oily, rich, dull and monolithic”; on the flipside, she was told variously that Oregon had the wrong chardonnay clones, or that the climate was too cold to make it well. For Harrison, who is self-confessedly competitive, this made for a delicious challenge.
“People will tell you that if you’re out in the vineyard and the chardonnay grapes taste good, you’re too late [picking them],” she says, “it feels born out of fear”. Instead, as ever, Harrison followed her intuition. She sourced the vines from a vineyard well known for having concentration and power; she planted them so that there was “room for a hummingbird between every cluster”; she let the grapes ripen until the skins were golden and the seeds were brown. It was a preternaturally warm year but the grapes never became too ripe.
The resulting wine was Aurata, a 100% chardonnay named after Oregon’s rose chafer beetle, “the closest thing in this hemisphere to the golden scarab,” she tells me; the insect can look variously green, reddish, copper and bronze, but always has a look of goldness because of how its exocuticle polarises light. “The best chardonnays have a feeling of gold without being gold,” she tells me. The label, illustrated by Harrison’s husband Michael, a graphic designer, features nine beetles of differing iridescent hues.
Like all of Antica Terra’s wines, Harrison and Mimi Adams, her co-winemaker, blind taste and blend some 125 samples, each from a different barrel, for 10 hours a day in three day blocks. Each year, the question is “what is the nicest thing we can do?”, which they ask with “maniacal rigour”. There is no dogma, Harrison tells me, “Only call and response. It’s the difference between being spiritual and being religious.” While any bottle of Antica Terra available now is ready to drink – I enjoyed the Aurata 2020 and a 2017 Botanica Pinot Noir – they are equally suited to ageing. “Things that are well made last a long time,” says Harrison, “whether it’s a sweater or a bound book, ceramics or architecture, it’s just the nature of craft.” (The same could be said of parenting; Harrison, who has two adolescent daughters, insists that while she was warned about having teenagers, “every single moment has built on the last”.)
Harrison speaks with a kind of parental love about her wines – with pride, with a touch of self-doubt, with a sense of wanting the very best for them. But she doesn’t enjoy them in the same way, telling me emphatically that while she tastes them every day, she never does so for pleasure. “Is it interesting and sometimes thrilling to drink my own wines? Yes. Is it relaxing? Never.” She says she can’t imagine Frances Ford Coppola patting the couch to his wife on a Friday night and them watching The Godfather together.
Since Harrison came to Antica Terra, she has acquired another 140 acres of neighbouring land, 90 acres of which isn’t wine producing at all, but oak savannah in which kunekune pigs root around for acorns. She now offers guests the chance to stay, dine and explore the estate way beyond the realms of winemaking with a course she calls Beauty School, an invitation to “crack open the context of beauty”. The experience is the antithesis of conventional vineyard hospitality, where in Oregon, she says, you’ll usually be welcomed to a sterile tasting room, told things and fed the likes of farmed salmon drizzled with a reduction.
Instead, people are hosted in a way that “gets into their bone marrow”, drawing them into conversations about the forces that shape the land, and therefore the wines. Guests are taken crabbing at the crack of dawn, then cook those crabs to eat with Harrison’s white wines. They’ll go to the woods to gather lichen, moss, and to forage for porcini, morels and chanterelles to accompany the pinots. “Conversations unfurl contextually,” she says, “and so much of this business is founded on intimacy.” This is a point on which Harrison has been consistent ever since she first came to Antica Terra, showing care and love to a once lacklustre plot which, like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, has since come into its own.
Maggie wears the TOAST Seamless Recycled Cashmere Sweater, Taro Cotton Oxford Long Shirt, and Alix Cotton Linen Trousers. The Longpi Stubby Candle Holder, English Beeswax Stubby Candles, Moroccan Glasses Set, and Moroccan Glass Carafe also feature.
Words by Mina Holland.
Photography by Kelli Radwanski.
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