Valentines 2012!

Folks,

To those in attendance at the Valentines at the Hollow this 2012 year: Thank you. For making the night, and all that preceded it, a fantastic ride.

To those unable to make it, or new to this blog and curious about Harris Bridge Vineyard, its event space The Hollow, and its annual February love bash, flag February 2013 to be a participant in what has become a much anticipated, poetry- and song-packed multi-course and –wine extravaganza, where the valleys’ bounties are put to use and celebrated in flavors, verse, and a rollicking good time.

The evening begins at 5. You arrive to the vines in their winter suits and a melt-swollen river roaring beneath the dim bridge. You step up into the tall, glowing tasting room, its two long rose-bouqueted tables. Welcome. A celebratory glass of bubbly, some mingling in the room’s growing sounds, while more arrive until you’re 40 all, and then it’s time to sit and begin the evening’s flavors.

First, a bright Pinot Gris from the Willamette Valley’s Westrey, paired with Denison Farm’s baby greens decorated with beets and dressed; next, Big River’s crusty pugliese and Fraga’s sumptuous goat cheeses; after, Nuthatch’s big Syrah to compliment the Brasato di Maiele, made of pork raised across the road from Gathering Together Farm where the meal’s main course veggies were sown, grown, harvested, chopped, sautéed, simmered; and last, succulent Bad Cupcake treats with the gorgeous, rich Magnolia Pinot Noir dessert wine from right here, where you’re sitting and feasting and grinning and laughing and, yes, friends, you are singing.

The evening holds the beats of jazz and folk, a bit of vibrato, and between the salad and pork an unassuming gentleman at the head of one table is all of a sudden speaking with your host of John Denver, Placido Domingo, key the music and the two tables belt Perhaps Love in chorus, one length of guests as Denver, the other Domingo, the recording strong in the background while eighty extra lungs sing out their parts. Later, because the night is surprises, a slow song threads the speakers and several pairs leave their seats to dance, those who weren’t told the cue following quickly, no chaperone in sight, just sweethearts being sweet with cheeks and twirls and dips. And of course, as is custom at this Hollow event, Chaucer makes a noteworthy, hilarity-ensuing appearance, as the night, beneath the wide pinpricked sky, arcs towards its end.

You’ve made new friends, visited old ones, exercised your teeth and pitch and heart and been nimble as kids again, love-drunk, now sated.

We appreciate you sharing with us, and as always, we look forward to the fun and flavors and friends and family who will join in next year. Remember: February 2013. With you here, it’ll be the best yet. 

Matt the Electrician and Lindy Osborne, LIVE

Folks! What a treat September 17th! The Hollow was wide – windows up-cranked and swinging doors swung to fit the many, many seats of pleased heads and hearts and ears here to hear Matt the Electrician the fantastic, with the incomparable Scrappy Jud Newcomb and Seela, opened for by a hilarious, harmonica-and-guitar wonder and brilliantly smiling Lindy Osborne.

Amanda and Nathan kept hard at work behind the bar, people’s palates content with party snacks and fizzy juices, bubbly, beer, red or white wine, the ’07 Stories, and of course – of! course! – Half Magic! The Half Magic namesake, for those of you new to the vineyard, is a song off Matt's previous album, Animal Boy. Each bottle in a case (12) is hatted by a different song’s lyrics typed and folded and star-stuck to its neck. Seriously nifty.

Yeow! The room and deck and drive were boisterous with arrivals, catching up, anticipation, while the sky set its pretty, dusty pinks and lavenders down the backs of the hillsides, and dusk came and the torches were lit and Patrick directed cars until it was time for the four certain faces in the shadow-making amber light to sing to us of exquisite in-the-dark climbing trees and the perfect pedal bike, finding home from a distance and family vacations and the sudden, unexpected kindness of strangers. The show was a CD release party for Matt’s latest, Accidental Thief, which, if you don’t have in your CD player already, or on your computer, or somewhere able to get itself out the speakers and into your head, you should. Remedy! Each song sung by each artist – we were lucky and heard Scrappy and Seela do solo numbers, too – was a story that focused for its brief minutes on something that might otherwise go overlooked and this place – the vineyard, the Hollow, its makers and audience – champion such details, the beauty of slowing down to examine and make sense of and, ultimately, to celebrate.

Beyond the fantastic voices and harmonies and storytelling, I was struck by the varied ages of the audience, and the skill with which Lindy and Matt and Scrappy and Seela drew us all even closer to them. Nathan and Amanda have made The Hollow such a warm, inviting space: its people, their mission, the wines, its wood and light, how nestled each piece is in the Harris Valley basin. Add to it musical talent and humor and humility and admiration and pleasure, and you’ve got a night that might feel, once you’ve reached home, like you went somewhere secret and magical and that if you went back it might not be there. But! It is!

The tasting room opened as a regular Saturday that 17th at noon, and didn’t latch closed until midnight, its inside’s finding their ways carefully back to town or other country, a flashlight escort, the crossing of train tracks, and beneath the fuzzy stars cars catching all the watchers had trapped in their teeth and the pressures of their tongues while they sang what seeded inside them, to home, a toothbrush, and bed.

Thanks to all who came; we’ll keep you in the loop for our next event. And we hope to see even more of you in the future. Come and visit!

Valentines at the Hollow

Though Valentine’s day and it’s preceding February 12th have passed, we Harris Bridgers would like to mark the occasion, even a month beyond its happening – think grand, ever going, slow to wilt birthdays, or gusto driven by great news that doesn’t want to wear off – because – because! –

February 12th this year was an inauguration, a celebration not only of love prior to the official lovey-dove and chocolates and roses and sweet notes etc. day, but a lift off in Hollow history, a notch in the tree trunk, something to be recalled down the line as the start of another fine tradition. Though the Valentine’s event made its place in Harris Bridge Vineyard’s story several years ago, this year was different, held as it was in the heart of The Hollow, a roomful of people ready to celebrate their adoration and admiration for each other and the people they’d newly met and those they already knew and loved, champagne blonde and tickly in their glasses, Fraga cheeses waiting to kiss the Big River Pugliese, a green bean and beet and chevre salad skipping around mouths with the Capitello Sauvignon Blanc – such lovebirds! There was boeuf bourguignon that fell apart when the fork touched it the way one might fall apart when another lays eyes on her or him and that eye-laying dynamo has the key to the fall-aparter’s heart, as in fall apart in the best of ways, as in fall apart because I see you seeing me wonderful. It was as if the Cloud(s) had dropped down 9 of their best versions of I love you, tucking some inside the boeuf, some inside the beets and some inside the potatoes that got in on the fest and had their shining time. And don’t think the Fraga and Pugliese quit kissing. Love was in the Carmeniere! To further rev our feelings, the pairing of a fresh, dewy two, a tender spiced cupcake and its raisin mousse hat, its pretty little clip of blood orange to make a sweet shape in the mouth, and the stunning and singing Half Magic on the promenade, that duo taste in taste on the tongue.

We had so much fun. We shared stories and music with new ears and hearts and eyes and old. Our soundtrack never failed. We laughed to hear Chaucer’s naughty head, then laughed some more, then again. The lighting was right and low, the room warm with voice, the night’s poetics all encompassing. Thank you to everyone present for helping to color so vividly and beautifully this noteworthy, momentous event, and to those who weren’t able to attend physically but who joined us in spirit, and to all who hope to come next year and the year after and the years after that – we can’t wait to see you and do this again. Keep your valentines close. Much love,

Harris Bridge and The Hollow

First of the shorts

Nathan here with a few words...

We were living on the coast in this little blue rental on a small ledge of stone and sand overlooking the ocean just South of Waldport. We had 3 walls of sliding glass doors in the house that would flex and pop during storms. All the glass made you feel like you were forever outside in those elements, the sheets of rain, being pushed onto the glass in thick layers by the wind.

In the Northeast corner of this little house, just off the entry way was a small room that we had made into an office. There, on a corner desk, the first of the stories were written. It was a good place for that kind of work, on a ledge, next to the ocean, in that house that sometimes felt more like a glass boat than a house, but just enough glass to hold back the storms, and just enough ledge to hold onto.

The first stories are novice and folksy. They were at the same time an escape back to a peaceful valley during an impossible time for both of us, and an attempt to understand and define this love of ours, the farm. The very first story was called Dirt, our humble takeoff on the notion of Terroir. The person named in this story, Dorothy Harris, was the one that made it possible for my family to live in Harris Valley. In 1976, she sold the original Harris family farmhouse to my parents, and my dad Troy took on the work of restoring it. Similar to the coast house, this structure sits on a ledge, just above the Mary's river. It overlooks a collection of small waterfalls, and in the winter those falls become a raging torrent, and in the winter of 1978 that ledge was also just enough to hold onto.

There were about 200 printings of this story on the bottles that left the winery. As I write this, and look back through the previous versions of this story before it was printed, and as I think about Dorothy, and Troy, I'm inclined to include one of the earlier versions of the story and toast that never made it to print. You will see it below.

Dirt

In the early spring of 1998 I began to prep the field for planting grape-vines. Dorothy Harris of Harris Valley, Harris Bridge, and Harris Road had let me use her old, rusted out, single blade, scrap-metal plow to turn the soil. I remember that I spent all evening wrestling it out of the shed because it was buried 6 inches in 50 years of dust, and entangled with 5 other implements from the turn of the century.

The plow's first cut into the soil was my baptism into the church of the romantically inclined small time farmer. I had turned over a century of seasons to reveal the soil of another time. It was musty, organic, dark, rich, soft, moist, and virgin. Its composition was all the life and matter of the past centuries, fallen, and laid to rest, waiting to be consumed again in another form.

A toast to dirt,

Life's reflection pool

Shape

Once upon a time was a big dark eye. It came in a big dark package that was soft and smelled a little dirty, a lot like river, a hint of corn-chips.

Once upon a time was a restaurant where the people went on the side of a concrete hill.

Once upon a time before this big dark eye in its big dark package was a girl who went to the restaurant on the hill where the corn chips came in warm little bowls and the windows were wide and the street was busy. This was a city.

Once upon a time the big dark eye in its package of darkness and softness and smells took a walk on a hillside in the country. There were railroad tracks and trees and lots and lots of fungus.

Fungus can snuggle and can stand like soldiers, or like figures tending paddies, or those admiring mountains.

Once upon a time the fungus threw a party. The party was a big one, a good one, with many invitations. To the little groves, to the glens, the dales, the nooks, to the crannies, the stumps, the beds of ferns. The cheeks of trunks. Come! Come! Celebrate! On this day at this time in this place you can’t miss us - we’ll be the ones all over the place!

Once upon a time while this party was being planned and the fungus were dressing in their best suits and some were saying I want to go and some were saying I don’t know how we’ll make it and still others were saying I don’t care what you think about this orange, I think I look pretty neat and my curves feel great and more than anything else I’m happy and glow and I’ll knock the socks off this party – as all this was hubbubing along, there was a checkerboard of old fire broke wood resting in red dirt. It remembered its days as a trim little tree when nothing could stop it from growing as tall as any other tree it had seen, taller even, right off the head of the hill and straight through the elements. Oh! Rain up high was colder, and sun that much whiter. The birds nested, and voles burrowed, and worms braided through roots. Sometimes a cat passed by or hid and more than one buck rode out its rut in the area, velvet pressed to bark and scrapes hoofed in the tree's slender trunk that turned brisk with exposure.

Once upon a time the big dark eye trotted past the checkerboard wood. It stopped and put an iris in the light. Down in a swale stood a broad glowing oak, its body green fur, branch tips webbed pale. Perhaps it was old enough its marbles or galls or whatever a tree might lose in old age were indeed being lost. Or perhaps trees grow only wiser. Perhaps what is wise is not always that which is widely believed to be so. Perhaps this and that and the other thing, and that thing over there, too.

Behind the oak and below the big dark eye that still stood with its iris lit grew a small tree, limber in the wind with a dish or nest or crown or catch for its top, all its highest needles curling as many many ears. Receptors. Receivers. Transmission. Cilia. It listened to the checkerboard wood remembering and the duct of the dark eye contracting and the fungus all readying. Goodness! The fungus! So many and they just kept arriving, kept popping up like joy or a keen fox or a salamander in the ditch at the water's face for breath. They were all shapes and sizes and outfits and the little tree knew the big dark eye could see it, and the checkerboard wood could feel it, and so could the oak, and so could it, the listening little pine, and so could all the others whose outsides were perked up in welcome:

You're here!

Turn it up!

Your gills are gorgeous.

May I have this dance.

here comes a start

it's new years' eve eve, but when this posts it will be new year's eve. the washer is spinning and my belly is pleased and full. tonight was homemade pasta and squid in red sauce and garlic bread and salad and a good thick dessert with kiwis and crumble. all in our warm cantaloupe kitchen, with family, tucked in the valley's pocket, the river thrashing rocks recently resurfaced and the buds at work on branches while the bulbs poke down and up and everything readies.

one of these days we'll look out to new color, but the winter that sits beyond our windows, the leftward field of reds and yellows and browns and grays and greens and reds and oranges and yellows, lines and dots and squiggles and feathers and soft and hard and dull and sharp, is beautiful. texture. beds and beds and miles and volumes and bellies and mouths of texture. like an anemone in a pool with its tentacles waving. a starfish on the rocks with its sandpaper skin. the side of a whale pocked with barnacles. a new dish of paint, a pile of cheese grate , a bowl of popped corn and its buttery crannies, ice on the windsheild spreading as quills.

it's a new and old discovery, texture. it's what amanda and nathan give the wines, what bodhi's coat does in light, luna's siamese eyes and a little lady's eyelashes and always a spot of her hair in the back. a certain favorite's earlobes and iris. a book's edge of paper. in the summer the river's silt bed disturbed and blooming. the coat of an owl or a fox's whisker. the sound of hair on string or ice in a shaker or skis cutting snow or oak warming in creaks and pops post frozen-fog night. it's everything.

sometimes i fall a little too in love with texture. sometimes i don't take enough time to rein it. sometimes i make more texture than is needed. sometimes texture suffocates and other times, the best times, of course, it's just right. everything sings. you feel it in your chest. purity.

a fly i'd normally smack buzzing up in the light so the bulb and shade shed dust and the motes fall in whorls like a winter's white storm beneath streetlamp.

i'm glad to be here. i'm glad to want to run around with a magnifying glass and a bandana and a cap gun and be always in boots. i'm glad to see someone endlessly love to jump puddles. i'm glad to come upon orange bellied salamanders playing statues in the road. i'm glad for blackberries that will ripen and the length of light on its way.

happy new year all you. keep peeled. be listening.

Neil Diamond...really?

Nathan here with a few words...
Home from Christmas day festivities with my side of the family and sat down on the couch for a movie. As we prepared the movie, a Neil Diamond interview was playing on the TV, and being nearly Neil fans, we watched, delaying our movie for a bit. A question came, "have you ever met the members of the Monkees band", the band that recorded "I'm a believer", "Love to Love", and a couple of other big hits that were written early in Neil's career that had a significant impact on his future music endeavors. Neil said "no", he hadn't met them. I puzzled on this for a bit, and then the interview continued, "what is behind the song, Sweet Caroline", and the response came something like, I liked the sound of the name, it was inspired by the name Caroline Kennedy, not the person, the name. He was careful to articulate how the sound of the name inspired him, the phonetics of Ca-ro-line. I began to crave more beer as this interview continued.

How do you do that? Please, this is not as much a judgement as much as it is pure puzzlement, as in there is something here that I don't understand. How do you not care to meet the people that you sold your songs to this early in your career, even if you were working in a song factory like he was? Yes, I can see that disconnecting yourself from your work can become habitual later on in life, when you're beaten down by the corporate machine, but this early on? At that time he was fresh out of NYU, having just swashbuckled his way to fencing fame, not 5 years into his songwriting career, and he was already disconnecting from his work?

Then to the movie, it was the movie Everybody's Fine, with Robert Deniro. Good movie, not great, but good, and as a dad, it hit home. It was a movie about family, and the relationships between a father and his children. In the scene where Robert Deniro sees the painting by his son, the inspiration for this blog hit.

The wine business is full of families and it is steeped in tradition. The idea, or more to the point, the dream of a family working together is at the heart of Harris Bridge. I'll never forget coming back to the valley as I began to consider starting a small farm. I sat down with my aunt and uncle from the more conservative side of my family to talk about my life's plans. At that time, farming was an interest of mine, but it wasn't yet the fully developed plan that it eventually became, and so I simply told them that "I don't know what kind of work I will do, but whatever it is, I want it to involve my family". I might as well have said that I wanted to begin the first Corvallian bobsled racing team. Bewilderment and confusion set into their faces.

So, what do these experiences with Neil, Deniro and conversations with my aunt and uncle have to do with one another? They share the concepts of connection and meaning (or the lacking of these things), and they inspire related questions, questions like how do you become or remain disinterested in the people who are connected to you through your work? How is it that an emphasis on family became such a strange and bewildering concept, disassociated from a person's life work? And tying in the movie, how is it that Frank Goode, Deniro's character, the father, ends up so disconnected from his children, in the end being closer to an idea represented with oil and canvas than he was to his son, the living person behind the canvas.

This comes off as dramatic I'm sure, and that's alright, it is, because for me it is meaningful. At Harris Bridge, Amanda and I find connections with the people that we work with, mostly because we don't know how to go about our work any other way. In the tasting room we talk about where people are from, and what inspires them, and what they feel about music, or politics, or poetry, because the concept of sharing something that you create with someone else, without having any idea of who you shared it with, is foreign to us. Most of our wine releases are less than a hundred cases, and our strongest connection to a sold out vintage is found in the people that we handed each of one of those bottles to. For this reason, most of the time, if you get our wine, we get to know you, and if not on your first visit to the tasting room, then on the second, or third.

We ask for meaning in the place that we work and in the things that we create. Don't confuse this kind of intent with complexity, at times what we do is very straight forward. However, the reason that stories are laid out for you as you carry one of our bottles away, whether it comes in the scroll atop the bottle, or is shared through a conversation at the bar, is that there is meaning behind that bottle that we feel compelled to share. We don't know to go about this another way, and to produce and release something without these layers would seem empty to us.

The long and lonely winding gravel road that leads to our tasting room in the woods tends to split those that travel it into two groups, those who begin looking for turnabouts, and others who become more interested and curious, and press on. My sense is that Neil and Frank would be the turnabout type, and yes, the day that Neil Diamond shows up in our tasting room, I will admit that I was wrong about this. However, for those that continue, there is a valley that opens up in the woods, with a railroad and a covered bridge, and just off to the East of the bridge sits the winery. It is here that this dream I mentioned above, the dream of working with "family", is being realized through an extended family of partners and customers and friends. From the True Grit crew, to the Ivy's Axe dinners, to the opening night at the Hollow, Amanda and I appreciate finding and creating connection and meaning with you. Thank you for an amazing 2010, and Happy New Year!

Nathan