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