Maggie Harrison’s War on Wine

I visited Harrison again last year, at the house she shares with her husband, Michael, and their two teenage children in the hills of Southwest Portland. Michael is a soft-spoken graphic designer who works mainly on labels for wine bottles (including Harrison’s). The house is inviting and lived in, with plenty of plants, a record player and framed children’s drawings sharing space with its many odd and beautiful objects. Being around Harrison is alternately exhilarating and difficult. Her quickness and exacting taste sometimes clash with her desire to be generous and easygoing, and at these times she appears slightly at odds with herself, like a radio tuned between two stations. I’ve never seen her fully at rest, a state that Harrison would probably find wasteful and disappointing.

During my visit, I sat down with Harrison for a personal blending session. We decided to combine 10 barrel samples of her pinot noir. We chose the number purely in the interests of time and sanity, but even 10 proved too much for me. Each sample tasted and smelled startlingly different, but after blending five of them, bewilderment set in. I couldn’t figure out what percentage of a wine to add to the others, or why sometimes the blend became better and worse simultaneously, and eventually palate fatigue dulled my purple tongue to subtle differences. In the space of an hour and a half, I lost confidence in my ability to discern much of anything except a need for water. Harrison looked at ease and totally in control.

She attributes her ability to map so many flavors in her mind at the same time to her synesthesia. The causes of the condition remain poorly understood, but at least one study suggests that synesthetes may have an enhanced capacity for creativity, possibly because of increased connectivity among regions of the cerebral cortex, and are more likely to enter creative professions. Nikola Tesla, David Hockney, Duke Ellington and Frank Ocean have reported having it. In “Speak, Memory,” Nabokov describes learning as a child that he shared the condition with his mother while playing with alphabet blocks: “We discovered that some of her letters had the same tint as mine.”

Like Nabokov, Harrison has grapheme-color synesthesia, a form in which numerals and letters become associated with colors, and this turns out to be especially useful in her work. As she tastes her way around the bottled samples, her brain turns every number into a distinct, vibrant color, until the wines in front of her become a palette of umbers, oranges and Prussian blues that she combines into a final composition that aspires to what she describes as “emotional transparency” and a “perfect tension between intensity and levity.” Her synesthesia allows her to hold this overwhelming amount of sensory data in her mind as a palette of color, “keeping it in the sensory realm,” she told me, “without having to translate it into language.”

The painstaking blending process that I observed, which sets her apart from so many other producers of still wine, is also the reason Harrison makes some people irate. Her process violates one of the central tenets of her craft: terroir. A French word that can be translated loosely as “sense of place,” terroir refers to every factor affecting a vineyard: soil composition, climate, elevation, drainage, even the surrounding flora and fauna. In the wine world, this concept has evolved into a philosophy. An ideal winemaker is not a creator pursuing a personal vision but merely a steward of the land, whose job is to allow her wines to express the subtleties of their individual sites through conscientious, largely hands-off work, before passing the responsibility to the next generation. This philosophy’s influence waxes and wanes. As demand grew in the 1980s and 1990s for the intensely fruity, unctuous and highly alcoholic wines that Robert Parker, the most influential wine critic of his day, admiringly described as “fruit bombs,” terroir became a rallying cry for consumers and sommeliers searching for more complex and subtle things to drink.