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New York Times

Dinner Is Served, at a 200-Foot-Long Table in the Oregon Woods

The Oregon winemaker Maggie Harrison, 52, launched her label, Antica Terra, in 2005, and is now considered one of the Willamette Valley's leading purveyors of chardonnay and pinot noir. But it wasn't until last year, after operating out of a nondescript warehouse in Dundee for the better part of two decades, that her business got a home worthy of its stature: a 148-acre patch of land on the outskirts of Amity, a small town about an hour south of Portland. Since taking over the property, Harrison has been at work creating her dream winery with a team of collaborators, chief among them Jai Kumaran, 42, a partner at the architecture and design firm West of West, which has offices in Portland and Los Angeles. Their first project, a candlelit tasting room and kitchen facility fronted by a dramatic oculus, debuted last year. Now comes what they call the Table in the Trees: an outdoor dining and hosting space centered on a sinuous, 200-foot-long, concrete and found-stone table set deep in a hilltop forest. On a warm evening in late July, Harrison hosted her first party there, gathering artist friends and collaborators for a dinner coinciding with the inaugural exhibition at what she calls Antica Terra's Art Meadow, an installation of naturalistic stone fountains by the Los Angeles-based ceramist Lily Clark, 31. 'People say I dress like a cult leader,' Harrison, who wore an ankle-grazing white caftan, was overheard telling a guest. 'But I feel more like the leader of a coven. Cults are all about persuasion, whereas with covens, the point is to make magic.' Offering up a seasonal feast and many bottles of wine under the towering white oak trees, she did just that. The attendees: Harrison and the Antica Terra team — including the winery's head chef, Timothy Wastell, 42; chef de cuisine Ramon Kelly-Canarios, 38, and studio manager Rachel Foster, 28 — were joined by Clark and Kumaran as well as Benjamin Critton, 42, and Heidi Korsavong, 42, who run the Los Angeles art gallery Marta and curated Clark's exhibition; the Portland-based woodworking artist Nicolas Musso, 43; the felted-wool artist Kristina Foley, 43, who lives in the Willamette Valley; and Kara Holekamp, 37, and Story Wiggins, 39, of Terremoto, a landscape architecture and design firm with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The décor: Just before the event, Harrison clipped sprigs from the surrounding oaks to place in small ceramic vessels arranged along the table. The Oregon-based designers behind the multidisciplinary creative studio Making Department used clay from the winery's property as well as grape vine ash to make the bulb-shaped vases. Place settings included pieces by the Japanese midcentury designer Sori Yanagi, and guests sat on hay bales covered with sheep pelts beneath fluffy hanging lanterns that Foley made using sheep's wool from a herd that grazes nearby. Perhaps the most dramatic element, though, was the forest canopy itself. The trees 'create a sort of roof over the table,' said Kumaran, adding that his goal for the project was to design 'something that felt as if it had always been there.' The food: Wastell works a weekly farmer's market shift for Groundwork Organics, a farm in Junction City, Ore., where he has priority access to seasonal produce. After a platter of cold water Tide Point oysters from Washington State, he sent out an elaborate crudités course featuring, among other things, purple wax beans, rainbow carrots, and Calimyrna figs, accompanied by a bowl of creamy Walla Walla onion and white miso dip. 'When stuff is in season we buy the best we can, and get out of the way,' he said. Also at its peak along the Oregon coast was albacore tuna, which he served two ways, offering a composed salad of heirloom tomatoes and fennel pollen with seared tuna tataki; and a whole fish head, brined and then smoked over white oak wood from the property, with blistered yellow Shiro plums and coriander seed. A similarly dramatic dish featured whole chickens from Dreamfield Farms in Birkenfeld, Ore. — also smoked over oak — presented with a single foot protruding from the corner of each platter. The dessert, a riff on baked alaska, was composed of peach leaf ice cream, peach sorbet, torched meringue, olive oil cake soaked in peach nectar and a sauce of olive oil simmered with peach pits. The drinks: Meals and tastings at Antica Terra often feature the winery's delicate Oregon pinot noirs and finely pointed chardonnays alongside wines from around the world, with an emphasis on the Burgundy, Barolo and Champagne regions. This meal instead included only the winery's own selections, all seven of them from 2022: Open bottles were placed directly on the table. The soundtrack: Birdsong was the only music. The Merlin app identified white-crowned sparrows, western wood pewees, American robins, acorn woodpeckers, northern flickers, black-capped chickadees, red-winged blackbirds, brown creepers and, once the sun had set, a great horned owl. The conversation: The artists and designers at the table talked shop, with Musso sharing salvage tips with Clark, and Critton enthusing to Kumaran about an upcoming show at his gallery, which features the works of New York-based interdisciplinary architecture and design firm MOS. As evening fell and guests refilled their wineglasses once more, the conversation turned to the setting itself. Daly, Kumaran and Foster wondered, wouldn't the table — reminiscent of a raised catwalk — be a great place for a fashion show? 'For the right person?' Harrison said. 'Sure!' An entertaining tip: 'The most memorable gatherings are rarely the most polished. They're the ones made in shared, easy spaces, where there's room for the night to surprise you,' said Harrison. 'This starts with dissolving the distance between you and the people you've invited.' She recommends letting guests arrive while you're still setting up, pouring them a drink and having them help with tasks like trimming herbs and laying the table. 'At the end of the night, no one really remembers how it came together, just how it felt to be there.'