From the Winery

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Recently an old friend who lives in a major metropolitan area and has never been to Oregon asked me what McMinnville was like.  ”It’s pretty much the middle of nowhere, right?”

I struggled a bit with how to answer that question, because yes, in many ways McMinnville does seem to be the middle of nowhere. With only 32,000 people, we certainly qualify as a small town. An hour and change from the uber-hip Portland, we can just barely bask in that limelight.  Even though we are home to the charming Linfield College, four or more world-class restaurants, and arguably the center of the Oregon wine industry, a city girl like me can’t really deny that we are fundamentally a farm town.

So yep, at first glance you might believe that we are stuck in the middle of nowhere, but hang around a little and you will see that this is a thriving community whose vibrancy belies that casual observation.

I was reminded of this quite vividly last Friday night when on a whim Rob and I decided to take the kids to a free outdoor performance of the new Willamette Shakespeare Company’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.  And what a dream it was! At the last minute we threw together a picnic – the centerpiece of which was this zesty Saffron Rice Salad, adapted from The Splendid Table.

Then we whisked ourselves off to Stoller Vineyards where this outstanding performance of the Shakespeare comedy would be performed. The Stollers are so generous – they frequently allow their beautiful property to be used for non-profit and fundraising causes. The ever-so picturesque Oak Grove park that perfectly compliments their vast vineyard was the ideal setting for the play.  It was Shakespeare exactly the way he intended it to be performed.

A wonderful evening ensued complete with outstanding theater, plastic cups of the Stoller’s wine, sharing tastes from our neighbors’ picnic baskets and all the kids alternately watching the performance with rapt attention and running off into the fields when the dialogue got too “Shakespearean”!

As the story progressed and the moon came out, the magical quality of the evening really began to shine.  Another friend told me later that this particular kind of moon is known as a Rogue Moon. We tried to look that up and find out just what it meant, but sadly Google failed us.  Never mind, it does seem to be a fitting description for the kind of evening it was, right here in the middle of nowhere.