GOLDENDALE -- There was a moment at last weekend's concert at Maryhill Winery where everything came together: The breeze had finally blown away the day's heat, the setting sun painted the Columbia River Gorge a golden orange and Lyle Lovett's molasses voice filled the entire amphitheater, seeping into even the cracks and crevices.

There was the a vineyard to the right of the stage and an orchard filled with cherries, peaches and nectarines to the left. Beyond the stage, the Columbia sparkled in the waning daylight. The place has the feel of a garden sanctuary as semi trucks and motorists whiz by on Interstate 84 far across the river, oblivious to it all.

That scene, that moment, is what Craig and Vicki Leuthold had in mind when they added the amphitheater to their winery outside Goldendale in 2003. They're both music fans, sure. But hosting the winery's annual concert series isn't really about music. It's about marketing the wine itself. It's about getting thousands of people to live these magic moments and associate them with the Maryhill label.

"When there's 2,000 wines on the shelf, what makes people choose ours?" Leuthold said "We figure it's a memory, it's an experience. The concerts are a way to introduce them to the wine."

It seems to be working. Though the Lovett show brought in only about 2,500 people -- 2,000 fewer than the Train concert a week earlier -- those interviewed for this story were unan-imous in their praise of the venue.

"Between the winery, the natural beauty of the gorge, all of it -- it's unbelievable," said Mindy Montecucco, 47.

Like 60 to 70 percent of Maryhill's visitors, Montecucco is from the Portland area. She and her friend, Kristin Williams, 43, were both at Maryhill for the first time. They drove over for the show and planned to return the same night.

These are the people the Leutholds are trying to reach with their concerts. Having started the winery itself in 1999 and opened the tasting room in 2001, they knew their demographic. You won't see hip-hop or punk rock bands play Maryhill. The acts that promoter Live Nation books on the Leutholds' behalf play music for relatively affluent, relatively grown-up tastes. For wine buyers, in other words.

This year's lineup is Train, Lovett, Jackson Browne, Natalie Merchant and Earth, Wind & Fire. Last year's was Counting Crows, Browne and John Legend. Previous lineups have included Los Lobos, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson. Acts like that generally come close to filling the amphitheater, which has a listed capac-
ity of 4,000 but can accom-modate up to 4,500 when it has to.

It's been a balancing act, Leuthold said. When the winery first hosted concerts in 2003, it went with smaller acts such as bluesman Delbert McClinton and country chanteuse Emmylou Harris.

"We honestly didn't know how many people would fit into the amphitheater," Leuthold said.

It was a matter of trial and error those first couple of years. The concerts drew crowds, which was good. But there were parking issues, troubles with ingress and egress and, on a couple of occasions, unruly crowds that swarmed down from the lawn seating on the terraced hill overlooking the stage and into the reserved section below.

Something had to be done, so the concert series shut down for 2006 and 2007 while the Leutholds took on a renovation of the still-new venue. They built a $750,000 permanent stage to replace the one they had to rebuild each year, they separated the lawn seats from the reserved section with a row of box seats and they redesigned the venue's entry, turning the doors-opening stampede into a more orderly line.

"It was a conscious decision on our part to change the way the venue worked," Leuthold said.

There are still problems on occasion, particularly during the first show each year when many of the crowd control contractors are brand new. The Maryhill Winery Facebook page the day after the Train concert had a few complaints about the way the parking lot was handled. But the plan is working. Maryhill has gone from selling 3,400 cases of wine per year when it started to 80,000, and events manager Joe Garoutte credits the concerts for much of that.

"We help people experience Maryhill for the first time," he said in the tasting room before the Lovett show started. "A lot of people would never come here otherwise. Then we get them to come, and then they come back."

A surprisingly small percentage of the visitors come from the Yakima area, just over an hour away. Part of that is sheer numbers -- Yakima doesn't have near the population of Portland or Seattle, which combine to make up 75 to 85 percent of the concert attendees. Part of that, Leuthold suspects, is the fact Maryhill is still relatively new, as a winery and as a concert venue.

"Once they come, they can't believe how beautiful it is," he said. "I think it's that we're still being discovered."

Certainly everyone here for the Lovett concert had plenty of memorable images to draw from when they hear the name Maryhill Winery or see the Maryhill label on shelves.

"It's just a beautiful, beautiful part of the world you folks live in," Lovett told the crowd. "I kept thinking I was gonna lie down on the bus and take a nap on the way here. But I couldn't stop looking out the window."

* Pat Muir can be reached at 509-577-7693 or pmuir@yakimaherald.com.