Day Trip: Thomas Monroe and Kate Norris, Division Wine Company

While wine making in Oregon may conjure notions of bucolic countryside and the verdant Willamette Valley, the operation at Division Winemaking Company looks a little different. Founded in 2010 by Thomas Monroe and Kate Norris, Division crafts their expressive, low-intervention wines in the heart of southeast Portland. (Division is the street name of their original home.) This year saw the winery move into a larger facility in the city. There, it nearly doubled production capacity to about 12,000 cases and allowed space for some playful experimentation. But during harvest season, it’s all-hands-on-deck, and Monroe and Norris bring us along for the ride.

6:30 a.m.

It’s customary in the Willamette Valley to start picking at 6:30 or 7 in the morning. And it might take two to four hours to pick the site. We create the work orders the night before, so everyone will have their to-dos for the long day ahead—what grapes will be coming in, how they’re going to be processed, and what fermentation management work needs to be done, plus any special projects. One of the peculiarities of being in the city means that we’re not getting grapes delivered from the valley until early or mid-afternoon.

10 a.m.

Typically, Tom goes out to the vineyard, or Kate’s brother, who does a lot of grape hauling for the winery. We’re working with about 22 vineyards this year. Cassin Vineyard is in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. And we lease the whole property and handle the farming ourselves, which is managed by Jessica Cortell. Eola Springs Vineyard in the Eola-Amity Hills is one of our key sites for old-vine Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, Gamay, and Sauvignon Blanc. Mae’s Vineyard in the Applegate Valley in southern Oregon is where we get Cabernet Franc, Grenache, and Syrah. We also work with a couple of Washington vineyards in the Columbia Valley, such as Carousel Vineyards, where we lease five acres of Gamay for our rosé.

12 p.m.

We almost always have lunch together as a team and taste a slew of wines from other producers we love and respect. It was what we did when we lived in France, and it’s a tradition we love. We spend most of the year collecting wines we think will be interesting for our harvest team to try. It’s also important to us to provide at least one communal meal for everyone. It’s a lot of hard, physical work during harvest. So to be able to sit and talk with your peers is a big part of the value of the experience, especially for the harvest assistants who will pick our brains about the wines.

1:30 p.m.

Our receiving line is sterilized prior to the grapes arriving, so it’s ready to go. We sort the grapes so we don’t let in a lot of leaves or rotted fruit. We do a lot of whole cluster fermentations. Typically the whole cluster components get layered into the vat first. And then we de-stem on top, or sometimes we do an alternating layer cake. We sort the grapes into different fermentation vats—anywhere from 1 1/2-ton vessels all the way up to 5 tons. We don’t add much at this phase other than a tiny amount of SO2 if the grape health needs it, and dry ice, which adds a layer of carbon dioxide in the vats before it ferments and helps with extraction and microbial control. Carbon dioxide is also a macerating chemical, so it molecularly breaks down the skins and helps to macerate the grapes.

The fermenters are wrapped up, and we do an initial pump over to get the juice moving around. Then we let it sit anywhere from two to seven days before we take any other actions. We’ve been doing more Italian varieties the past few years and added more Sangiovese this year. We also have some new stuff planted on the vineyard that we lease—some Gamay and Sauvignon Blanc. We’re trying to make a statement that single-site Gamay and Sauv Blanc deserve a spot at the Willamette table—that they are terroir-expressive wines that are ideal for the region.

Kate has also led the charge on cider wines, and our first perry cider released this year. We also made a piquette from Sangiovese and added honey back to it, making a kind of a mead piquette that became naturally sparkling.

6 p.m.

At the end of each day, we taste every single ferment to make sure we’re not seeing any issues. By the apex of harvest, we have 40 or 50 ferments going. So we’ll be tasting for at least an hour. We’re a very low-input, low-manipulation winery. It’s important for us to be as proactive as we can at this stage because we don’t use adjuncts or chemical means for changing the wines. We prefer an old-school approach. We like nuanced, mineral-driven wines that have character and uniqueness from their site and from the folks that are involved in them. We do natural fermentations. And, while we don’t say never, we don’t amend our chemistries very often. We just try to make the best wine we can from what we got with Mother Nature and the excellent farmers we work with each year.