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Division Winemaking Company 2016 Chenin Blanc “Inondé”
The day the phone started ringing
The phone rang. And it rang again. And again. At Division Winemaking Company, the phone didn’t stop ringing for days. Just about three years ago, New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov singled out Tom Monroe and Kate Norris’s 2012 Gamay Noir as the best red wine to pair with a Thanksgiving meal. It was just a three-sentence mention, but the phone didn’t stop ringing until the Gamay Noir was sold out – and almost everything else in a bottle, too.
Tom and Kate are best known for founding the Southeast Wine Collective, a popular wine bar and urban winemaking facility. Currently the home of twelve winemakers, the Collective has launched numerous labels that are winning fans.
They’ve have been making wine together since they spent a year on a vineyard in France in 2009. With a business plan for an Oregon-based winery that Tom wrote during business school, they relocated to launch a winery of their own.
At Division, they create wines that reflect their love of French style wines – balanced wines with nuanced flavors using minimalist winemaking practices that help the unique character of each vineyard shine through in each bottle.
Cellar 503 Tasting Notes
Division Winemaking Company, Portland, Oregon
2016 Chenin Blanc “Inondé”
For about 2000 years, ending 13,000 years ago, the Pacific Northwest was repeatedly flooded by waters rushing as fast as 80 miles per hour and more than ten times the volume of the biggest river in the world today, the Amazon.
Those cataclysmic Missoula floods make our wine country possible, with layers of sediment deposited over basalt bedrock and volcanic rock. It’s that terroir that makes northwest wines so dynamic, unique, and extraordinary. And it’s in honor of those floods that Kate and Tom named this wine “Inondé” — French for “to flood”.
This Chenin Blanc will be perfect for your Thanksgiving table, with ripe fruit and acidity balanced against minerality and floral notes. Just 82 cases were made – and it’s now sold out. Cellar 503 members got the last of it!
A Cellar 503 selection in November 2017, Thanksgiving Wines Columbia Valley | Chenin Blanc
