A completely unique pear cider full of verve, depth, texture, and delight.

Kate's dad taught her (rightly so) that a perfectly ripe pear is one of the marvels of the agricultural culinary world. Add in a little French upbringing (poire ciders from Normandy with buckwheat crepes... yum!) and you have one of her fave fruits of all time.

So how does a pear find its way into our winery and into a bottle?

Our dear friends Kirk Sutherland (Erde Wines) and Laura Brennan (Inconnu) introduced Kate to a 100+ year old abandoned orchard at the very top of Underwood Mountain, located opposite Hood River across the Columbia River.

They were friends with the owners and were foraging the orchard for apples for their winery projects and just knew that the pears would pique Kate's interest. So in the middle of a heavy, heavy rain storm in the middle of the 2020 harvest, Kate and a few members of our harvest team braved the elements and picked two bins of Bartlett pears, brought them back to the winery, and milled them by hand.

After they are milled, pears can be pressed much the same way that grapes are, but need a little texture added into the press so that the fruit doesn't turn to mush instead of clear juice. Some cider makers like to use hay as the texture adder, but Kate looked around the winery and thought that the skins and stems of some pressed off-white grapes would work just as well!

For the first press load, we had botrytized Chenin Blanc available, and for the second press load, a combination of Roussanne and Riesling. And so a unique mixture of pear juice and grape juice was barreled down and fermented - at first in barrel, and then split into two lots - a version where fermentation finished in bottle with a little local honey, creating this sparkling pear wine, and a still version, the 2020 Division Still Perry.