The Winery

Glacial Lake Missoula Wine Company is a garagistes winery based in the border-town of Blaine, Washington. We are Tom Davis & Tracey DeGraff, a Vancouver B.C. couple. Tom is a former brew-master and bartender, and Tracey is also from the hospitality industry.

As passionate amateurs, we experimented for a decade making red wine from grapes from wine regions all over the Northwest. In 2000 we discovered how superior eastern Washington’swine-grapes really were, in making a truly awesome wine from a ton of Cabernet Sauvignon from a vineyard near Sunnyside, in the Yakima Valley.

In 2002 we started the winery in Blaine, WA, 50 kilometers from our home in Vancouver, but the closest point in Washington State. True to form, the winery is in a converted garage, and uses both modern refrigerated stainless tanks, and traditional cooperage.

Our wine-making style is to make full bodied, fruity, mouth-filling reds, balanced by racy acidity and exclusively new French oak cooperage. Deluge is our signature wine, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc and Malbec, conserved for two years in new French oak barriques. The final product is a soundly structured, massive, fruit-forward wine with ample fruit tannins, tangy oak perfume and bright acidity that give our wine, real cellaring potential.

Our first wine (2002 vintage) was released in 2006, and received 92 points in the Wine Enthusiast, 89 points in the Wine Spectator, and the three subsequent vintages have also achieved multiple accolades and awards. Our last two reds (Deluge 2015 and The Denier 2016) have both one Double-Gold awards from the Seattle Wine Awards.

*Tasting bar and panorama frieze of Lake Missoula.*

After focusing only on producing seven exceptional vintages of Deluge, we now produce a saignier Rosé, a burgundian style Chardonnay, and have innovated a new style of wine-making we call Enrobed Wine.

The winery name and “Deluge” refer to the Ice Age Lake and massive floods that transformed Eastern Washington and deposited rich alluvial soils unto its otherwise barren basalt landscape. Most of Washington’s grapes are grown in soils that originated in Montana and Idaho’s Rocky Mountains, and were laid down in these floods that were the largest ever known.

Glacial Lake Missoula re-formed and flooded over forty times. Our hope is to produce as many great Deluges.