Tablas Creek Vineyard Blog

Paso Robles Wine Festival 2009

Last weekend was the annual Paso Robles Wine Festival.  We joined 92 other Paso Robles wineries to pour in the park on Saturday morning to pour wine for the roughly 4200 attendees.  Of course, it was hot.  You can just about set your calendar in Paso Robles to the fact that the first hot weekend of the year will coincide with Wine Fest, and this year didn't disappoint.  It was a little cooler than last year (around 100 instead of 106) and the heat broke on Sunday afternoon, which proved to be a very welcome and unexpected early respite.  Still, it didn't seem to dampen anyone's spirits.  The Tablas crew (cru?) at the park included eight of us so we would have time to go out and taste ourselves, as well as to get into detailed conversations with anyone who was interested without neglecting other guests:

The Wine Festival as a whole had a very nice vibe to it, and we were busy the whole time.  We poured about 2000 tastes of wine over the four hours, which amounted to nearly seven cases of wine... the same amount we poured in 2008.  Even better, I heard mostly good things about the temperatures at which other wineries were pouring their wines (which was not the case last year).  We were swapping wines in and out of the ice all day, even the reds, which is essential.  The thought of tasting warm red wines on a hot day... ugh.  There were a few instances of the cool kid syndrome where wineries brought much less wine than they would need and poured out in a few hours, but overall, I think that anyone who attended got to taste all the wines they would have wanted to if they took even a little care.

I hope the Paso Robles Wine Alliance was happy with the results; they've done a tremendous job of turning what used to be a giant party into a fairly focused tasting where attendees are overall quite responsible and interested even at the end.

On Sunday, we again used the excuse of having thousands of wine lovers in town to launch the new vintage of our Rosé (in this case the delicious 2008).  We reprised our salmon tasting, and chef Jeffrey Scott did another amazing job of putting together an amazing spread of dishes to pair with Rosé, including cured salmon, fresh cheeses, two salads (heirloom beets and burrata in one, fennel in the other), and strawberries with balsamic vinegar and basil.  The chef at work:

We have for the last several years planned our event for the Sunday morning of Wine Festival weekend, in the hopes of convincing people to begin their day out west of town and work their way back toward civilization.  As we're typically much busier in the afternoon than the morning, this helps ensure that our traffic is steady all day, and it has become an annual event for many of the members of our VINsider Wine Club (for whom the event is free).

I saw a phenomenon this year that I wasn't expecting, and would love some feedback.  While we did sell wine in the morning, we sold only about 40% of our daily sales to 60% of our traffic in the first two hours of the day (which coincided with the salmon event).  And I spoke to several VINsiders who said that they'd come out for the salmon but weren't even going to go and taste, as it was too early in the day for them.  Later that weekend, I read an article in the New York Times magazine where Suze Orman is quoted saying (I'm paraphrazing here) that she never gives things away for free because people just don't value what they don't pay for.  This was truly a phenomenal event, with amazing food and wine, and available to anyone for the price of a tasting fee (which also got the purchaser a full wine tasting and a tasting glass).  Are we doing something wrong if some people come out and partake but don't buy (or even taste)?  Maybe this is overkill?  I'm not sure, but we'll reevaluate before next year.

I'll leave you with two more photos that give you a feel for the family side of the event, and of Tablas Creek.  First, a quiet moment near the end of Saturday's tasting in the park, where Neil is relaxing next to my older son Eli, who just turned four and was taking everything in with very wide eyes:

And finally, one family shot on Sunday, where both kids (Eli and his little brother Sebastian, age 20 months) came out and mingled with the guests at Tablas Creek, many of whom have known them since they were born:

I have the complete photo album, with more photos both from the park and from the salmon and Rose tasting, posted on Tablas Creek's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=81506&id=27438997414&l=d9b54a4ad8

Thoughts on Taste Live, Twitter and online wine tasting

Last Friday, I was fortunate to be invited to participate in the Taste Live (formerly Twitter Taste Live) online wine tasting in honor of Hospice du Rhone.  For the uninitiated, Taste Live is a community of over 1000 wine (and beer) enthusiasts who get together roughly every couple of weeks to taste wine (or beer) on a particular theme.  The tasters, scattered all over the world, share their thoughts and questions about what they're tasting over Twitter.  The Taste Live Web site compiles all the Twitterers' comments into an interface that is easy to assimilate at a glance. 

My first vision was sort of pathetic: hundreds of lonely wine tasters getting together virtually on a Friday evening to taste wines in front of their computers and communicate what they thought in 135-character bites.  But it appears that most of the participants get together at central locations (wine shops, wineries or restaurants) to taste together, share some camaraderie, and, oh yeah, tweet about what they're tasting.  A terrific diagram from the Taste Live "learn more" tab explains:

The Taste Live events are organized by time zone.  There were three separate tastings that happened last Friday: one in the UK, another on the US east coast, and the one that I was involved in, on the US west coast.  They all share a theme for the day (last Friday's theme was Hospice du Rhone) but feature a different selection of four or five wines.  Customizing the wines for each tasting allows the organizers to correct for the regional variability in wine distribution and availability, and to identify retailers who have agreed to stock the wines that will be discussed in their time zones.  Each tasting took place from 7pm to 10pm local time, so the east coast tasting was finishing up as we were getting started.

The west coast wine selections (chosen by Jill Bernheimer of Domaine 547 and Paige Granback of The Jug Shop) included two Tablas Creek wines: the 2007 Cotes de Tablas Blanc, and the 2006 Mourvedre.  Jill and Paige invited me to taste and tweet along with everyone else to help give some perspective on our wines.  

I, of course, was doing exactly what I'd visualized: sitting at home at 7pm on a Friday evening, trying to tweet about wine while simultaneously getting the kids ready for bed.  Not, perhaps, the most conducive environment for focus, but I still was able to contribute in a fairly consistent fashion.

My review of the event?  I thought that it had components that were excellent, including that the Hospice du Rhone team had invited some eminent Rhone Rangers winemakers (including Randall Grahm and Jeff Cohn) to sit in at the event's Sonoma epicenter and tweet about the wines they were tasting and about Rhone-style wines in general.  Plus, as a participant, you get some reach beyond just those who participate day-of because many of the organizers and participants are wine bloggers and blog about the wines they taste.  But it also had chaotic elements, with tasters in different places wanting to move at different speeds and people who hadn't bothered (or weren't able) to get the pre-selected wines contributing thoughts on wines that weren't on the list and weren't in front of anyone else.  There is really no capacity with the present technology to moderate of this sort of discussion, and Jill commented mid-way through that organizing wine tweets was like herding cats.  It was also difficult to answer questions that came up because of the decentralized, non-threaded nature of Twitter itself.  Tweets flowed in, hundreds in all over the course of the evening, including ones with some excellent questions for the producers involved, but by the time I was able to respond to a question, the twitterer might have already asked another question and typically we'd received dozens of other tweets in the interim.  Conversations become difficult and you end up with lots of not-particularly-interactive chatter.

So, I loved the concept, and was thrilled to have Tablas Creek included, but am not sure that Twitter is the right engine for this sort of tasting.  Twitter's 135-character limit for tweets is both a strength and a weakness, forcing contributors to be concise but limiting the depth of possible answers.  And the event will get increasingly unmanageable as its numbers grow.  We probably had somewhere around 100 contributors to the west coast tasting, and that already created such a rapid flow of tweets that correspondance was difficult.  If the event should grow to 1000 people it seems like it might collapse under its own weight.

Still, Taste Live is an exciting development in the world of creating wine tastings that are both thematic and decentralized.  As the technology gets better, both for moderation and for creating threaded discussions, I can imagine this becoming a really powerful way of sharing thoughts and experiences of wine.  Will it be via Twitter?  I'm not convinced.  But if you'd like to keep up with me just in case, you can follow along at @jasonchaas.

Twitter Taste Live, Tablas Creek and an online wine tasting in honor of Hospice du Rhone

A couple of months ago, I created a Twitter account (jasonchaas; or follow it here).  I figured that I'd lurk around a little and see what uses it might have for Tablas Creek.  Since then, I've spent a higher percentage of my time than usual on the road, and haven't developed it at all.  I might be more motivated if I were convinced that Twitter-style updates (one or two-sentence sound bites on what's going on) were the appropriate way to communicate about Tablas Creek.  But I'm not, and have been focusing on the more robust capabilities of our Facebook page and the blog world.

Still, Twitter offers some remarkable opportunities to create virtual communities and virtual events.  One wine-related Twitter event is called Twitter Taste Live and has over one thousand active members who get together to hold virtual wine (and beer, and food) tastings on different themes every week or so.

On Friday, April 17th, Twitter Taste Live will focus on Hospice du Rhone.  I'm not clear on how the wines get chosen or whether they vary by region (what does region mean, anyway, on the Internet?) but in California, co-organizers Jill Bernheimer (Domaine 547, Los Angeles) and Paige Granback (Jug Shop, San Francisco) decided to feature the Tablas Creek 2007 Cotes de Tablas Blanc and 2006 Mourvedre among the four wines of the communal tasting.

I have agreed to join in virtually, tasting the wines with the group and answering any questions that any of the tasters have.  It will be a first for me, and will hopefully point the way for some possible virtual tasting opportunities we could do with our Tablas Creek fan base in the future.  I'll post a recap here after the tasting, but if you want to participate, make sure you get the wines in advance (we're offering $10 shipping on all orders from the winery in April if you can't make it to see us or to see one of the retail partners) and then register with Twitter Taste Live.  If you're planning to attend, please comment here.

Is this the future of wine tasting?  I'll let you know!

On the Road Again

I'm in day five of a five-day swing through Southern California, with stops taking me to Pasadena, Del Mar, Costa Mesa, Long Beach and (later today) back to Pasadena.  This is a long trip for me; I am not usually gone over weekends, and not usually gone for four nights.  But I believe that it is essential that we stay visible in this economy, and so I have scheduled more events open to the public and more days on the road this spring than ever before. 

It does not appear that the economy has dampened the turnout at most of these events.  At the Family Winemakers tasting in Del Mar, I underestimated how much wine I'd need and ran out two hours before the event was over.  I had to ask the winemakers at the table next to me to let people who came by the table know I'd be back shortly as I ran out to get another case of wine from my car.  At my dinner in Pasadena (at the beautiful Athenaeum at CalTech) the Athenaeum managers who were planning to come to the dinner had to give up their seats to a last-minute flurry of reservations, and the room had 86 people in it.

There are several opportunities for people around the country to come and see us in the next couple of months, and I wanted to highlight some of most exciting.  As always, we have a complete list of upcoming events on our Web site: http://www.tablascreek.com/upcomingevents.html

• San Francisco: Rhone Rangers Tasting, March 21-22: I'm on the board of the Rhone Rangers organization, and this is our biggest showcase.  Three seminars (moderated by Jon Bonne and Karen MacNeil), a 15-winery winemaker dinner, and trade and consumer grand tastings of over 125 American producers of Rhone varietals make this an amazing opportunity to delve deeply into the world of American Rhones.  More information is at http://www.rhonerangers.org/calendar/sf_grand_tasting.php
• Washington, DC: California Barrel Tasting at Macarthur Beverage, March 21st and Tablas Creek/Beaucastel dinner at Charlie Palmer Steak, March 27th: We're coming to DC next week for two events, one the east coast's premier futures offering of California wines (where we'll be showing the Esprit de Beaucastel from the spectacular 2007 vintage) at Macarthur Beverage and the other a wine dinner in conjunction with Beaucastel at Charlie Palmer Steak in Capitol Hill.
  
• Atlanta: High Museum Wine Auction, March 26-28: Atlanta's highest-profile wine event benefits their tremendous art museum, and includes seminars, a gala dinner, and one of the country's leading wine auctions.  I'll be participating in all three, as well as hosting a winemaker dinner at ENO in Midtown on Wednesday, March 25th.  More information on the event is at http://www.atlanta-wineauction.org/
• Austin: Texas Hill Country Food & Wine Festival, April 16-19: I love Austin.  It's a beautiful, hip city, and its signature wine festival is no different.  It includes a great collection of seminars, two big tastings, and several associated winemaker dinners (including one we're hosting at Mirabelle on Tuesday, April 14th).  More information is at http://www.texaswineandfood.org/.  We'll also be nearby in San Antonio for the Paso Robles Grand Tour on Wednesday, April 15th. 
• Los Angeles: A Culinary Evening with California Winemasters, May 16th: This benefit for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is always one of the country's top five charity wine auctions, and it's an honor to be invited.  The event includes a wine tasting (many top vintners who don't otherwise show up in person come to this) followed by the auction.  All the events take place at the Warner Bros. lot, and more information is at http://www.californiawinemasters.org/

In addition to those highlights, we're continuing our seminar series here at the vineyard with our annual blending seminar on April 11th, and also participating in events around the Paso Robles Zinfandel Festival, Hospice du Rhone, and the Paso Robles Wine Festival.

I hope that we'll see you at one or more of these events.  And if you have an event that you're aware of (or you participate in) that you think we should consider, please share...

Facebook, social networking for wineries and a new use for a winery blog

About three months ago, I created a Facebook page for Tablas Creek.  For those of you who are not familiar with Facebook, it's a site where people can interact with their friends by sharing updates and photos, posting thoughts and links, and generally keeping a loose eye on what your group of friends is thinking and doing.  It was originally designed for students, and many of the users are still in their teens or twenties.  But, as social networking sites like these (MySpace is the other main one) insinuate themselves into mainstream culture, the demographics have broadened.  According to Facebook's press page, the 150 million users worldwide spend an average of 17 minutes a day on the site, and more than half the users are post-college.  That's a lot of eye time for a lot of potential customers.

The main connection on Facebook is that of "friend".  You can request to be a friend of another Facebook user, and if that person accepts your friend request, you have access to their postings and updates.

While the application was designed for individuals to use to stay in touch with their cohort of friends, it also allows companies and organizations to create pages to represent themselves.  Some do so by creating a personal page as a winery (as in my first name is Justin and my last name is Winery) and then making friends with their followers.  Other create organization or group pages, and followers can become "fans" (of an organization) or "members" (of a group).  There doesn't seem to be any particular pattern that wineries and vineyards have chosen.  All three options are well represented.

Treating your business personal page as a person has some advantages that I didn't anticipate when I created the Tablas Creek page as an organization.  Friend relationships are considered by Facebook closer than fan or member relationships, and personal pages can update their Facebook status.  The status is a powerful tool, as the default home page of each user shows recent status updates from their friends.  An organization or group doesn't have a tool quite as effective.

Still, the relationship of a possible customer to a business (at least, a business that's not tiny) seems more appropriate to that of "fan" or "member" than "friend".  For better or worse, I chose to create the Tablas Creek page as an organization page, and we now have some 230 fans.  Some are friends of mine or of other Tablas Creek employees, but many are not, and each day we get another 3 or 4 or 5 new fans organically.

A screenshot of the current Tablas Creek page:

You will notice that, as an administrator of this page, I have the option of sending an update to fans, and I do so occasionally.  You'll also notice that there are 35 "notes" posted.  Nearly all of these are blog posts, as I've configured Facebook to automatically pull any posts I make here on the blog into the Tablas Creek Facebook page as a note.  This is a potentially powerful tool for wineries with Facebook pages who are also bloggers, as it obviates the need to duplicate content and provides regular updates on important items to the Facebook audience.

There are also portions of the page that are relatively undeveloped, such as the discussion board (no one has yet created any discussion topics) and the wall (there have only been seven posts).  I'm sure that both of these components will grow as our database of fans grows.

There is also the option of creating and publicizing events.  We're just starting to use this capability, which many other Facebook users have reported is currently the most applicable one to a business.  I do have the experience of using the event page through the Paso Robles Rhone Rangers (which was created as a group a few months ago and has 600+ members).  The upcoming 2009 Paso Robles Rhone Rangers Experience has a corresponding event page on Facebook which shows 53 confirmed guests (some of whom are winery members) and another 121 listed as "Maybe Attending".  We'll see the extent to which these people actually buy tickets; according to the event staff at Robert Hall Winery, who are accepting reservations, no one has identified themselves as having heard about the event through Facebook.  A funny October article in the New York Times Magazine by Hal Niedzviecki told of his effort to invite his more-than-700 friends to a Facebook event and seeing only one of the fifteen "attending" and 60 "maybe attending" friends show up. 

So, why am I spending the time to create and maintain this Facebook page for Tablas Creek?  First, it's not much time or maintenance, particularly because I can use my blog posts as content.  And, I have to confess I spend a fair amount of time on Facebook anyway, so it's not like I have to remember to check whether anyone has responded.  And, I'm convinced, as more and more people adopt the application and integrate it more fully into their lives, that it will become the same sort of tool for businesses to keep its fans updated as it has become for communities of friends: a tool whose power is in its broad reach, even if its depth is limited.

And plus, if I don't start now, how will I ever get us more than 236 fans?  Oh, wait... there's one more.  Make it 237.

Thoughts on our Annual Futures Tasting and En Primeur Offering

Each December, we offer our VINsider Wine Club members the chance to taste the upcoming release of our two top red wines, before bottling, and reserve these wines at a futures-only 30% discount off of expected release price.  We began this program back in 2003 (offering futures on the 2002s that were in barrel at the time) and have continued each year since.

Offering wines en primeur is is a time-honored French tradition most often associated with first-growth Bordeaux estates.  In outstanding vintages, valued customers are offered the opportunity to secure a limited quantity of sought-after wines at a special price in advance of bottling and subsequent general release.  As the demand for Tablas Creek's wines grow, this is a way for our best customers to ensure that they receive the wines that they want.

We have gone through several iterations of how we've set up the futures tasting.  Initially, we did it on a Saturday afternoon in our barrel room, which worked fine in 2003 the (when our tasting room just wasn't that busy).  The next year, we happened to have a big crowd in our tasting room, and the challenge of getting a hundred people through the tasting room and into the barrel room (and back) proved to be too much for us.  We felt that we'd lost control, with non-club members wandering into what was supposed to be our most exclusive event, and VINsiders strolling back and forth between tasting room and barrel room getting who-knows-how-many tastes.

So, in 2005, we moved the event to the evening and held it in both our barrel room and tasting room.  This worked fine the first year (at around 115 guests) but started to break down the following year.  By 2007, 200 guests had reserved, and the event felt more like a nice holiday cocktail party than it did like a focused exploration of young, powerful wines.  Attendees would spend their first ten minutes in our barrel room tasting the futures wines, and the next forty-five in our tasting room tasting their favorites.  it proved to be impossible to keep focus where it needed to be: on the futures wines.   Our average futures sale of attending customers had dropped for two years in a row, and we decided to rethink our format.

We decided that the best way to focus on the wines was to get people off of their feet, and to present the wines in a more leisurely, intimate setting, with restrained food designed to showcase the wines and soften their youthful exuberance.  So, we moved the event to the afternoon and created three different sessions with a maximum seated capacity of 50 people at each.  A placesetting is at right.

Neil (our winemaker, for the uninitiated) and I began by talking through the specifics that created the powerful, low-yield 2007 vintage, and we then moved to tasting the 2007 Esprit de Beaucastel and 2007 Panoplie.  Finally, we served Chef Jeff Scott's creation to feature the wines: a braised lamb over polenta with root vegetables dish (click here for the recipe) that was the perfect foil.  A panoramic photo, below, gives you a sense of the setting in our cellar:

 
The results were terrific.  The wines showed magnificently, confirming our impressions that the 2007 reds are likely the best we've ever seen.  The sales reflected this; nearly every attendee ordered futures, and the average sale per person was nearly triple what it had been last year.  The feedback we received from the members who came was that it was a wonderfully relaxed, focused exploration of the wines, and Neil and I both appreciated the chance to share impressions and answer questions with these intimate groups.  At $25 for the seminar, the tasting of these wines, and the lunch, it was a steal.  Plus the ticket price was refunded on any futures purchase, so the event ended up being free to nearly everyone.

We had worried that we would find it difficult filling a 75-minute seminar with discussion about only two wines, but instead found that each session ran nearly 100 minutes and could have lasted longer if we hadn't had to reset for the next group.

Now, we just need to find out why more people didn't come.  From 200 reservations in 2007, we dropped down to just under 100 this year, and only the first (11:00am) session sold out.  We'll just have to work on communicating just how nice the event was to everyone before 2009's edition!

Any VINsiders who are reading this should note that Wednesday, December 10th is our deadline for futures orders for the 2007 reds.  An PDF (faxable) order form is available; click here to view details and prices.

Terroir, Then and Now

Recently, along with Randall Grahm, Neal Rosenthal and Alice Feiring, I participated in a seminar at the Santa Fe Wine and Chile Festival on the subject of wine quality entitled, “The Winemaker, the Owner, the Merchant and the Author”.  Greg O’Byrne, maestro of the festival, chose the participants to include three different aspects of the professional wine fraternity and a critic.  The goal was to explore whether we would have different views of the relative importance of wine-making and specificity of terroir in the quality of the wines we were making and/or marketing.  It turned out that we really did not.  Where we differed was in our definition of terroir. Alice, the author, felt that "power vinification" was eliminating terroir. Randall declared himself an agnostic on whether or not there was such a thing as terroir in New World vineyards and Neal and I agreed that the essentials of terroir, both in the New and Old World -- from single vineyard properties on appropriate terrain and not over vinified -- did exist.  Our audience also seemed to have very differing views. So, for me the question became, “how do we define terroir these days, what is it, and how did we arrive here?”

In the beginning, Egyptian, Greek and Roman wines were always identified by place of origin.  In Egypt, in the annex of Tutankhamen's tomb, 36 wine jars were found and each bore a docket in hieratic giving the date, place, and vintage of the wine¹.  The Greek trade in wine was extensive. An early system of appellation designation was implemented to assure the origins of esteemed products. The most reputable wines of ancient Greece were Chian, Coan, Corcyraean, Cretan, Euboean, Lesbian, Leucadian, Mendaean, Peparethan, Rhodian and Thasian.  The Roman historian Pliny the Elder wrote extensively about the "first growths" of Rome -- most notably Falernian, Alban and Caecuban. Other first growth vineyards include Rhaeticum and Hadrianum located along the Po river, in what are now the modern day regions of Lombardy and Venice, respectively.  In ancient times, wines came from somewhere with specific geology, soils and climate: the basic elements of terroir (and therefore taste). The grape varieties grown in those origins were steadfastly traditional and the consumer was not concerned about and most probably did not know the varieties of grapes in the wine.

The boundaries of fine wine growing regions in France have existed for at least a millennium and over time have codified connections with specific grape varieties.  Cistercian monks focused on Pinot Noir in their Burgundian homeland, and by doing so were instrumental in creating a distinction between their fine wine and the more common wine (probably field blends) of Mediterranean France.  It was their expertise that induced them to establish abbeys and vineyards in Vosne, Vougeot and Gevrey.  They identified the crûs but it was the Burgundian state in a 1395 decree by Duc Philippe le Hardi that banished the grape Gamay.  This made red Burgundy a Pinot Noir monovarietal appellation (although some white varieties were still allowed).  Thus the essentials of Burgundy crû terroir were established by cooperation between church and state 600 years ago.  Wines from crûs took on value because of their geographical identity.  Other regions within France emulated the Burgundian system and began identifying regions of particular quality.  Over time, fraudulent identification and/or blending became profitable, and began to threaten the integrity of the highest quality areas. 

Pressure by proprietors in fine wine producing areas to establish controls started growing but it was not until 1935, in the heart of the crisis of the Great Depression, that Châteauneuf-du-Pape, under the leadership of the Baron le Roi, established and posted its regulations, leading to strict appellation controllée laws and the creation of the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO) in 1935/1936². High quality small plots in fine French vineyards became recognized as distinct from neighboring plots, and lovers of Burgundy will argue over fine distinctions in terroir.  So what is terroir in vineyards where no long tradition exists?

Terroir, the French term that is used in descriptions of the taste (and origin) of a wine, is unfortunately a word that is untranslatable into English. An interesting parallel is that “winemaker,” an English term frequently used in describing the origin of a wine, is untranslatable into French.  This linguistic disconnect reflects cultural cultural differences the New World's focus on the winemaker as primary creator of distinctiveness and Old World's focus on place as the traditional determinant of character.

The American wine journalist Matt Kramer’s modern take is that that people consider geographical identity to be the terroir and that it then becomes the “somewhereness” in the taste of a wine.

Terroir imparts its special characteristics to the taste of wines that are produced in its limits.  It is generally considered to be defined by the rocks and the soils in which the grapes are cultivated.  But, according to the renowned wine journalist and author, Hugh Johnson, in his foreword to James Wilson’s excellent book called Terroir, published in 1998 by The University of California Press, says

“Terroir, of course, means much more than what goes on beneath the surface.  Properly understood, it means the whole ecology of a vineyard: every aspect of its surroundings from bedrock to late frosts and autumn mists, not excluding the way a vineyard is tended, nor even the soul of the vigneron.”

But terroir has not always been seen as part of the “vigneron’s soul.”  Before the nineteen seventies, prior to the great expansion of wine drinking in the United States, a “goût de terroir” in a wine was considered a fault.  Frank Schoonmaker, the American wine pioneer, marketer, importer, and author described it in his Encyclopedia of Wine, published by Hastings House in 1964, as:

“Soil or earth, used in a very special sense in French in connection with wine, as gout de terroir. Certain wines produced on heavy soils have a characteristic, unmistakable, almost indescribable, earthy flavor, somewhat unpleasant, common, persistent.  This is a gout de terroir, and the German equivalent is Bodenton or Bodengeschmack. Superior wines rarely if ever have much of this, which if once recognized, will not easily be forgotten.”

Ironically, earlier, in 1939, Schoonmaker and a few struggling California wineries including Martin Ray, Concannon, Wente, Almaden and Louis Martini, not at all worried about terroir or geographical origin, introduced varietal wine labeling, as already practiced since 1933 by Beaulieu Vineyard in St. Helena to identify a fine wine (and lift it and set it apart from the then abundant cheap field blends called Burgundy, Chablis, Claret, etc.).  At that point the “somethingness,” of a wine's composition began to replace the “somewhereness” of a wine's origin.  This shift deemphasized geographic identity in favor of a more interchangeable grape varietal (although the wine's appellation could still be noted on the label).

So now terroir in its current use has taken on a new importance.  The expanding employment of vineyard designations on New World wine labels is a sign of our current efforts to give specific “somewhereness” to both varietally labeled wines and blends.  We are using terroir in a positive sense as a tool to emphasize a wine's taste characteristics determined by soils and climate as opposed to those specific to a given grape varietal or those which come from cellar manipulations. Cellar manipulations, and the sameness that these can produce in wines from different areas (and even different grapes), are coming more and more under fire from a growing number of consumers and press as a misstep in the search for more "natural" wines.

Robert Haas, October 2008

¹Wine Making in Egypt by Menna El-Dorry

²I might add that our AVA (American Viticultural Area) regulations are a very pale and often meaningless imitation of the system, made even more meaningless by the TTB’s (the section of the Treasury Department, which oversees wine label approvals and AVA regulation) continued recognition of brands, even those misleadingly or falsely labeled, over geographical origin.  See our blog post The TTB's new AVA rules: a well-meaning step in the wrong direction from December 2007.

50-Mile Dinner with Cass House Inn & Restaurant

Last week, we had the pleasure to participate in a 50-mile radius dinner at the Cass House in Cayucos.  This sort of dinner, where all the components served are sourced locally, and most are organic, is particularly gratifying to be able to support.  When the food is great, the setting beautiful, and the people terrific, so much the better.

The Cass House Inn & Restaurant is a historic building on the main street in the tiny seaside town on Cayucos.  Formerly the mansion of ship captain and Cayucos first citizen James Cass, it has been a bed & breakfast for the past few decades.  Last year, new owners Gary and Nancy Bagnall began a complete restoration of the house, and it reopened early this year to much excitement in the local community. 

The Bagnalls hired Chef Jensen Lorenzen and General Manager Grace Wingett to run the restaurant.  Formerly the proprietors of Papillon in Los Osos, Wingett and Lorenzen came in with a growing reputation in the local foodie community.  At Cass House, their menu focuses on local and organic foods, and the restaurant has been getting great reviews. 

For the 50-mile dinner, all the ingredients (produce, cheese, fruit, herbs, bread, meat and wine) were sourced from farmers within a 50-mile radius.  One of the pleasures of the dinner was getting listen to them talk about the struggles of finding all the components.  Our protein was braised goat!

We were proud to support the mission of eating locally by featuring four Tablas Creek wines to pair with the four-course meal: our 2006 Vermentino, 2006 Bergeron, 2005 Mourvedre and as a special treat, the 2005 Vin de Paille "Quintessence".  The setting (above) in their garden was gorgeous, and the meal full of good cheer and good company.  We sat next to Bill & Barbara Spencer of Windrose Farm, which is always a pleasure.

The awareness that all food has a place, and that the place has an impact on how that food tastes, has been known for decades with wine as terroir.  If we can have more meals where we support local farmers and reduce the environmental impact of transporting food far from where it was grown while exploring food's sense of place, sign me up.

As for the Cass House, we'll be back.  Soon.

Pig Roast!

Each August, we hold a pig roast here at the winery.  We got the idea originally five years ago because our neighbor was having problems with feral pigs and offered to get us one for an event, and have continued the event with farm-raised pigs (in the absence of conveniently available wild ones) each year since.  Our winemaker Neil Collins dug a pit in an old rootstock field near the creek and rigged up a rotisserie from an old tractor motor.  The rotisserie:

Neil built the fire at 4:30am on Saturday, and the pig was on the rotisserie by 6am.  It spends the next twelve hours cooking, and is then taken out of the pit, off the spit and carved up.  Chef Tom Fundaro (of Villa Creek Restaurant) did the honors:

It's always fun for me to bring the kids and see what they think of all this.  Last year, Eli (our older son, now 3) discovered that he could figure out which grapes were ripe by what color they were.  This year, he was much more fascinated by the pig itself, while Sebastian (our younger son who is almost one) discovered the grapes:

We held the event in our nursery, in our shadehouses that are underutilized due to our partnership with NovaVine (they graft and harden off our grapevine material in Santa Rosa, so we don't have much use for shadehouses here).  It turned out to be a beautiful event space.  We welcomed around 120 people, mostly our VINsider Wine Club members, many of whom have come to every pig roast since 2004.  A couple of views of the event space, first during late afternoon with the sun low, and then after sunset with the lanterns and the twinkle lights out:

The food was served family-style, on platters, and to accompany the pig, Tom prepared gazpacho, summer white beans, grilled summer squash and potatoes, and a peach crumble for dessert.  All the vegetables were sourced from Paso Robles, and the dinner was delicious.  It's always one of my favorite events that we do.  If you didn't have a chance to make it this year, we hope we'll see you in 2009.  You can keep up with what's coming up on our upcoming events page.

Wine Festival Etiquette

No, I'm not going to write another piece on how you're supposed to spit rather than drinking when you attend a wine festival (hint: you are).  Nor am I going to rant about perfumes and colognes that are likely to overpower the wine for you and the next dozen attendees unlucky enough to trail in behind you (hint: don't wear perfume to wine-related functions). No, this post is focused on the other side of the table.

More and more, I'm going to wine festivals where there are a handful of wineries who are intentionally bringing less wine than they need to last out the event.  And doing so, I think, is disrespectful to the attendees, to the other wineries, and to the event itself.

I'm not talking about bringing as much wine as festivals suggest.  Most festivals wildly overestimate the amount of wine you'll need to bring.  As a general rule, I calculate based on a bottle of wine total per attendee.  So, with 500 attendees and 40 wineries, if each winery brings 12 bottles of wine total, there's plenty of wine at the event.  If you know, because of the demographics of the festival, you're likely to be busier than average, you round up.  It may seem counterintuitive in this situation to bring just 4 bottles each of 3 wines, but the math works out.

(Incidentally, most festivals estimate based on each attendee being able to taste each wine.  So, with this hypothetical festival, most suggest that each winery bring 500 tastes of each wine you show.  At 20 tastes per bottle, that would suggest that each winery bring 24 bottles each, or if you're showing 3 wines, six cases total.  You don't need to do a lot of complex math to understand that this all adds up to nearly every winery bringing lots of wine home at the end.  This is not the least desirable outcome, as I'll explain, but it's inconvenient, particularly if the festival is not local, or if it's in a state where you have to order the wine from your distributor in advance and then can't return it.)

Still, what I see as the larger problem is what we've started to call the "cool kid" phenomenon.  Because real scarcity is rare, wineries are in the business of creating perceived scarcity.  One way to do this is to be sure you run out of wine early enough at an event that people will notice and make a mental note to come earlier next time.  If you've got good wine, and your ploy is not too transparent, you can even get attendees to start planning which wineries they have to hit in the first few minutes of the event.  This makes the strategy even more effective, as other attendees see the swarm around your table right at the beginning and, in true lemming fashion, squeeze in to find out what all the fuss is about.  Then, you can run out even earlier.

Sauntering around the room tasting other wineries' wines after you've run out (with the implication that the rest of you are suckers for still being pouring) is just the coup de grace.

Of course, the net effect of this phenomenon is that other wineries either hate or envy you (mostly depending on whether they feel you've brought a reasonable amount of wine to start with).  And consumers who weren't quick enough on the uptake or who didn't have the patience to wade through the scrum at the beginning are cheated of getting to try some of the hottest wines.  But, the stakeholder who should be the most upset is the event, who get the benefit of their biggest-name attendees for only a portion of the event's time.

I have started to see some events threaten that if wineries run out of wine too early, they won't be invited back. But most events are all too happy to have the hottest wineries on their Web sites and in their promotional materials to help sell tickets, and so accept behavior they probably shouldn't.

I can only hope that in the long-term, consumers understand when they're being manipulated and push back.  But I'm not holding my breath.  Meanwhile, feel free to come by the Tablas Creek booth in the last half-hour of the the next festival in your town.