Tablas Creek Vineyard Blog

An excellent beginning to the growing season, strange smoky weather notwithstanding

With two big fires burning to the north of us in Monterey County over the last few weeks, including the Indians Fire that has burned nearly 60,000 acres in three weeks and the Gallery Fire (just south of Big Sur) that has burned over 13,000 acres since Saturday, we look outside on strange yellow-gray skies and hazy sun.  A photo from earlier this afternoon looks west toward the Santa Lucia Mountains:

The smoke is at its most dramatic in the evening, when sunsets have been brilliant orange.  During the day, I keep looking outside waiting for the thunderstorm to hit (I'm betraying my East Coast origins here).

The smoke actually helps keep things a little cooler around here as the sun's intensity is reduced.  After some very hot weather the second half of last week -- including three consecutive days Thursday 6/19-Saturday 6/21 where high temperatures topped 105 -- any relief is welcome.  Even better, a front passed through and the normal pattern of onshore flow has reformed, meaning that we get a sea breeze in the afternoon and temperatures are usually comfortable by dinnertime.  Lows last night actually dropped into the upper 30s.

The vineyard itself looks very healthy, with a good fruit set and no pressure from any pests except for ground squirrels.  Two photos should give you a sense of what things look like out there.  Typically, what we'd worry about at this stage is shatter (where a large percentage of flowers are unfertilized, leading to clusters with only a few scattered berries) which is most common in Grenache.  No worries on that score.  Two shots in the Grenache (left) and Grenache Blanc (right) show excellent fruit set:

And finally, a long view of the vineyard, looking from our "New Hill" section north across small plots of head-pruned Tannat and Picpoul to our main south-west and south-east facing slopes of Grenache.  Note the strange (for Paso Robles) pale blue-grey sky:

Paso Robles Wine Festival 2008 Musings and Photos

The 2008 Paso Robles Wine Festival is in the books.  I've poured at the last seven festivals, and this one was one of the hottest.  Both Saturday and Sunday topped 100 degrees (an unwelcome change from the past few years, which were beautiful) and I think it deterred some of the local crowd.  In the four hours of the event, we poured about 7 cases of wine, two fewer than last year.  We still felt busy, but it was the kind of busy where you're always talking to new people, but you do have time to talk.  In some past years, it was all we could do to pour wine into the outstretched glasses in front of us.  The slight decline in audience was not unwelcome.

There were still some wineries pouring appallingly warm -- even hot -- red wines.   One friend (who's not in the wine industry) questioned this and was told that this was the temperature that it was supposed to be served at.  I can't fathom this.  The event gives you ice for free.  Why wouldn't you make sure that your wines were served at an appropriate temperature?  We were icing even our red wines, and serving the whites and the Rosé very chilled.  This is your opportunity to make an impression on hundreds of potential new customers.  I can't think of much that's more unappealing than sipping hot red wine on a 100 degree day.

Overall, there was a typical mix of more established and newer wineries at the park.  There were a few big names missing; Justin again chose to pass on the event and, most notably, Tobin James elected to sit this year out.  I think they, more than any other winery in Paso Robles, are associated with the party atmosphere that the park has cultivated over the years, and I imagine that some of the efforts that the PRWCA has been making to make the event more upscale are probably unwelcome.  For us, the net effect is probably good.  Over the weekend, we saw about 100 fewer people at the tasting room (from about 600 last year to about 500 this year).  But, those 500 people who came bought the same amount of wine as the 600 did in 2007.  Pouring less wine but selling the same amount must be a good thing!  Plus, while still small compared to an event like the Hospice du Rhone, there was notably better trade and media presence at this year's event than in years past.

On Sunday morning of the event, we again welcomed Chef Jeffrey Scott out to Tablas Creek for a cured salmon tasting and the official launch of the 2007 Rosé.  A photo from this year's event, with Chef Scott in the foreground serving a fresh sheep's milk ricotta cheese he found to go with the salmon (definitely more elegant than cream cheese):

Our goal is to get people out to the vineyard in the morning: effectively, to encourage them to start their day as far from town as possible and work their way back in.  This helps us even out our traffic on what's usually our busiest single day of the year, and get more people out to us when their palates are fresh and their trunks empty.

Plus, it's always a good time, with delicious food.

I thought it might be fun to share some family photos from this year's Sunday event.  It's one of the events each year to which we always bring the kids, as it's in the morning, outside, and very low-key and relaxed.  First, me with Eli (age 3, in front) and Sebastian (age 9 months) on my back:

Eli spent most of his time making sure there was enough ice in the chillers that we were using for the Rosé:

A nice photo of Meghan with Sebastian:

Hospice du Rhone!

Last weekend was the 2008 Hospice du Rhone.  As always, it was a terrific show, with a great mix of producers, distributors, restaurateurs, retailers, distributors and consumers.  It's one of the few events I do where the trade and consumers interact so much, and on such equal footing.

I think that one of the secrets of why the event works so well is that it doesn't take itself too seriously.  It presents terrific speakers, consistently some of the most important, relevant names in the wide world of Rhone varietals, but it does it without ceremony. The informal (but delicious) lunches  are outside.  The setting at the Paso Robles Event Center (home of the Mid-State Fair) is rustic, old-west, and a little bit goofy.  The serious events are punctuated by skits including a "top 10" list read annually by Mat Garretson, and the whole event comes across as light-hearted yet substantive.  This approach is typified by the pseudo-film-noir themes that they choose for their posters.  The 2008 poster spoofing James Bond (at right) is a great example.

While the tastings always offer an impressive number of top-quality Rhone wines from around the world, the lunches are the most fun parts of the event for me.  You sit at picnic-style tables without assigned seats, and may find yourself, as I did, next to Patrick Comiskey from Wine & Spirits Magazine, Rhone Ranger legend Bob Lindquist from Qupe, two distributor managers from Florida, and two pairs of consumers from Santa Fe.  These informal interactions are a great way to demystify the people in the world of wine, and I always come away from the lunches with new ideas about how to enjoy, promote, and think about Rhone wines.

My final thought is how lucky we are to have this world-class event in Paso Robles every year.  Yes, Paso Robles is becoming known as a hotbed for Rhone production in the United States (as evidenced by the recent creation of the Rhone Rangers Paso Robles chapter), but the Hospice du Rhone is still the one time each year when we can count on having many of the wine world's largest players come to us.

For someone like me used who has clear memories of presenting our wines to people in the industry who didn't know that Paso Robles wasn't a part of Napa, this is probably the sweetest result of all.

A bullet dodged: only minor vineyard damage from a serious California-wide frost event

California was badly zapped last week by a deep trough of cold air that spread south from Canada and brought freezing nights from Mendocino to Santa Barbara.  The perils presented by this frost were made more severe by the fact that it followed a week of unusually warm weather, where it neared 90 degrees at Tablas Creek and was well over 90 in downtown Paso Robles.  Nearly the whole vineyard had sprouted, in many cases 6 inches or more.

As the frost approached last weekend, forecasts looked terrifying.  On frosty nights, the weather station at Tablas Creek is typically the coldest in Paso Robles, and it is not even in the coldest spot on the property.  Forecasts were suggesting that temperatures would range from 26-33 degrees in the appellation, which we usually project to temperatures as low as 23 or 24 in our coldest spots.  When it's this cold, the frost prevention fans that we use aren't effective; the only way to save the new growth is with overhead sprinklers.  And we don't have enough water for those.

We did indeed have three cold nights in a row.  The nights of the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of April all registered lows at our weather station between 28 and 29 degrees.  But, in an unusual reversal, it was colder on the east side of town than out at Tablas Creek.  And, Paso Robles seems to have been less heavily hit than other regions; Napa, Sonoma and the Sierra Foothills all report significant damage, and even vintners I've spoken to in Santa Ynez see more damage than we do.

In driving around the vineyard this afternoon with my dad, we'd estimate maybe 5% of new growth has been damaged by this frost.  A typical section is below, with some vines at the very bottom of a swale showing browning, but the vast majority of the vineyard looking fine:

As always, the frost damage is curiously selective, with damaged shoots just inches away from others that are fine.  Still, given how scary things looked a week ago, we're counting ourselves very lucky.

We hope that we're largely out of the danger zone now; it hit 90 degrees here both days this weekend.  And we always figure that once we get into May we're pretty much safe.  And we're ready for a break.  We ran our frost fans seventeen nights this spring, nearly double our annual average.

Limestone in Paso Robles

Yesterday, I was over for a Paso Robles Rhone Rangers meeting at Halter Ranch.  Halter is a beautiful property just across Adelaida Road from Tablas Creek, and both were parts of the old Macgillivray Ranch through most of the 20th century.  After our meeting, Ranch Manager Mitch Wyss took me down to a little waterfall in Las Tablas Creek just behind their ranch buildings.  Although Las Tablas Creek is dry (or just trickling) for most of the year, in the spring there's enough water to splash merrily down the waterfall.

I was struck by how dramatically the waterfall-driven erosion had exposed the limestone layers that underlie this Adelaida area.  According to the prevailing view, the bulk of the calcareous clay that we have out in this neck of the woods isn't true limestone, although it shares much of the chemical composition.  And, this is a good thing, as limestone is hard, too hard for vines' roots to break up or break through.  However, there are bands of true limestone that run throughout the region, and the waterfall illustrated one place where the water had broken through a 9-inch limestone layer and was eating its way through the softer clay layers underneath.  Another view, this time from inside the riverbed, with some drying layers of the calcareous clay in the foreground:

The sides of the little canyon were a great illustration of the layers we're planting in, with the cap of limestone at the top:

As further evidence of where the roots need to get to to find nutrients, there was a big old oak tree root that had pushed through the limestone and was snaking its way horizontally below it:



And finally, one more photo, a closeup of where the root emerges from the eroded hillside:



Finally, back at Tablas Creek (where we don't have intact limestone layers like at Halter) one photo of what we do with all the broken-up pieces of limestone that we've ripped from the topsoil to keep from destroying our tractors:

Some nice recognition for my Dad

A few months back, I got a phone call from Stacie Jacob, the Executive Director of the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, letting me know that their board of directors had decided to honor my dad as their 2007 Wine Industry Person of the Year.  It was a secret, so I had to figure out how to get my parents to go to the Wine Country Alliance Gala (the sort of event that they normally avoid) without letting on why.  I eventually figured out how to do it by donating wine to the event and telling them that we needed to go and show our faces in support, and like the good sports that they always are, they got dressed up, came to the event and made a good showing.

Still, it was clear that it was a complete surprise to my dad when at the end of the event, his friend and fellow vintner Stephan Asseo (of L'Aventure Winery) got up to begin the awards speech.  Even more impressive was the short, eloquent speech my dad gave (with no advance warning) after having received the award.  The whole time, my wife Meghan was elbowing me and saying "if you ever do this to me, I'll kill you."

The evening was a wonderful acknowledgment of the contributions he's made to Paso Robles over the last two decades, against the backdrop of a career that has now spanned six decades.  It's still amazing to think that when we founded Tablas Creek in 1989, there weren't any Rhone varietals planted here, and there were less than two dozen wineries.  Now, there are nearly 200 Paso Robles wineries, and about 70% of these wineries are producing at least one Rhone.  Paso Robles is finding its voice.

It's also been fun for me to see my Dad get calls from friends and acquaintances, many of whom he hadn't spoken to in years, congratulating him on this honor he genuinely didn't expect.

You can read the complete press release on Business Wire:
Robert Haas Honored as Paso Robles 2007 Wine Industry Person of the Year

Rainfall microclimates in Paso Robles

Appellations are by nature generalizations.  You do your best in defining one to understand macro-level differences in soils, climate and rainfall (the three components which together give a place its signature).  And, practically speaking, you won't ever be able to delineate an area that is absolutely uniform.  Even within our vineyard at Tablas Creek, there are areas that are warmer and cooler, and have different amounts of topsoil above the high-calcium limestone-derived bedrock.

All this is a long-winded leadup to my point, which is that the Paso Robles AVA is essentially defined by climate.  And, the appellation does have broad climatic similarities (probably the most important of  the three variables) that make the AVA a meaningful designation.  Still, there are over 40 different soil types within the AVA, and rainfall varies from an average of about 7 inches in the high plateaus east of town (think Creston, or Shandon) to nearly 40 inches in the extreme western reaches of the AVA.  So, the proposal to subdivide the Paso Robles AVA has some good scientific reasoning behind it.

This last rainstorm that we received yesterday, which dumped 3.15 inches at Tablas Creek, is a good illustration of the diversity of rainfall amounts around the AVA.  I've pasted in below the readings from the other weather stations in the region:

You can see how much more rain we get at Tablas than the other weather stations: nearly double what they get in the Templeton gap, and nearly triple the reading from the most easterly weather station in Shandon.  And there's good logic for this; at Tablas, we're only about 10 miles from the Pacific, and in the rain shadow of the Santa Lucia mountains.  Pacific storms get pushed up into cooler air by the mountain range, and drop their rainfall over us.  By the time the storms get into town or further east, they've lost much of their moisture.  This is why the Adelaida area was known until the middle of the 20th century as the breadbasket of the Paso Robles area.  It's warm enough to ripen crops consistently, but wet enough to farm without irrigation.

And this is one of the characteristics we were looking for in founding Tablas Creek: enough rainfall to dry farm.  At 28 inches average annual rainfall, we can do it most years.  The Adelaida District area of Paso Robles is one of the only parts of California warm enough to ripen Rhone varietals and still with enough rainfall to farm without irrigation.  No wonder this is becoming known as the center of California's Rhone movement!

The TTB's new AVA rules: a well-meaning step in the wrong direction

I was surprised with how quickly the TTB published new draft rules to resolve the issues surrounding the approval of new AVAs that might conflict with existing brand names, or that are nested within other existing AVAs. [I wrote about this a few weeks back at some length.] 

A first reading of the new TTB proposals suggests an honest effort on their part to create more rigorous protections of the future use of place names as brands while redressing possible negative financial implication for brands created after 1986 who use a viticultural area as a part of their brand name.  However, we believe that it takes the wrong approach, would set United States regulations further at odds with our responsibilities under international law, and would set a dangerous precedent not just for the geographical labeling of wine, but also of other agricultural products.

The crux of the proposal suggests a rule whereby wineries that registered a brand name between 1986 and 2005 which later was adopted as a viticultural area may continue to use their brand name but must make a "statement which the appropriate TTB officer finds to be sufficient to dispel the impression that the geographic area suggested by the brand name is indicative of the origin of the wine".  Labels approved after 2005 have no such protection, and wineries will be notified upon the approval of any new COLA (Certificate of Label Approval) if there is a chance that it may one day conflict with a place name.

In addition, the new regulations address the nesting of AVAs within other AVAs, which has been done for centuries in other countries and for decades in the United States.  The rules proposed include a frightening warning for those who (like the Paso Robles AVA Committee) would propose AVAs of greater specificity within an existing AVA.  The full paragraph is below, with the most alarming idea in bold:

"In any case in which an AVA would be created entirely within another AVA, whether by the establishment of a new, larger AVA or by the establishment of a new AVA within an existing one, the petition must dispel any apparent inconsistency or explain why it is acceptable. When a smaller AVA has name recognition and features that so clearly distinguish it from a larger AVA that surrounds it, TTB may determine in the course of the rulemaking that it is not part of the larger AVA and that wine produced from grapes grown within the smaller AVA would not be entitled to use the name of the larger AVA as an appellation of origin or in a brand name."

The Napa Valley Vintners Association quickly objected both to the expansion of the grandfathering clauses to cover an additional twenty years of brand approvals and to the curious departure from the international standards of appellation nesting.

In a letter to the other members of the Paso Robles AVA Committee, my dad proposed another solution that would strengthen, rather than weakening, place-name designation:

"If honest and accurate representations of the wine in the bottle to the consumer is the objective of the TTB then the problem of conflict that they are feeling is due not to the AVA system regulations but to the issuance of COLAs.  The owner of a COLA that is issued with a geographic name should be required to source 85% or more of his grapes from that geographic location, whether or not it is an AVA.  Installing such a rule would avoid all future conflicts between COLAs and AVAs.  It would mean that the wine in the bottle was made from grapes of the same geographic origin as the label implies.  It would inform the consumer reading a wine list or retailer solicitation without it being necessary for him to see a bottle disclaimer.  It would also eliminate the need for a rolling grandfather amendment.             

As for AVAs within AVAs, the precedent has already been set in the USA, since they already exist.  The larger AVA informs the consumer by determining the larger geographic location of the vineyard with which he will be more likely to be familiar.  The smaller AVA determines the more exact location of the vineyard(s) and their distinctiveness within the larger AVA.  That is the way all wine producing countries in the world regulate their identifications of geographic locations to best inform consumers.             

I am not for rolling grandfather exceptions.  There is an established regulation for 1986 and prior.  It should be followed.  People who find themselves in conflict with new AVAs, who have COLAs approved after 1986 should be given a length of time, say 5 years, to bring their sourcing into line or change the brand name or /and label.  After all, they are fraudulently representing the source of their grapes, and they know it.             

If I had my way, I would make people who have COLAs prior to 1986 that misrepresent the source of their grapes either conform by sourcing 85% from the geographic area or change their label and/or brand name in a delay of 10 years or so."

I believe that we have an opportunity to make a better system, and that the TTB's proposed new rules instead make a system even more riddled with exceptions, exemptions and disclaimers.  The first order of business is making comments to the federal government on their proposed changes in rulemaking.  To learn how to do so, visit Docket No. TTB–2007–0068 (at www.regulations.gov).

Winemaker Neil Collins Discusses Harvest 2007 with winerychannel.tv

If you haven't checked out winerychannel.tv yet, you should.  It's online television, dedicated to the world of wine.  Like many members of the new media, they're fans of what's going on in the Central Coast, and we welcomed them up here a month or so back for a discussion of the 2007 harvest.  Winemaker Neil Collins spent an afternoon with their crew walking them through what was going on in the cellar and talking about what 2007 was like for us.  Check it out (click on "The Source" Episode 26: Harvest Report when you get there).

The TTB's Reevaluation of its AVA Approval Process: a Retreat from the "Common Good"?

[Editor's Note: with the publication in late November of the TTB's proposed new rules for AVA approval, the questions under debate have been clarified.  I have posted an updated analysis of the new rules, as well as a discussion of some of the responses of local and regional organizations, in the December 6th blog post The TTB's new AVA Rules: A Well-Meaning Step in the Wrong Direction.]

Recently, the TTB (Tax and Trade Bureau), which among other responsibilities oversees the applications for new AVAs (American Viticultural Areas) announced that they would be suspending consideration of any AVA petitions which either nest inside of an existing AVA or could conflict with an existing brand name.  This has effectively shut down the consideration of all new AVA petitions within the United States, including the 11 petitions to subdivide the 600,000 acres within the Paso Robles AVA (map below).

I was asked recently by a writer visiting the area what I thought of the TTB's decision.  I thought that the question deserved a little more thorough consideration, and began this post.  Shortly thereafter, a terrific article by Corie Brown was published in the Los Angeles Times addressing the issue.  I wanted to take a little more time to incorporate the new information she unearthed and think about this issue from a larger perspective.  My feeling is that this provides a great opportunity to think about what the purpose is of the TTB's regulation of viticultural areas, and to address why they might be looking at changing their regulations now.

In essence, viticultural areas were created to provide specificity of origin when existing place names (cities, counties, or states) were either too large or too imprecise.  To use the Paso Robles AVA as an example (as I'm most familiar with its specifics), the AVA includes portions of three towns: Atascadero, Templeton, and Paso Robles itself.  These all share characteristics of climate and geography that make them distinctive from other areas outside the AVA.  Yet, within the AVA there is still enormous variation in rainfall (from 7 inches to 45 inches, depending on where you are), temperature (as much as 10 degrees on any given day), elevation (from 600 to 2200 feet), topography (high plateau to the far east, alluvial riverbeds in the center, and foothills to the west) and soils (over 40 soil types have been identified within the appellation).

The goal of creating AVAs (within the Paso Robles region and elsewhere) is to help consumers understand what characteristics a wine will inherit from where its grapes are grown.  In order to make these AVAs meaningful, the TTB requires that any brand incorporating an AVA name use grapes grown in that AVA.  When the TTB began recognizing AVAs in 1986, and enforcing the directive that wineries that incorporated a place name into their brand name had to use grapes from that place in their bottlings, they identified that they had created a problem for some existing brands.  These brands were grandfathered in and are allowed to make wines from any California AVA, as long as the wine's AVA is clearly marked on the label.  This seems a reasonable compromise to the competing goals of protecting the meaningfulness of geographic identifiers and avoiding harm to brands created before the rules were made.

However, the rules are different for brands created since 1986.  The regulations expressly prohibit any winery from using an approved AVA as their brand name unless they're using fruit from that AVA.  This is well known within the industry, and is an important consideration for any winery in choosing its name.  If, for example, you're going to call yourself Paso Robles Winery, you know that this will preclude you from ever making a "Central Coast" or a "California" (or even a "Napa") AVA wine.  And, this is important even if you're using a place name that has not yet been made an AVA (such as Calistoga). 

In the Los Angeles Times article, Corie Brown interviews the proprietors of Calistoga Cellars, who are in a fight with the proposers of a "Calistoga" AVA.  They created the brand in 1999, but make wines under the Napa Valley AVA, incorporating some fruit from within the proposed Calistoga AVA but buying the majority of their fruit from elsewhere in Napa Valley.  They filed a letter of objection to the Calistoga AVA proposal, claiming that it would harm their business to have to find new sources of fruit.  I found the most fascinating insight into their thought process from the following quote from owner Roger Louer: "I assumed Calistoga Cellars would be grandfathered just as those wineries were in 1986".

It seems incredible that the federal government should be in the business of protecting speculative business owners who begin a project with the expectation of an exemption from the rules on the books, yet this is what has happened.  The TTB has suspended consideration of any new AVA that "would affect an established brand".

Every exception to the rules requiring geographical specificity undercuts the foundations of American AVAs.  It is alarming to me that the TTB seems to be indicating that it is planning a retreat from the rules that it has made for itself and for its wineries to follow.  What's more, it is doing so while several proposals developed under the old rules are in mid-approval.  In a letter explaining their decision, they state that what they're going to do is "take a balanced approach to its administration".  This sounds alarmingly to me like what is going on elsewhere in the federal government, where agencies are being directed to support the interests of individual businesses over their statutory responsibility to promote the common good.

What do all of you think of this?  Am I overreacting?