Tablas Creek Vineyard Blog

A great blue heron visits the Tablas Creek wetlands

Several of us were sitting on our patio having lunch when a blue heron sailed over the vineyard before coming to rest in the Tablas Creek wetlands that border Adelaida road, just downhill from our entrance.  I got one decent shot (right) before I scared it off by getting too close.

The growth we've seen in the wetlands this year has been extraordinary.  We installed them three years ago in response to a California mandate that wineries treat the water they use before releasing it into a septic system.  For the first two years we struggled to get the appropriate flow of water (which varies enormously based on the time of year and peaks during harvest) through the system.  But, we've made ongoing adjustments and in the last year the growth of the willow trees, irises, reeds, cattails and other water-loving plants in and around the wetlands make them look entirely different than they did in 2006.

And the arrival of a water-loving bird like the great blue heron is just one more indication that this solution to winery waste-water treatment, which we chose because it was friendly to the environment, has been a success.

Early impressions of the cool 2009 early summer

So far, except for a scorching hot weekend that (of course) coincided with the 2009 Paso Robles Wine Festival, it's been cool.  Days typically have been topping out in the mid- to high-70's, with relatively frequent cloud cover at night.  Normally, by June, we're seeing cloudless, deep blue skies and temperatures routinely into the 90s.  By contrast, here's a photo from this afternoon, looking over the hill behind the winery:

Combine the recent cool weather with a late, cool spring and significant portions of the vineyard which were knocked back by our April frosts, and you have a recipe for a very late harvest.  We've just finished flowering, about three weeks later than normal.  A few shots of young clusters in the vineyard, Viognier on the left and Grenache on the right:

The vineyard, overall, looks very healthy, and the vines look like they've set a good crop this year.  This is in keeping with what we've seen with the exceptionally vigorous cover crops this winter, and local farmers (of grapes and other crops) report that they're seeing heavier fruit sets than either of the past two years.

It's interesting to note that we're seeing such relatively heavy fruit set from a year when the rainfall was only 60% of normal.  But the manner in which we received the rain -- relatively frequent, light precipitation rather than fewer, heavier downpours -- seems to have encouraged the vines.  What we didn't see was the heavy rains necessary to replenish the reservoirs and ground water, so vineyards that rely on irrigation may see hardship later in the season.

We do see some residual damage from the frosts.  While every part of the vineyard re-sprouted, some weaker or younger vines didn't set a crop.  Others have set a small crop from their second growth buds.  These clusters will be smaller (and ripen later) than the vineyard around them, and will require that we be careful when we harvest.  A photo of a Grenache vine, frozen bud above a second growth shoot, will give you an idea:

Still, despite the frosted areas, the major challenge for us in the vineyard now is controlling the explosive canopy growth.  Most of our vines, with energy stored up after consecutive light crops and encouraged by the regular rainfall this winter, are sending out dozens, even hundreds of shoots.  We're going through the vineyard thinning out the canopy and letting air and light in to circulate around the clusters.  A good (if extreme) example of this dense growth is the vine below, from our oldest Grenache section:

At this point, we're expecting a substantial but late harvest, probably not beginning before the middle of September.

Anyone who is interested in seeing the rest of the photo set, include a few more detailed photos of the frost damage, can do so on our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=85027&id=27438997414&l=fc36dd4214

Paso Robles Big Sky

I spent an hour or so rambling around the vineyard on Monday to get a sense of to what extent we'd been hit by the frosts the mornings of April 25th and 26th.  It looks like the damage was serious -- the worst that we've seen since 2001 -- but hopefully not devastating.  Roussanne and Mourvedre (our two most-planted varietals) were hardly out at all yet, which meant they weren't affected.  Syrah and Viognier seem to have largely escaped.  The varieties that were hit worst were Grenache and Grenache Blanc, particularly in the newer plantings near Tablas Creek.   Overall, I expect an impact of perhaps 25%-35% in the affected varieties, maybe 10%-15% overall.  The walk was, on that level, somewhat reassuring, as I was worried it would be worse.

Plus, mitigating the frost losses, there appears to be a heavier than normal number of flower clusters on the vines.  This would be a good thing; we've had very light crops the past two years.

While I was out I was struck by the openness of the space.  I've noticed it from time to time in Paso Robles, but was particularly struck on Monday.  Perhaps it was the scattering of cirrus clouds; normally the sky is a relatively undifferentiated cloudless blue.  But I managed one shot that captured pretty well the sense of space:

You can view the entire album, with photos of budbreak and of the frost damage, on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=78059&id=27438997414

The importance of hang time

This past weekend was Hospice du Rhone.  It's always one of my favorite events of the year, where hundreds of people (maybe pushing 1000, all told) who are enthusiastic supporters of Rhone varietals get together for a weekend of seriously lighthearted consideration of all things Rhone.  You get comments at these tastings that you don't anywhere else (like "oh, I've been so looking forward to tasting all the grenache blancs") and a very informed level of questions.

One question I got at Saturday's tasting I thought deserved a fuller treatment here.  It came after I'd tasted the questioner through all our red single-varietals wines from 2006 (Counoise, Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre) and was explaining why we thought that Mourvedre was the best of the bunch, at least for us.  The assertion, in a room where 90% of the tables focus on Syrah, is one that invites a challenge, and the questioner asked me why we thought so much of Mourvedre.

The answer (like so much else in wine) hinges on the appropriateness of the grape variety for its site.  Syrah is clearly a great grape, dark and lush, with terrific minerality and excellent structure.  But while it reaches monumental heights in the northern Rhone, it's a relatively minor player in the southern Rhone.  In non-Rhone examples, a grape like Sauvignon Blanc, which makes some of the world's greatest white wines in the Loire Valley, is used as a blending grape in Bordeaux, and Pinot Noir, which makes some of the world's great wines in Burgundy, makes largely boring wines in the Languedoc.

Why is this?  Grapes can clearly ripen in a climate warmer than might be ideal for them.  And, in a warmer climate, you can harvest more reliably, as you're less likely to run into end-of-harvest hazards like rain or frost.  What you don't get is hang-time.  Hang-time measures the length of time between flowering and harvest.  The cooler the temperatures, the more slowly grapes ripen.  At Tablas Creek, because of the exceptionally cold nights in Paso Robles, we tend to get long hang-times, between 4 and 6 months depending on the season and the varietal.  This is usually about 2 weeks longer than the same varieties have at Beaucastel.

In the family of Rhone varieties, at Tablas Creek, the harvest usually sequences itself something like this:

Early September: Viognier
Mid-September: Syrah, Marsanne
Late September: Grenache Blanc
Early October: Grenache
Mid-October: Roussanne, Picpoul, Counoise
Late-October: Mourvedre

Of course, the above list is an approximation.  The spread of earliest to latest harvest of any given varietal can span close to a month (or more in the case of Roussanne, which as I've written about before seems particularly prone to uneven ripening).  Still, it gives you an idea of how long the hang time is on each varietal.  [It's worth noting that there is some spread in flowering time, with Grenache and Grenache Blanc joining Syrah and Viognier as early flowerers.  Still, the roughly three week spread of earliest to latest flowering is a lot less than the two month spread of harvest.]

It is intuitive that the longer a grape cluster can spend on the vine without going out of balance, all other things being equal, the more interesting it should be.  Each day that the cluster is in contact with the roots, the vine's roots can transmit a little more character of place to the clusters.  Each day that the vine is in the sun, the skins should get a little thicker and the color a little more intense.  This would help explain why the most interesting examples of a given varietal should be made in the coolest climate in which the grape will ripen.  It also helps explain why, in regions where multiple varieties are planted, the ones that come in latest tend to be the most renowned.

Of course, there are risks involved with late-ripening varieties.  There have been a few years (most recently in 2004) that some of our Mourvedre didn't come in, as it didn't get ripe before the onset of the rainy season.  And in Chateauneuf du Pape, it has long been considered too risky to plant more than a token acreage to Mourvedre.  One of Jacques Perrin's innovations at Beauacstel was to devote a significant percentage of his acreage to Mourvedre at a time when nearly the entire appellation was planted to Grenache. Beaucastel takes the risk of having to toss out a higher percentage of their crop than their neighbors in a year when Mourvedre doesn't come in.  But, in the years it does get ripe, they can make wines that no one else in their appellation can match.  It's a gamble that has paid off well for them.

In Paso Robles, it's not so risky to choose late-ripening varieties as it is in France, as the climate is more reliable later in the fall.  And, overall, due to its cool nights, most varieties hang for a long time before they come in.

So, long answer to the question: I credit the exceptionally long hang-time of our latest-ripening red (Mourvedre) and white (Roussanne) varietals for giving them the character that they have, and with why we choose them to make up the core of our flagship wines.

Signs of Spring

We've been getting lots of small rainstorms over the last month.  It's a lot better than what we saw in January, so I'm not really complaining, but we're still missing that one big five-inch dousing that will really replenish the reservoirs and get the creeks flowing again.  Tablas Creek, even after the roughly six inches of rain in February, is still dry.  We have gotten over an inch of rain today, but at about 14 inches for the year, we're still only halfway to our normal totals and time is running out.

Still, the pattern of the rainfall (lots of days of light to moderate rain, and relatively warm interludes) has resulted in one of our lushest, greenest surface crops in years, and what promises to be a glorious wildflower season.  I took advantage of a break in the precipitation late last week to walk around the vineyard and see how things looked.  The photos below are a selection of the best ones; as usual, I've posted the complete Signs of Spring photo album on Tablas Creek's Facebook page.

First, a look at the cover crop, which we seed most winters between the rows.  It is a mix of sweet peas, oats, vetch and clover.  Some years it barely grows six inches; this year it's eighteen inches in spots.

A shot through our Roussanne block, looking west, shows just how green the cover crop is, and how tall it has gotten:

The first California poppy of the season:

I liked this next shot because it showed the seeded cover crop intermingled with the native flowers, including a pretty purple one which we saw more prominently this year than I can ever remember.  More photos of this flower will follow.

As promised, the blanket of purple flowers in a valley of head-pruned vines, with rows of Syrah (and seeded cover crop) behind:

And, because I couldn't resist one more shot of the purple flowers, this one looking west toward our newly-planted section:

As I was walking through the vineyard, I saw this mustard flower with a ladybug on it, straight out of organic vineyard central casting:

This last shot shows two rows of Syrah: one seeded with the cover crop (on the left) and the other left to naturally self-seed.  We could have probably gotten away with leaving more of the vineyard to self-seed this year, as it was such a good growing year for surface plants, but you never know... and we were disappointed with the self-seeding take in the winter of '07-'08.

As always, you can click on any of the above images for full-size shots.

Creating a new wine: En Gobelet

Our model at Tablas Creek is pretty consistent from year to year.  We make our Esprit de Beaucastel (red and white) and Cotes de Tablas (red and white).  We make our Rosé.  We make somewhere between six and nine single varietal wines depending on what's compelling when we're doing our blending.  Some years we make a dessert wine or three.

Okay, maybe that doesn't sound very simple.  But practically speaking, it doesn't change much from year to year, or at least hasn't changed much since we introduced a relatively extensive lineup of single varietals in the 2002 vintage.  The specifics of which varietals to produce have been more or less dictated by the production levels of the vintage and what we taste when we're putting together our core blends.

One thing that we have not done is subdivide our vineyard and do vineyard block designates.  It's not that we don't believe that this might make for interesting wines; we would love to celebrate any block-level differences we learn about.  We do expect eventually to make a block-designate wine from the dry-farmed, head-pruned, west-facing eleven-acre block on the south side of Tablas Creek.  But we have not yet seen a distinctive character from a specific block that we can track from year to year.  Ask us again in a decade.

One experiment that has shown some promise has been our decision to plant small head-pruned blocks of vines in several of the flatter, lower-lying areas such as the Mourvedre block between the winery and Adelaida Road (visible at right).  We created several other head-pruned blocks in vineyard that we reclaimed from rootstock when we outsourced our nursery operation to NovaVine in 2004.  That effort accelerated when we planted Scruffy Hill (the vineyard block on the other side of Tablas Creek I mention above) in the winters of '05-'06 and '06-'07.  At this point, we have about eighteen acres of head-pruned vines, scattered here and there around the vineyard.

Head-pruning is appealing both for its simplicity and because it is traditional.  The Chateauneuf du Pape regulations which specify the rules for the appellation controllée dictate that all grape varieties except Syrah be head-pruned (taillé en gobelet; literally translated as "pruned in goblet form").  And in Paso Robles, too, the old vineyards are all head-pruned, largely Zinfandel but also Petite Sirah, Carignan and other California "heritage" varieties.  It's much less expensive to plant a vineyard this way, as you plant with less density and no posts, wires, irrigation lines, etc.  And the yields are controlled naturally, as dry-farmed, head-pruned vines rarely produce more than 2 or 3 tons per acre.  This natural yield control is why head-pruning is legislated in Chateauneuf du Pape. 

As we've had a chance to get some of these blocks into production, we're noticing they seem to share  an elegance and a complexity which is different from what we see in the rest of the vineyard.  Perhaps it's the areas where they are planted (generally lower-lying, deeper-soil areas).  Perhaps it's the age of the vines and a comparative lack of brute power.  But, whatever the reason, we believe that these lots show our terroir in a unique and powerful way.

We got the idea of putting several of these lots into one wine for our VINsider wine club last summer, as we remarked again and again on the character that they shared.  We chose to base the wine on Mourvedre and Grenache (which comprise most of our head-pruned blocks) but also added a splash of head-pruned Tannat which gives the resulting wine a little more smokiness and a little firmer finish.  We are calling it En Gobelet, after the French term for head-pruning.  We expect it to act like many Mourvedre-based wines, drinking well when young, then tightening up after 3-4 years in bottle before reopening for another 10 years or more as a mature wine.  A bottle of the wine will go out in the fall 2009 shipment.  The label for the wine is below.

Fog in the Vineyard

It's not foggy out at Tablas Creek very often.  Our elevation (1500 feet) and the barrier of the Santa Lucia Mountains mean that neither the Salinas Valley fog that settles in areas close to town on summer mornings nor the Pacific fog that comes through the Templeton Gap in the afternoons when we have onshore flow tends to make it out to Tablas Creek.  [For a cool photo of what summer fog patterns look like in Paso Robles, check out this animated satellite image of fog retreating up the Salinas Valley.]

What we do occasionally get is ground fog in the winter, nearly always shortly after it has rained.  This morning, it was clear in town but when I arrived at the vineyard, the winery was shrouded in fog (though the blue sky was visible through the fog).  The effect was cool, so I grabbed the camera and drove up to the top of our highest hill expecting to come out the top of the fog, but it was actually thicker up there than down lower.  So I took a handful of shots of the vineyard, several of which I'm pleased with.  I've posted the best here; you can look at the complete Fog in the Vineyard album on Facebook.

The first three photos are all in our Grenache blocks up near the top of the tallest hill in the vineyard.  First, a photo looking up and west through our oldest section of Grenache.  The vines are starting to look mature as they approach 20 years old.

The second photo looks east through a slightly younger Grenache section on the back of what we call Mount Mourvedre.

The third photo shows how variable the fog cover was.  It was taken less than a minute after the previous photo, but looks north through the Grenache block rather than east.  It also show how much the cover crop has grown even in the last two weeks as we've gotten our first consistently rainy weather of the winter.

Speaking of cover crops, I got a nice shot of a sweet pea, one of the most useful of our cover crop components.

As is often the case, most of the best shots of the fog were taken into the sun.  This photo below looks south-east, down the old Grenache block.  To orient you, the first three photos were taken from more or less where the road exits the left-hand edge of the frame.

As I was standing at the top of the hill, the fog was rising up to meet me.  This photo looks east toward Halter Ranch, and you can see the fog approaching from the south.

The next photo looks north, down through our Viognier block, and shows how thin the veil of fog was, with the hillsides no more obscured than vines twenty yards down the hill.  It also shows the two long "kicker" canes that we leave when we prune early-sprouting varietals.  These kicker canes sprout first, and delay the sprouting of the buds closer to the cordon by a week or so.  It doesn't sound like much, but getting an extra week of frost protection can mean a lot.  (We later come through and prune off the kicker canes so they don't sap too much of the vine's vigor.)

Finally, with the fog fully rolled in, the Grenache blocks disappeared, giving a terrific ghostly feel.

Snow in the Vineyard

We're (finally, thankfully) in a cold, wet winter weather pattern.  Over the past four days we've received about 3.5 inches of rain, and it appears that we have Pacific storms dropping down out of Alaska every other day for the next ten days or so.  That's great.  We're up to 8.85 inches of rain for the year, and hope to pick up another 3 or 4 inches this week.

Still, I was not expecting, when I left town in the steady rain that we'd been receiving all night, to see snow out at the vineyard.  It does snow in Paso Robles every now and then (the link at the left is to a blog post from our last snowfall, almost exactly three years ago) and when it does it's always beautiful.  When I got out to the vineyard, it was still snowing hard, and we got an inch or two of accumulation.  The photos below are a few of the best; you're invited to view the whole "Tablas Creek snow" photo album on Facebook (you can look at the photos even if you're not a Facebook member).  First, the main road heading out into the vineyard, lined by snow-covered olive trees:

A look down toward our grapevine nursery through our tiny Chardonnay block:

I love the geometry of the vineyard, made more dramatic by the snow.  Below, a newly-pruned Roussanne block to the west of the winery:

We've been pruning for the past few weeks; below is a single, newly-pruned Roussanne vine, with a closeup below:

We collect the prunings off the vineyard for our grapevine nursery.  The pruned Roussanne canes are in the foreground of the photo below, covered with snow:

It was cold enough (32 degrees exactly) that the snow was sticking wherever it landed.  Add to that the fact that the air was absolutely calm and the snow built up even on the unpruned canes like those in the Syrah block south of the winery:

Finally, one shot of the snowy Beaucastel sign in front of our tasting room:

Modern Organic, Stone Ground Olive Oil

When we started planning out the Tablas Creek vineyard, we decided to line the roads within the vineyard with olive trees.  Olives are traditional in the Rhone, and they have the added advantage that they aren't much work, won't grow so big they'd shade the grapes, and don't share any pests with grapevines.  The trees grew beautifully, and in about ten years we started getting an olive crop. 

This posed a bit of a problem. 

As we'd chosen the olive trees primarily for their looks, we hadn't really thought through what we'd do with the olives once the trees started producing.  You can't leave the olives on the tree, because they rot and attract pests, but we did not have the capacity to press them here (wine presses are woefully unsuited to breaking down olive pits).  The first few years we just cured the olives that we harvested, though our harvest soon overwhelmed our needs for cured olives.

In 2004, we got our first harvest in sufficient quantities to press, and took them to a local olive oil producer to press.  They did it for a year, and then (very nicely) asked us to find somewhere better set up to handle small custom-crush lots.  Keeping lots separate is difficult, and machines that are designed to process dozens of tons of olives waste a lot of time and effort on half-ton lots.

So, for the last three years, we've been taking our olives down to Figueroa Farms in Santa Ynez, which has done a very nice job for us.  But, the modern processing equipment is a far cry from the pastoral ideal of the stone-ground press (like the one at right, which is a detail from a photo I found on Wikipedia of a Roman press; the photographer is David Shankbone).

Modern olive presses use crushing blades and centrifuges to crush the olives and separate the oil from the water and the solid materials (pomace).  The process is noisy, industrial, and very far from our ideal of minimal processing, much more so to my mind than a modern bladder press is from an old-fashioned wooden basket press for wine.  Plus, we've wanted to be able to label our olive oil as organic, and in order to label a food product as organic it needs to be processed in an organic-certified facility.

Enter Pietra Santa Winery. Pietra Santa, located in Hollister (not far from Calera) is an artisan producer of olive oil as well as wine, and their facility is certified organic.  Even more exciting, they use stone grinding wheels to crush the olives into pomace.

Of course, technology of stone grinding has advanced from the Roman press (above) which would have been turned by oxen.  The press is powered by electricity rather than bovines, and the pomace, once it has been crushed, is still separated by a centrifuge rather than by being pressed between fiber discs (to remove the solids) and then decanted (to separate the oil from the water). 

In December, our winemaker Neil Collins brought the olives from the 2008 harvest up to Pietra Santa for pressing.  His photos follow the path of the fruit as it becomes oil.  First, the olives are sorted and moved by conveyor belt up to where they will be washed:



Then, the olives are washed vigorously in water:



Next, the olives are crushed under the stone wheels:



The liquids (oil on top, water below) are separated:



And the oil streams out of the centrifuge:



And into the carboy:



The end result will be Tablas Creek extra virgin olive oil, for the first time certified organic in 2008, and available exclusively in the Tablas Creek tasting room!

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 1: A Riot of Color

One consequence of the end of daylight savings has been that I'm at the vineyard at the end of the day a lot more often.  At this time of year particularly, the combination of the late-day slanting yellow sun and the foliage turning colors makes for some spectacular scenes in the afternoon.  I have a whole series of photos I want to share, and am planning to post three thematically connected photos each day for the next week.  For this first post, wanted to celebrate the colors of fall.  First, a look down from the top of the vineyard through the Grenache (left, mostly green) and Mourvedre (right, mostly red) sections:

Next, a photo of the Vermentino vineyard with one lone remaining cluster (evidently missed during harvest) that shows the deep blue skies:

And finally, a shot of Grenache Noir vines showing the brilliant greens and reds that make November such a beautiful time of year: