Tablas Creek Vineyard Blog

A Library Wine Club?

For years, we've been struggling with how and whether to create a second wine club.  Right now, we're one-size-fits-all.  Each member of our VINsider Wine Club receives the same selection of wines in each shipment.  We have at times toyed with the idea of creating certain customization of shipments, and always retreated due to our unwillingness to accept the added risk of mixups that doing so creates.  And, we think of our club as really an introductory sampling of our wines.  We rarely include more than one bottle of any particular wine in any year, and have felt that a principal goal of the club is to introduce our members to wines that they might otherwise have overlooked.  Club members who love a particular wine can always order more, and we don't want to burden anyone with lots of bottles of something that may not be to their tastes.

The benefit of introducing a wine through a shipment to our club members was driven home to me today when I showed around a couple of club members and, at the end of our tasting, pulled two of our Vin de Paille dessert wines -- the Vin de Paille white blend and the Mourvedre-based Sacrerouge -- out of the back.  They commented that they'd always seen the dessert wines on our order form, but because they hadn't received them in a shipment (we don't make enough to send even one bottle to each club member) they hadn't ever felt comfortable pulling the trigger and ordering.

The one wine that we've always struggled with how to share has been our Panoplie.  It's an elite wine, really the best that we can produce in any vintage, and is priced accordingly.  It's $95 retail, and even with the 20% wine club discount, it's still an expensive wine.  We absolutely believe that it's worth the tariff, and the press that the wine has received (the most recent 2005 got a 94-96 from Parker and a 94 from Tanzer's IWC) supports that.  The wine sells out, even with a 2-bottle order limit, within weeks of its release.  Still, as we price our club shipments at 20% off of the retail prices of the included wines, its inclusion in a shipment puts pressure on the price of that shipment.  We keep the shipment within our promised range of $150 to $190 by selecting other, less expensive, wines to complement it.  Nevertheless, we receive a handful of comments each spring from VINsiders who challenge why we include such an expensive wine in their shipment.  Our explanation always has been that we feel, if we can include the very best wine we make to all our club members while keeping the overall shipment price within the range we promise, it's a net benefit to them.  Most accept this explanation, although one or two decide each spring that the club no longer suits them for that reason.  I think I saw four or five responses in our recent canceled member  survey (I wrote on this with respect to wine shipping costs a few months back) that listed this as a primary reason for cancellation.

The Panoplie has spurred our search for a second club -- with our initial thinking that we should try to create some sort of "elite" club where members would receive some special wines otherwise unavailable to "regular" members.  The problem was that, with the exception of a few dessert wines, VINsiders already get all our best wines.  Taking wines away from them to give to an elite club seems wrong on lots of levels, and to take us dangerously down the road of taking our club members' loyalty for granted.  I don't ever want to think of our VINsiders as just "regular".  Other wine clubs are what we call "hostage" wine clubs, where you have to buy increasing amounts of wine you don't really want to get the good stuff.  I hate that model.

So, we think we've hit on a solution, and I'd love any feedback any current members (or, for that matter, anyone) has.  We have been saving 200-300 cases of our signature Esprit de Beaucastel red and white wines from each vintage since 2003.  We had always vaguely envisioned using these if we were to have a disastrous vintage and be unable to make an Esprit de Beaucastel.  But, we think we've hit upon a better idea.  We would create a library club, available only to current members (but optional to them) that gives its subscribers the opportunity to receive a shipment each year of wines that we've aged at the winery and think are at or nearing their peak.  This solution seems much more appropriate for who we are and for the sorts of ageworthy wines we try to make, and seems to provide a real benefit for its members without taking anything away from our VINsiders.

What do you think?  Please share.

Congratulations to Mark Royer

Congratulations to Mark Royer, from Menlo Park, CA, the winner of the third annual Tablas Creek VINsider NCAA Tournament Challenge!  His bracket correctly predicted 6 of the Elite Eight, all of the Final Four, both of the finalists, and the Kansas Jayhawks as champions, placing him in the 99.1st percentile in ESPN's national brackets.

He edged out second-place finisher Davies Wakefield, from Maribel, WI, and in third place (embarassingly for me) my mother-in-law Sally Dunn, from Baltimore, MD, who rarely watches college basketball but routinely ends up winning the family tournament pool. 

As we have seen each year, our VINsider club members overall score above the national average (we knew there was a reason you liked us!).  This year, the average VINsider bracket scored in the 52nd percentile, with an impressive 15% picking Kansas to win it all.  My results?  A very mediocre 54.7th percentile, as North Carolina failed to beat Pitt in the final.  Anyone interested can look at the complete brackets and results of the VINsider pool on the ESPN Web site.

Wine shipping cost comments from a cancelled Wine Club member survey

Early this year, we made a point to reach out to our canceled VINsider Wine Club members and ask them for some feedback on what we could be doing better.  I'm not worried overall about our club members; our median tenure of a club member is about 3.5 years, more than double the industry average.  Still, I was sure that we could learn something from the former members who have moved on.

We're still receiving dozens of survey responses each day, and we're holding off on rigorous analysis of the data until we have received most of the surveys we expect to get.  I'm sure that these will lead to several additional posts here on the blog.  Still, I've been reading through many of the responses and was surprised to see one item pop up with some frequency.  Several ex-club members have commented that they don't like paying shipping for wine, or that they think that what we're charging for shipping is too much for them.

I was surprised, since we subsidize shipping costs considerably, particularly to the East Coast (where most of the survey respondents who mentioned shipping costs live).  I wonder how often these people have tried sending 40-pound packages second-day air across the country.  We receive good shipping rates from FedEx thanks to our membership in the Wine Institute (about half off FedEx's published rates) but we still pay between $70 and $79 to ship a case of wine to the East Coast, and between $40 and $46 to ship a half-case of wine.  We charge our customers $45 (full case) and $30 (half-case).  In the mountain states (where we charge $25/$35 for half case/full case) we pay $29/$55.  In California, where we use UPS Ground (they guarantee next-day delivery to nearly the entire state, and second-day on a few outlying fringes) we pay $19/$29 (we charge $15/$25).

Yes, we're receiving a higher margin on this wine, since we're selling direct to customers, but we're also providing most of these customers (our wine club members) either a 20% or a 25% discount, and absorbing packaging costs and labor expenses. 

I wonder how other wineries do this.  Many of the customers who mentioned that they felt our shipping prices were high said that other wineries who they ordered from provided very inexpensive shipping (on the order of a $15-$25 per case) or even free shipping.  I can only assume that these wineries must be eating this cost to do more business on the East Coast.

Shipping costs have gone up enormously over the past few years, reflecting the higher costs of gasoline. On of my first conclusions from this survey is that I'm not sure public perceptions have changed along with them.

An Appreciation of Blending Rhone Varietals

Some of my favorite events that we do at Tablas Creek are our annual blending seminars, where we invite our wine club members and other interested members of the public to come, taste through the component varietals, and then work as a table to put together their own blends.  This is in keeping with many of the educational wine seminars that we put on each year. 

Our focus on education has two purposes.  One is a marketing purpose. We know we aren't making Cabernet and Chardonnay (wines that people can categorize easily and have an inherent understanding of).  Instead, we work with obscure grapes and blend them together.  Anything we can do to share with our customers why we persist in such a quixotic enterprise helps open up our experiences to a wider audience.  The second purpose is that the blending, itself, is our favorite time of the year, as the wines stop being potential and start to come together as wine.

Over the long term, our hopes are that people who have joined us in a chance to blend... or a chance to help during harvest... or to try obscure but wonderful varietals will be willing to follow us in our own experiments.

What I always find most interesting about these blending seminars is how different the blends are.  Starting with the same raw materials (this year, we had 5 components: Counoise, Grenache, Mourvedre, a Syrah from a neutral barrel, and a Syrah from a new French oak demi-muid) the different groups came up with radically different blends. 

The most controversial component (perhaps unsurprisingly) was the Syrah, both from the new barrel and from the older barrel.  For whatever reason, Syrah has taken its time this year to complete malolactic fermentation, and both samples were a little bubbly and the sample from the new barrel also a little reduced.  That reduction, plus the cedary flavors from the new oak, led some groups to totally eliminate it from their blends.  And the blends that resulted from this decision were tasty: Mourdvedre and Grenache dominated, with lush fruit, good acidity, and lots of immediate appeal.

Other groups took the opposite tack: good percentages of Syrah (as much as 45%, in one case) with less Grenache and Mourvedre, and a focus on the longer term.  These wines were darker, gamier, with a different character to the tannins: creamier in the attack and mid-palate, but firmer on the finish... a classic characteristic of Syrah. 

For me, the least successful wines were the ones that split the difference.  When the wines had around 25% Syrah they muted the forward fruit of the Grenache and Mourvedre but didn't replace it with enough of the Syrah mouthfeel or firmness at the back, and the resulting wines felt both heavy and sharp... not a great combination.

It is this process, this rediscovery of the wines you have each year, that I find most exciting about our focus on blends.  Each vintage gives us something new, and a new opportunity to express that year, and those grapes, and this place.

Congratulations to Tim McGowan

Congratulations to Tim McGowan, from Oak Brook, IL, who won the second annual Tablas Creek VINsider NCAA Tournament Challenge with an entry correctly predicting 6 of the Elite Eight, all of the Final Four, both of the finalists, and the Florida Gators as champions.  His entry ended up in the 99.2nd percentile in ESPN's national brackets.  He narrowly edged out Steven Weitz, from Fort Lauderdale, FL, who ended up in the 99.0 percentile.

Special kudos should also go to Dennis Gorges, of Charlotte, NC, whose bracket up until the final four was so flawless that he was actually in the 100.0th percentile going into the final weekend... in roughly 1000th place of over 2,000,000 entries.  Of course, the last weekend tripped him up, but that's still the first bracket I've ever seen in the 100th percentile that late, and at least within sniffing distance of ESPN's $10,000 top prize.

As we saw last year, our VINsider club members overall score significantly above than the national average.  The median VINsider bracket scored in the 58th percentile, with 10 of the 59 entries (17%) in the 90th percentile or better.

Anyone interested in looking at the brackets and results of the VINsider pool can do so on the ESPN Web site: http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/group?groupID=133546

Thanks again for playing, everyone!

Roussanne "Bergeron"

We're enjoying probably the last relatively mellow day before harvest starts in earnest.  From sampling we have done, it looks like we're going to see significant amounts of Syrah, Viognier, and Grenache Blanc this week.  Ripening is proceding under ideal conditions: low-90s daytime temperatures, upper-40s nighttime temps, full sun, no humidity, and light Santa Ana winds from the south.

Meanwhile, we're working with our early-season harvest, one component of which is our Roussanne "Bergeron" program:

Each year, we make a little early-picked, cool-microclimate Roussanne in the style in which it's made in the Savoie region in France (where the Roussanne grape is known as "Bergeron").  This citrusy, higher-acid version of Roussanne is great with fresh seafood, oysters on the half-shell, and fresh cheeses.  We have more details in out 2005 Harvest Report.  Above, see the Bergeron in its picking bin, and then a great shot of cleaning the skins, seeds, and stems out of the press after pressing.

The Bergeron is the sort of wine that we make exclusively for our VINsider Wine Club members.  It's typically made in 200-300 case quantities, and isn't something that we would market nationally.  But, we think it's a great  take on the Roussanne grape, and has proven to be exceptionally good with food.  Try it with aged cow's milk cheeses!

Congratulations to Lane Forsythe

Congratulations to Lane Forsythe of Arlington, VA, who won the first-ever Tablas Creek VINsider NCAA Tournament pool.  In this crazy year where no #1 seed made the final four, Lane correctly picked two of the four final four participants (UCLA and Florida) and ended up in the 94.7th percentile nationally.  You can view the final VINsider pool results on the ESPN Web site.

Overall, the level of choices was high... the median percentile for all the VINsiders who entered was the 59th.  Congratulations to everyone.

New Tasting Room at Tablas Creek

When we built the Tablas Creek winery and office building in 1997, we were under the belief that we would be purely a production facility, and leave the marketing and sales of our wine entirely to other people.  So, when we designed the building, we did not include a tasting room.  When we would entertain VIPs, we would taste with them in the cellar or in our conference room.  And, we developed our tour, which took interested visitors down through our grapevine nursery, organic vineyard, and winery.

                            From old...                                                                 to new!

We found that people who had the chance to see the property in action came away like disciples, spreading the news about Tablas Creek to their circle of acquaintances.  And, we realized just how difficult it is to get your story out in what is a more and more crowded wine marketplace. 

So, in September of 2002, we converted what had been the lobby of our office into a tasting room. Since then, we've welcomed nearly 40,000 people through this 440-square-foot room.  It wasn't ideal, but we made it work, bringing in a hand-made stone tasting bar (made from limestone from our vineyard), another custom cabinet made from two of our old barrels, and whatever other pieces of furniture we could make work.

Pam Blakeman, Tablas Creek's Tasting Room Manager

This room worked for us well in 2002 and 2003, and adequately in 2004.  However, by 2005, we were cramped on weekends, and positively overwhelmed on festivals.   So, we made a decision to expand the tasting room early in 2006.  We sacrificed our conference room (which also served as my dad's office) and reconfigured the tasting room space to include three new tasting bars, new lighting, new inventory display space, and a new color scheme.

The two parts of the tasting room now total 980 square feet (effectively doubling our capacity) and we can now pour from five different bars when we need to.  We dedicate one room on weekends to our VINsider Wine Club members, and we can also close off the new room for private groups.  Plus, we can be much more flexible about the sorts of winery events we can hold, including our recent VINsider shipment tasting party.

We moved into this space in mid-February, and it has been an absolute pleasure.  We encourage you to come out and see it for yourselves.  If you are interested in setting up a visit and tour, either for yourself or for a group, please contact us!  Some photos of the conversion are below: