Two things to celebrate: 2025 frost season ends with no damage and flowering begins under ideal conditions

This past weekend was the Paso Robles Wine Festival, our unofficial end to frost season. For the second consecutive year, it was a picture-perfect day, in the 70s and breezy, with both winter's below-freezing nights and summer's hundred-degree days feeling comfortably far away. And yet, as recently as 2022, we saw freezes at this time of year that cost us something like 30% of our crop of white grapes. So it's with a big sigh of relief that we've made it through the first and most dangerous quarter of the growing season intact. We had our first few 90°F days week-before-last, with more expected later this week. As you might expect, the vineyard is growing fast. And on cue, we're starting to see flowing in our early grapes. Here's Viognier:

If you haven't seen grapevines flowering before, you can be excused for finding it underwhelming. It's not a showy process. Still, the tiny white fuzz-like flowers that appear on the clusters are the first stage of development of the berries. From this point on, if the berries are fertilized successfully, they'll grow in size and mass until veraison, at which point they stop growing but accumulate sugar and ripen the seeds within. As with all parts of the vineyard annual cycle, there are grapes that enter (and exit) flowering earlier and later, with the early grapes being Viognier, Grenache, Grenache Blanc, and Vermentino. They are followed shortly by Marsanne and Syrah, and finally, as much as a month after the early grapes, Roussanne, Counoise, and Mourvedre bring up the rear. And there is variation between vineyard blocks as well, with cooler, lower-lying areas a week or two behind the same grapes at the tops of our hills. The other grapes that I could find flowering were the two Grenaches from our top-of-hill blocks. This is Grenache Noir; Grenache Blanc is the last photo in the blog:

Flowering is the second main marker point that we use to compare each vintage to others. First is budbreak (which this year was about a week later than average). Now we have flowering. From the first two markers of 2025, it seems like this year is following a somewhat later path, more like the past couple of wet vintages than most of what we saw between 2013 and 2022. We're at 402 degree days for the season, about 10% less than the average since 2011. Normally, you'd expect a cooler year to come with increased frost risk. Thankfully, that has not been true in 2025.  

Typically in April and early May we get a few nights that drop below freezing at our weather station, and another several that do so in our coldest pockets or get near enough that we need to be up at night turning on our frost protection. This year, remarkably, has managed to start cool without any frost nights, and with very few nights that even got close. We did have two nights in early April which dropped to 33.1°F and 33.4°F, but we dodged frost and most of the vineyard hadn't sprouted yet anyway. Since then we've only dropped below 35°F once, and only barely, to 34.8°F on April 13th. That has been a relief, I know, to Austin, Erin, and David, who are on call on spring nights to get up and turn on fans and water to protect us from freezes. For them to have to be up a dozen nights isn't unusual in a normal springtime. We turned everything on this year exactly twice, and for the first time since 2019 saw zero frost damage. Hallelujah.

Flowering is the second of the four viticultural markers that we use each year as markers: notable reference points that indicate where we are compared to other years. These are, in order:

• Budbreak (typically beginning late March or early April, and lasting three weeks or so)
• Flowering (typically beginning mid-May, lasting a month or so)
• Veraison (typically beginning sometime between mid-July and early August, lasting as much as 6 weeks)
• Harvest (typically beginning late August or early September, lasting two months or so)

You might notice that in the above list, the duration of each stage is longer than the previous one. That's because grapes start their growing cycle at different times, and also proceed at different rates. So, harvest stretches over a longer time than veraison, which takes longer than flowering, which takes longer than budbreak. Given we saw flowering begin the second week of May, we're likely to be enjoying the intoxicating scent of bloom until the sometime in mid-June.

What do we want now? We're hoping for consistent, sunny weather to hold through flowering, with only limited wind and no rain. Cold, wet, or windy weather at this stage can produce incomplete fertilization, or shatter, where a cluster has a high proportion of unfertilized berries, looking snaggle-toothed and (often dramatically) reducing yields. Some varieties, most notably Grenache, are prone to shatter, while others are less so. The Paso Robles weather forecast suggests that we're entering a warmer period, with highs over the next ten days between the upper 70's°F and the lower 90's°F, with full sun and no unusual wind. That's perfect. 

So far, so good. Full steam ahead.

An appreciation of one of the most ambitious and exciting wine dinners I've hosted... and the remarkable Master Sommelier behind it

I just got back from two weeks on the east coast. This most recent week I was in Washington DC representing the members of WineAmerica, meeting with the offices of our senators and representatives, advocating for policies that will help American wineries. The week before, I was in New York, spending three days working with our Vineyard Brands team members there and hosting two evening events that were open to the public. The first was a lovely wine tasting at a very cool wine shop in Manhattan's Waterline Square neighborhood. The second was maybe the most ambitious and exciting wine dinner I’ve ever done.

This remarkable four-course, fourteen-wine dinner was organized and hosted by the incomparable Pascaline Lepeltier at her restaurant Chambers in Tribeca. If you don’t know Pascaline, she is one of the world’s most celebrated Master Sommeliers. She oversaw the Michelin-starred wine program at Rouge Tomate in Manhattan before opening her own restaurants. She was named Best French Sommelier in 2018, has represented France in international contests and earned fourth place at the ASI Best Sommelier in the World Competition in 2023. She’s an outstanding follow on social media, whose advocacy for and interest in the world’s under-recognized wines led her to publish the terrific book One Thousand Vines, published in both French and English and named a New York Times Best Wine Book of 2024.

Yes, I’m a fan.

So when, a few months ago, Pascaline agreed to host a Tablas Creek dinner at Chambers, I couldn’t have been more excited. That excitement grew when I learned the format that she chooses for her wine dinners. Each course is crafted to tell a different piece of the winery’s story, and Pascaline likes to feature three wines at a time, offering small pours of each to keep from overwhelming guests while allowing a deeper dive into the winery’s portfolio. She hosts the dinners at a single long table at the front of the restaurant. I’ve written about why I think communal tables are such a positive asset for a wine dinner: they bring people together, encourage deeper conversations, and emphasize the community-building capacity of wine. Let me take you through Pascaline’s orchestration of our dinner.

Scene 1: Welcome. As the participants arrived, they were greeted with a glass of our Dianthus. Yes, it’s a relatively rare wine in wholesale, but up to this point, nothing extraordinary, But it breaks the ice, and gives the group (all singles or doubles) a chance to get to know each other a bit before the first food course is served.

Scene 2: A Diversity of Red Wines. For our first food course, Pascaline chose a deceptively simple dish of spaetzle, mushrooms, and green garlic, and paired it with three of our small-production varietal red wines: our 2020 Cinsaut, 2020 Vaccarese, and 2021 Mourvedre. This gave me a chance to talk about our connection to the Perrin family, Jacques Perrin’s quest to bring all the traditional Chateauneuf-du-Pape grapes to Beaucastel in the 1950s, and our ongoing work to bring them into California. Showing these three rare monovarietal wines side by side was a treat.

Scene 3: Esprit de Tablas Through the Years. The next course was a classic southern French dish: a boudin blanc sausage with sunchokes and lightly pickled ramps. The wines were three vintages of our Esprit de Tablas: our current release from 2022, and two vintages out of our library: 2015 and 2013. The 2022 was youthful and exuberant, while the 2015 showed the weightless elegance I have always noted in that extreme drought year and the 2013 was starting to show some of the mature characteristics of leather and meat. The deep dive into our flagship wine allowed me to talk about our blending process, how we adjust to different vintages, and how different grapes play greater or lesser roles depending on the year.

Scene 4: A Diversity of White Wines. The main protein course was a lovely fillet of black sea bass, with broccoli rabe and a tangy meyer lemon hollandaise. Like the first course, it was paired with three of our small-production varietal wines, but on the white side: 2021 Picardan, 2021 Bourboulenc, and 2023 Grenache Blanc. We introduced all three grapes to California viticulture through our grapevine nursery, and it included our rarest: Picardan, which is so scarce that when we planted our half-acre in 2013, it increased the world’s total Picardan footprint by 40%. Putting these rare varietal bottlings in such a high-profile position in the dinner encouraged the guests to take them seriously, and they were up to the task, with all three showing vibrant citrus notes that bounced off the hollandaise and gave relief to the enveloping richness of the fish. A masterpiece.

Scene 5: Esprit de Tablas Blanc Through the Years. Unlike most wine dinners, which move from white to red, Pascaline chose this menu to begin with reds then move to whites. She did so largely because of this pairing. She wanted a cheese course and believes that cheeses are better matches with white wines than reds. The cheeses she chose (Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Uplands Cheese Company in Wisconsin and Reading Raclette from Spring Brook Farm in my home state of Vermont) were lovely in their own right. They also provided outstanding foils for three vintages of our Esprit de Tablas Blanc. The first was the current 2022 vintage, evenly balanced between the beeswax and poached pear richness of Roussanne and the brighter notes of the five other higher-toned varieties that make up the blend. The older wines, from 2015 and 2012, showed the rewards of aging Roussanne into its caramel and hazelnut maturity.

Scene 6: Wine Dessert. I find often that after multiple courses and multiple wines, a substantial dessert is often too much. In fact, in the two other dinners that I hosted this week, I only ate a bite or two of each dessert. Pascaline solved that problem by serving the dessert wine as the sweet course in itself. For a wine, we provided our 2018 Vin de Paille Quintessence, made from 100% Roussanne. It’s a beautiful wine anyway, but having it be the full show rather than a sidekick to a dessert allowed it to shine in all its glory.

Scene 7: Aftermath. We were two and a half hours in, but no one was ready to leave. So after the last wine had been poured and the dishes cleared, Pascaline’s team put all the fourteen bottles back down the center of the table, with about a third of each bottle left, and everyone revisited their favorites. By this point, the table had become a single unit. Everyone was sharing stories and enthusiasms, comparing notes and making plans to get together again. By the time people started to leave, it was 11:30pm and only after we got several photos together.

The dinner had a quiet confidence to it that is quintessentially Pascaline. The food wasn’t showy, but it was delicious. All of the dishes were restrained enough to let the wines play a starring role. The pacing was flawless, with wines poured first, giving me a chance to introduce them, and then the food appearing as if conjured from the kitchen the moment I started to wind down.

Contributing to the evening’s easy flow was its modest quantity. I didn’t get up from the table feeling overstuffed, or over-wined. That’s a surprising rarity in wine dinners, in my experience. Most of them pour too much wine and serve too much food. I always feel bad sending back my plates half-eaten and my glasses half-drunk, but if I consumed everything that was served at most wine dinners, I’d need assistance walking out. At this dinner, I finished every bite and every drop of the small (one ounce) pours and felt perfectly satisfied.

But ultimately, as I reflect, what made the dinner so compelling was its intimacy. I’ve done much larger dinners, as many as 110 people. This was a table for twelve. But at twelve it didn’t feel underpopulated. Instead, it felt curated, personal, and human-scaled. Twelve is pretty much the maximum number you can put at a single table and expect everyone to be able to talk to everyone else. And that was what this felt like: a conversation rather than a performance.

Here's to more intimately-scaled wine conversations in 2025. Thanks, Pascaline, for lighting the way.

A Picture Worth 1,000 Words, Limestone Edition

Every now and then I stumble upon a photograph that illustrates something essential about the place we live and farm. I had that experience over the weekend. It was on a run not far from my house in the Templeton Gap. Running up a hill where the road builders had needed to carve into the hillside, I found this scene of layers of limestone, with the roots of one of our live oak trees clinging on in a way that seems precarious but will probably hold for centuries:

The photo illustrates several of the things that we prize about the soils here. I won't go into it in the detail that I did in my 2020 blog Why Calcareous Soils Matter for Vineyards and Wine Grapes (to which I refer you if you want the full chemical and physical analysis) but I did want to highlight the benefits of these soils. The principal ones include:

• A perfect balance between water retention and drainage. These soils are porous, which allows them to hold the rain we get in the winter and give it back to the vines (and other perennial plants, like the oak trees after which Paso Robles is named) as they need it during the hot, dry summer months. That porosity also means we don't ever get standing water around the roots in our vineyard, and that the underground water sources recharge rapidly after a rainy winter.
• More freshness in our wines. The soils are old (well, not that old, geologically speaking, at 10 million years old) seabed and therefore made almost entirely of calcium carbonate. Those calcium ions attach to the same receptors in grapevine roots that are used for potassium uptake, and potassium is a critical nutrient used by grapevines to break down acidity during the ripening cycle. Displace potassium with calcium, as happens in our soils, and your grapevines preserve acidity later in the growing cycle. Voila: wines with more freshness.
• Deeper root system development. You can see in the above photo the cracks between the rock layers as well as the oak roots' capacity to force their way through. These rocks are relatively soft, soft enough to allow deep penetration of our grapevine roots. We've done soil pits and found roots 15 feet down. We do what we can by restricting or eliminating irrigation to encourage this deeper root growth, which we feel both protects the vines from the often-stressful climate at the surface and ensures that they're pulling maximum character of place out of our vineyard.
• Saline, mineral flavors. I'll start by admitting that this is controversial. There is no direct mechanism by which flavors of soil are transmitted to fruit and therefore wine, so a wine planted in slate-rich soils isn't going to taste like slate itself. But at the same time, grapevines planted in the same climate but different soils absolutely end up making differentiable wines. That's central to the whole French concept of terroir. And for each mechanism that we know -- like the displacement of potassium for calcium and the resulting higher acids at harvest I mentioned above -- there are likely others that we haven't yet identified. Whatever causes it, when you taste through a lineup of Tablas Creek wines, there's a signature of place that I often sense as a saline minerality.

When my dad and the Perrin brothers were looking for a place to found the winery that would become Tablas Creek, high-calcium soils were one of three main criteria they were looking to satisfy (the others were a warm, sunny climate with cool nights and enough rainfall to dry-farm). We wanted these soils because of their similarity to those of Chateauneuf-du-Pape's, though they look very different at the surface because of the overlay of galets, or rounded river stones, that were deposited there by the Rhone during the Ice Ages. As we realized that soils like these are rare in California, it focused our search on the crescent of land in the Central Coast where they can be found, roughly west of a line between the Santa Cruz Mountains to the north and Lompoc to the south. It is those soils that remain a major draw for wineries to west Paso Robles.

How did we find these soils? My dad and the Perrins decided that the most efficient way to do so was to look at road cuts, where CalTrans had done the hard work of digging into the stratigraphy. It was on a drive along Peachy Canyon Road one afternoon in 1989 that they finally found what they'd been searching for for nearly four years. I'd heard the story dozens of times, and in 2021 I found the exact spot and recorded an explainer there:

Join Jason for a 2-minute tour at a spot of historical significance for Tablas Creek. In 1989, at this bend on Peachy Canyon Road, Robert Haas and the Perrin brothers found a crumbling limestone cliff and realized that Paso Robles was the right home for their yet-unnamed project. pic.twitter.com/vmi1BPLIp4

— Tablas Creek (@TablasCreek) November 26, 2021

So, when you see the white, fractured rocks that define the geology here, you'll know why vineyards and wineries so often follow. 

Celebrating the amazing 2025 wildflower season

I was hopeful that the conditions that have been so good for our cover crop growth and which helped keep our vines dormant until a couple of weeks ago would make for an amazing wildflower season. I'm happy to report that this is proving to be true. Witness the wall behind our winery, a riotous tangle of poppies, vetch, and mustard:

Spring is my favorite time in Paso Robles. The hillsides are green. The air is softer than it was during the winter, and the days warm and pleasant, but not yet the summer where everything feels like the contrast has been turned up too high. Nights can still be chilly, and we do worry about frost, but so far this spring we've been OK. Meanwhile, the vineyard is springing to life, with buds swelling, then opening, then bursting to leaf with remarkable speed.

But it's the explosion of color that is springtime in Paso Robles' calling card. The rain that came during the winter combines with the longer days to produce a month of proliferating wildflowers. The most visible of these flowers are the bright orange California poppies, our state's official flower. If you come to visit our tasting room, you can't miss them:

Purple vetch is an important part of our cover crop, providing protection against erosion and lots of biomass. Vetch's purple flowers are visible everywhere on the sides of the local roads, and even as we bring our cover crops under control, vetch vines rise to envelop the cordons:

In the areas we haven't yet tamed, purple flowers from phacelia and white flowers from daikon radish mingle with the oats, peas, and mustard to form head-high thickets:

The phacelia is supposed to be attractive to lacewings, one of our most important beneficial insects. I didn't see any of them but they were definitely attractions for the many bees I saw:

But as usual, the most impressive wildflower arrays are the lupines. These purple clusters can cover the ground, swaying rhythmically and producing an intoxicating scent. They're unmissable on the sides of the roads out in the Adelaida District this year:

You'll notice those lupines when you arrive, because we have groves of them on both sides of our entrance. The photo above taken looking north on Adelaida Road from our driveway, while the below photo looks at the driveway from the south:

It's not only the roadsides that lupine is found. Deep in the vineyard, it's everywhere that it hasn't been crowded out by taller plants. And yes, there are grapevines in all that greenery, that we'll be excavating in coming weeks:

This explosion of spring color won't last long.  Soon, the weather will heat up and dry out, and the color palette will shift from winter green to summer gold. We've already started getting the cover crop mowed, crimped, and spaded into the vineyard so the vines can benefit from its nutrition and we do what we can to preserve the winter's water resources for the summer growing season. But if you're coming in the next month, you're in for a colorful treat.

Social media used to be a lousy way to promote wine events. Then we started thinking of it like we were a band on tour.

Last year I started thinking differently about one of the ways that we use social media at Tablas Creek.

What spurred it was my own effort to get out and see more live music now that our kids are getting older and are mobile on their own or out of the house. I realized as I started following more of my favorite bands on Instagram that one of the most useful types of posts was the tour update so I could see at a glance where they were going to be and when without having to go to their website and do the research.

So, we launched the #TablasOnTour series where we share where we’ll be the next 6-8 weeks every month. Here's the one we're sharing today:

It’s been fascinating to see the reach of these posts, which are typically double the reach of our standard social media posts diving into farming or winemaking, and roughly quadruple the reach of posts talking about any individual event we’ll be participating in. Diving into the analytics, it’s all because of shares: people seeing an event they might want to attend and sending the post to friends or family they’d want to go with. Those shares are further augmented by the partners we're coordinating the events with, who share the post to their audience. Beyond the eyeballs that see these shares, Instagram has prioritized shares and comments over views and likes, so these sorts of interactions encourage the algorithm to organically show the post to more people.

It's worth noting that posts on individual events are among our lowest-performing posts, to the point that we've just about stopped doing them. There are good reasons why these sorts of posts typically struggle to connect over social media. An event is an inherently participatory thing. Whatever the event is that you're promoting, the audience that is going to be interested is limited by geography, timing, and format. A wine dinner in Cincinnati, Miami, or San Francisco? Probably not appealing unless you live in that specific city. An event that already happened? Sure, some of the 80-or-so people who attended might chime in with how fun it was, but how many of those are going to see it on your social media? Not a lot, and it's hard to interest someone who didn't attend in an event that's already concluded. An upcoming blending seminar at the winery? Better, but still, most of the people you reach probably aren't going to be free on that afternoon. (Note: if you are free, our 2025 blending seminar is on Sunday, April 27th, and it's going to be super fun.)

Because these sorts of "on tour" posts aggregate the interest in each of the events that they list, they largely avoid the "only interesting to a small percentage of your audience" issue that drives down the success of individual event posts. What's more, they are visible, shareable gestures of support for the restaurants, wine shops, and organizations that are hosting us around the country. These posts build goodwill among our partners as well as driving interest and attendance at the events themselves.

Before we launched the #TablasOnTour series, we were mostly promoting the events we participated in via our email list. We would draw a radius around the event location and send out a geographically-targeted email to mailing list members within that radius. And we're continuing to do this. There's nothing like appearing in someone's inbox letting them know that you'll be in their neck of the woods. But geo-targeted emails aren't a perfect solution. Imagine a wine club member who will be on vacation near where we'll be hosting an event. There's no way we can know to send them an email. Or a friend who works for a local winery with friends or family in the event's location, who might be able to pass along news of something interesting happening. We are trying to avoid having all our promotional eggs in a single email basket. 

What's more, if we're trying to attract younger wine lovers, we can't rely principally on email, as there's good data that while younger consumers all have email addresses, it's not how most of them prefer to receive information. Add that to the increasing push by email providers working to keep promotional emails out of their users' inboxes, and we know that emails are less likely than ever before to reach their target audience. Sharing the same information across multiple channels helps us know that the information is more likely to get to the audience who will want to see it. 

This moment in wine feels like an important one to rethink how we promote events. All the wineries and wine organizations that I speak to share stories about how they're having to work harder to drive event attendance. But at the same time, getting out and showcasing your wines is one of the tried and true ways for a winery to promote itself. I know that we've never been working harder to take the Tablas Creek story on the road; we already have 26 events on our calendar between now and just the end of June. There are huge incentives for us to spread the word.

Until recently, social media wasn't helping this push much. Now it is.

Budbreak 2025 Arrives a Week Later than 2024, Showing the Impact of Our Late Rain

As the last few sprinkles of what may be the last serious rain from the 2024-25 winter wind down this afternoon, it feels like an appropriate moment to highlight that the vineyard is also making a visible transition from winter to spring. After last week's warm, sunny days, we've started to see budbreak in our early-sprouting varieties and at the tops of our hills. Below are Syrah (left) and Viognier (right):

Although overall we're only at about 70% of normal rainfall for this point in the winter, when it has come has been pretty close to ideal. We got a nice dose of early season rain, which got the cover crop sprouted. December cleared up but the weather stayed relatively warm, which encouraged that cover crop to grow and allowed us to get our sheep into the vineyard earlier than most recent years. January was sunny and cold, with 18 below-freezing nights. As the calendar turned to February and we started getting seriously worried about lack of rain, the clouds rolled in and the skies opened up, and February and March have been wet, with 15 days with measurable rainfall totaling 129% of the precipitation we'd expect in these two already-rainy months:

The net result has been exceptional cover crop growth, to the point that you often couldn't see our sheep (or sheepdogs) when they entered a new block. All that cover crop growth will be returned to the soil either through the flock's manure or as we mow, disc, or crimp the grasses into the soil:

Budbreak, as you probably guessed from the name, is the period when the grapevine buds swell and burst into leaf.  It is the first marker in the growing cycle, a point when we can compare the current season to past years.  Upcoming markers will include flowering, veraison, first harvest, and last harvest. Like each of the stages, budbreak doesn't happen for every grape simultaneously. It usually starts in Viognier and Grenache. Other early grapes like Grenache Blanc, Vermentino, Cinsaut, and Syrah tend to come shortly thereafter, followed by Marsanne, Tannat, Picpoul, and Mourvedre a week or two later. Finally, often three weeks or more after the earliest grapes sprouted, Roussanne and Counoise get in on the game. As I write on March 31st, we've seen budbreak in all our early varieties and the top-of-hill blocks of the middle varieties, but are still waiting for the bottoms of the hills and for later grapes like Counoise (below), which doesn't look any different than it would have in January. But that sky and that landscape could only be March:

This year's last-week-of-March beginning is about average for us. Drought years tend to be early, since dry soils warm up faster than wet soils, so it's interesting that we're a week or so later than we were in the significantly wetter year of 2024. That suggests that, at least as far as the vineyard is concerned, we're not in drought conditions. For an overview, here's when we saw first budbreak the last dozen years:

2024: Mid-March
2023: First week of April
2022: Mid-March
2021: Last week of March
2020: Last week of March
2019: Second half of March
2018: Second half of March
2017: Mid-March
2016: Very end of February
2015: Second week of March
2014: Mid-March
2013: First week of April

Further evidence that our late rainfall has helped keep soils wet and therefore cool is the presence of the edible water-loving California perennial miner's lettuce across much of the vineyard. This was a plant that the hopeful gold rush miners ate to ward off scurvy:

In addition to the variation by variety, there's variation by elevation and vineyard block. Grenache is a good example. I took the following three photos as I walked up our biggest hill on the edge of a Grenache block that stretches from the hill's top to its bottom. The first photo is from the bottom of the block, where cool air settles at night. You can see the buds swelling, but no leaves yet:

About halfway up the hill, you see the first leaves emerging:

And at the top of the hill, nearly all the buds are out:

Now our worries turn to frost. Before budbreak, the vines are safely dormant, and a freeze doesn't harm them. But once they sprout, the new growth is susceptible to frost damage. April frosts cost us roughly 40% of our production in both 2009 and 2011 and a May frost cost us 20% of our production in 2022, with Mother's Day marking the unofficial end of frost season. So, we've still got more than a month to go before we can relax, and I'm thankful that this storm that's just passing through was a relatively warm one with origins in the South Pacific instead of one of the late-season winter storms that sweep down from Alaska. It's typically in the aftermath of the passage of a cold front that we see damaging frosts. We have our frost sprinklers and our mobile fans ready to go, for when they're needed:

That said, there's nothing particularly scary in our long-term forecast. But there's a long way to go.

Meanwhile, we'll enjoy the rapid changes in the vineyard, and the hope that always comes with the emergence of new buds. Please join me in welcoming the 2025 vintage.

Creating a New Legacy (Tasting) at Tablas Creek

By John Morris

Wine can feel complicated a lot of the time. So when we can, here at Tablas Creek, we’ve tried to keep things simple. Remember the days of elbowing up to a crowded, standing bar with just one tasting list available? That was the experience anyone visiting Tablas Creek had until about 2015. Sure, we would customize based on guests’ requests, getting special wines out of the back room, but the starting point for this personalization was the same for everyone. Personally I love going to a restaurant where there’s just six or seven entrees on the menu. It's a statement of belief in who you are, and can create a more purposeful, curated experience. And for a long time we felt pretty much the same way about our tasting. Why complicate things when we’re confident in who we are and the pedigree and classic composition of our wines?

But as time went on, options at other wineries proliferated, and we started getting requests from guests asking why we didn’t have a “reserve” tasting. We would explain that our standard tasting included our flagship wines, and that we were, in effect, giving everyone a reserve-level tasting, but you could almost hear the customers’ doubts over the phone. So we put our heads together and tried to figure out what an elevated tasting experience at Tablas Creek should look like. We ended up offering two, to compliment the standard bar tasting that was still what the vast majority of our customers chose. The first was a Seated Flight Tasting, which customers reserved in advance and for which they chose from a mixed (red and white) flight or a flight of all red wines or all white wines. The second was what we called our Collector’s Tasting (after the VINsider Wine Club Collector’s Edition), which was in essence a vertical tasting of our flagship Esprit de Tablas wines.

If the Seated Flight Tasting sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it became our standard offering when we reopened outdoors after our Covid-mandated closure. Giving guests their own space felt safe as we all started reintegrating with the world in a new pandemic-changed environment. Serving our wines in two flights meant that we weren’t in our customers’ space all the time. And the chance to compare and contrast among wines meant that guests got a great picture of what we made. We believe that making this elevated experience the standard tasting for most guests is a huge improvement, as it seems to offer something for everyone. But one of the casualties of Covid was that we paused the Collector’s Tasting at the same time, and just never brought it back.

Why didn’t we bring the Collector’s Tasting back sooner? There were two reasons. One, we were selling through our older Esprits and were having a hard time keeping enough inventory to pour six different vintages of Esprit. Two, even though we loved this tasting, as did many of you, somehow it just never fully resonated with the public. I can’t tell you how many times guests booked this tasting and then asked something like, “Why are we tasting 6 of the same wines? And only reds?” Our takeaway was that while this tasting was ideal for our some of our existing fans who knew the Esprit de Tablas story and wanted a deeper exploration of that wine, it was too specialized to satisfy all the visitors looking for a premium experience, and not a great introduction for people visiting for the first time.

Last summer, we decided to take another crack at offering an elevated experience. We took the shortcomings of the Collector’s Tasting to heart, and created a new experience that offers something beyond the regular tasting, while giving a more complete look at the breadth of our wine and who we are. We christened this new experience the Legacy Tasting. In this tasting we offer a chance to delve a little deeper into our portfolio and focus on our top blends. The current Legacy Tasting includes both a young and an aged Esprit de Tablas, a young and aged Panoplie, an Esprit de Tablas Blanc, and other treats that change depending on the season. If you’re a member, or someone who visits often, you probably know the Panoplie is quite limited in supply, and has never been poured in the tasting room with some rare exceptions. Over the last eight months we’ve hosted about 730 legacy tastings, and the response has been outstanding. Our wine club team hears regularly from members who signed up for Legacy tastings and loved them. Our tasting room folks are equally enthusiastic. As Senior Tasting Room Manager Charlie Chester said today, "it's the tasting that best tells the Tablas Creek story."

If you haven’t had the chance to experience a legacy tasting, we’d love to host you. For those who are not members yet, this special tasting is $75 per guest, each tasting waived per $250 purchase. For members of our Collector’s Edition wine club, a complimentary Legacy Tasting for two is a member benefit, available once per calendar year. For our other members this is $40 per person, also waived with a $250 purchase. This is bookable online for up to four guests. If you don’t see a time that works for you, or if you would like a splurge for a larger party, please reach out to us at [email protected] and we'll do our best to accommodate you.

We’d love to have you be part of our legacy at Tablas Creek.

200% tariffs on European wines would be extremely dangerous for California wineries

In 2019, I wrote a blog explaining why proposed 100% tariffs on European wines would create a cascade of negative impacts on American wineries, and shared the letter I submitted to the Office of the US Trade Representative in opposition to the plan. In the end, the tariffs didn't come to pass, either then or the following year when the threat was renewed. Well, even more substantial tariffs against European wines are now again on the table, and some of the hot takes in response have been badly off base. I responded to one of these hot takes on Threads, from journalist Christina Binkley, who has written on the business of culture and style for outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, and Vogue:

To her credit, Christina posted a response owning up to the mistake after reading the responses she received. And I'm not posting her initial piece to pile on. But I've heard a variation of her take from lots of people outside the world of wine and wanted to dive a little deeper into why I am convinced that tripling the price on European wines would have negative spillover effects onto those of us who make wine here in America.

I'll start with the direct impacts. These tariffs post an extinction-level threat to importers of European wines. A thread by importer Lyle Fass, proprietor of Fass Selections, laid out the math. Tariffs are taxes due from the importer to the US government at the port of entry. Importers would be on the hook for double what they've paid for any wine that they order, including wine already paid for and in transit:

 

Let’s talk about the financial catastrophe these 200% wine tariffs will create. Not in theory but in reality.

In my case, the $350,000 worth of wine I have coming in September? I’ve already paid for it. That money is gone. Now I have to pay a 200% tariff just to bring it into the country. That means coughing up another $700,000 overnight.

That’s just me. Now imagine what this does to the entire industry.

Fine, I hear you asking, but how is this bad for a California winery like Tablas Creek? I see the danger in three areas:

• We are dependent upon wholesalers, all of whom sell both imports and domestic wines. We sell about half our production through a network of state-licensed wholesalers. This distribution system is mandated by law. A producer like us cannot sell directly to restaurants and retailers in other states, and our ability to sell directly to consumers, while growing, is still restricted. So, our success is dependent upon the health of this distribution network. None of the 50+ distributors that we work with represents exclusively domestic wines; all have a diverse portfolio including wines that would be impacted by the proposed tariffs. Many get the majority of their business from European wines. A significant number are also importers. For those importer/distributors, the proposed tariffs amount to a death sentence. For the distributors with a mix of imported and domestic wineries, sales will fall, perhaps dramatically, limiting their ability to buy our wines. To save money, they will lay off salespeople, limiting their ability to sell our wines. Could American wines fill in the gap? Not for years. The production of American wines is currently about 300 million cases. Consumption of wine in the United States is about 375 million cases. It takes roughly five years for new plantings to produce grapes, be fermented and bottled, and eventually reach the market. By the time that American wines could make up the difference, the damage to wholesalers would be done.
• Our exports, which have been a growing piece of our mix, would likely be subject to retaliatory tariffs. We've already seen this play out in Canada, whose provinces have responded to the on-again-off-again threats to impose across-the-board 25% tariffs by pulling all American products off the shelves of the province-wide monopolies that are the only legal outlets for wine in the country. We have already received cancellations of confirmed orders to Quebec and Ontario. If European wine is targeted in a new round of tariffs, it's very likely that American wine will be on the list of reciprocal targets. While export markets aren't a huge piece of our business, we've been investing in them in recent years and have been rewarded with significant growth. Last year we spent a little over $42,000 to grow our sales in our export markets, including visits I've written about on this blog to Asia, to Canada, and to Europe, and saw our export sales grow from $78,000 in 2023 to $175,000 in 2024. We expected additional growth in our export sales in 2025. Those prospects are looking shaky.
• The uncertainty is already inhibiting investment in an American wine ecosystem that is under record strain. I have heard from several distributors that because of the uncertain climate around tariffs this year that they're holding off on hiring new staff, bringing in new inventory, or taking on new suppliers. That impact is hard to quantify, but I know it's cost us at least one opportunity with a high profile distributor and it's reduced the coverage of the distributor teams we do work with as many are trying to make do with fewer salespeople to cover their existing network of accounts. And the distributor network is already under dangerous levels of strain. The country's two largest distributors, Southern Glazers and RNDC, have both executed multiple waves of layoffs in recent months. Constellation Brands, the country's fourth-largest wine company, is reported to be exiting the wine sphere entirely. If a major producer or distributor should declare bankruptcy the cascade of impacts on their suppliers and customers would almost certainly cause other failures.

Would tariffs hurt European producers? Absolutely. But because of the legally-mandated channels that alcohol must be distributed through, Americans would be hurt more. The US Wine Trade Alliance has calculated that for every $1.00 in damage tariffs would inflict on the EU, they cause $4.52 in losses to American businesses. 

That $4.52 in losses doesn't include the losses in export sales by the imposition of reciprocal tariffs, or the damage to the international reputation of American wine, which could be both sharp and lasting. Canada has been California wine's largest export partner for decades, at a total value of over $1 billion last year. The recent tariff dispute has already created a boycott of American wines (and other products) that will likely render the market less welcoming even after any trade issues have been resolved. It's taken decades to build up the international reputation for American wine. That goodwill can disappear fast, as evidenced by these signs now posted in the American wine sections of Ontario's LCBO stores:

But would there be a larger piece of the pie here for California wineries? Not much of one, I don't think. As I mentioned above, the additional capacity here is finite. It's also not clear that American wines would be the first choices for replacing the lost business from European wines. At the low end, the likely substitute for European wines would be wines from other New World countries like Chile, Argentina, and Australia, all of which do better in the under-$15 segment than American wineries. At the high end, the places that wines come from are inseparable from the wines' identities. An Oregon Pinot Noir isn't going to smoothly replace a Grand Cru Burgundy, nor is a California Nebbiolo going to replace a Barolo. Classic wines aren't commodities produced by formula from specific grapes, that could be grown anywhere. My guess, based on what we saw last time, is that at the high end, there would be a period where restaurants and retailers scavenge inventory from warehouses around the country, and then sales would drop sharply as buyers wait and hope the tariffs are rescinded. We might see a few new placement opportunities but those benefits would be overwhelmed by the disruption in our distribution network.

I also think that the long-term impacts would be negative for the broader world of restaurants and hospitality. The restaurant business is never easy. It's famously low-margin, with half of all restaurants closing within 5 years. Wine offers restaurants an area where they do make good margins, and while I have my complaints about that model, I still want restaurants to be successful. Can a neighborhood Italian joint replace its inexpensive Chianti with a California Sangiovese? Probably not when that grape represents less than one-half of one percent of the red wine grape acreage here in California. Instead, they probably sell more cocktails or beer and less wine, and the wine they sell will be more expensive and less good, as they trade down to find the cheapest available wines that fit the category they're looking to fill. That will make restaurants more expensive, discouraging customers from dining out and from including wine when they do. Would there be some additional opportunities for California wines, either in new placements or in the opportunity to raise their prices? I'm sure there would. But the resulting higher prices of wine to restaurants and consumers would drive people to other categories of alcohol and to other non-alcohol options, with negative impacts to the category over both short and long term.

All of these economic costs to wineries and the wine ecosystem are serious. It's also worth noting that it would mean the end of an era for the American wine consumer. For nearly a century, the United States has enjoyed the world's most dynamic wine market, with vibrant domestic wineries in every state and the world's best selection of imported wines. That has led to the flowering of wine culture here and allowed the wine market to grow from about 4 bottles per person per year in the 1950s to the roughly 15 bottles per year that are enjoyed today. It has vaulted the United States to its position as the world's largest wine market, the home to two-thirds of the world's Master Sommeliers, and an appealing destination for generations of winemakers, both domestic and international, who settle here, like us, with dreams of making wines that will compete on the world's stage.

Are these tariffs a serious proposal, or just a negotiating tactic? I hope it's the latter. [Editor's note 3/21/25: Yesterday, the European Union announced a two-week delay on the imposition of the tariffs to which the 200% tariffs on wine were a response. That is a sign that both sides are looking for negotiating time. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.] But the reality is that even the discussion of them has negative consequences for American wineries. Their implementation would usher in a new era with much greater and more unpredictable dangers. If this is an issue you care about, please reach out to your federal representatives and let them know. Sometimes an eye for an eye really does make the whole world blind.