Harvest 2015 update: just over 15% completed & yields are looking low

By: Lauren Phelps

In the cellar, things are in full-gear!

According to veteran Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Franchi harvest is already over 15% completed.  As of August 29th, we have worked with 65.82 tons of fruit.

The 1700 gallon French oak upright fermenters are all full fermenting Syrah for the 2015 Patelin de Tablas!

Our first estate grapes were harvested on August 26th when we brought in about 3 tons of Viognier.  According to Viticulturist Levi Glenn, the estate Viognier yields appear down at least 50% due to the drought however, both acids and PH look great.

Levi's dog Mavis, vineyard dog extraordinaire, conducts a rigorous "lab test" of a bin of Viognier.

Although estate Viognier yields look low, Levi explains that "it's really more of a mixed bag.  Mourvedre and Roussanne both look a bit higher than normal".  In general, we're thrilled with the quality of fruit and a bit concerned since yields remind us of frost reduced years in 2001, 2009 and 2011.  We're waiting until we've harvested more from the estate to draw any firm conclusions.

The 11th annual Tablas Creek Vineyard pig roast dinner

By: Lauren Phelps
We hosted our 11th annual Pig Roast dinner on Saturday evening, August 15th and wanted to share some of the images and a bit of information about this event.  Over 120 guests joined us for a family-style meal on our terraced patio with wines paired from our cellar.  The meal was collaboratively prepared by our very own Winemaker, Neil Collins and local Chef, Jeffery Scott. 

It was a beautiful evening, and relatively mild for August in Paso Robles.  As the sun set behind the tasting room the breeze brought in cool marine air.

Our very own Darren Delmore and his brother who make up the duo, The Delmore Boys set the tone with their Americana guitar tunes.

Many Tablas Creek team members and their families attended the event including, Neil Collins, Chelsea Franchi, Jason Haas and Nicole Getty.

This year, Neil roasted the 350 pound estate-grown pig for over 12 hours using a modified iron-cross roaster with oak from our property. Chef, Jeffery Scott contributed incredible appetizers and sides using locally-sourced and organic ingredients.

TABLAS CREEK PIG ROAST

SATURDAY AUGUST 15th, 2015

CHEF JEFFERY C. SCOTT

 UPON ARRIVAL

CHILLED SUMMER MELON CUPS
GINGER CRÈME FRAICHE

  TABLAS ESTATE LAMB CRUSTADE
MOROCCAN SPICES, ROSEMARY HUMMUS

DINNER FAMILY STYLE

 HEIRLOOM TOMATO & WATERMELON
FRENCH FETA, SOFT HERBS, BALSAMIC CREMA

TOASTED PEARL COUSCOUS
PINE NUTS, SULTANAS, CURRANTS, FENNEL CONFIT

SHEEP’S MILK YOGURT TATZIKI

MASON JARS OF CAPONATA

HUSH HARBOR RUSTIC BREAD

________________

 EMBER ROASTED TABLAS CREEK ESTATE PIG

AMARETTO-APRICOT GLACÈ

 LOO LOO FARMS GARDEN PAELLA
PORCINI STOCK, LINGUICA, ROMESCO

 CUMIN GLAZED CARROTS & CHARRED SUMMER SQUASH
ROASTED GARLIC, LOCAL GOAT CHEESE, LEMON THYME

______________

BLUEBERRY-PEACH COBBLER

OLIVE OIL GELATO, CINNAMON BASIL

We paired the meal with the 2014 Grenache Blanc, our 2014 Dianthus, the newly released 2013 Mourvedre and our flagship red wine, the 2011 Esprit de Tablas, that we brought up from the library.

We'd like to thank all of the guests who joined us and invite you to view additional photos by Patrick Ibarra Photography on our Pig Roast Dinner Flickr Album. 

Also, we are thrilled to announce that the Cooking Channel's, Man Fire Food will be airing an episode on September 15th highlighting our pig roast dinners! We're really looking forward to watching it.

The date for the 2016 pig roast has not been set yet and we recommend periodically checking our Upcoming Events page for more details.  We give priority invitation to our wine club members and seating is very limited.

On the Rhone: a Post-Cruise Appreciation

By Robert Haas.  Special thanks to Jeffery Clark, who provided most of the photos.

I’m back in Vermont, basking in the afterglow of our Tablas Creek cruise of the Rhone. It was a ten-day celebration (including the optional three-day visit to Paris and Champagne) of great food and wine, organized by our partners at Food & Wine Trails.  By the end, new friends felt like old friends, and our 120-person group had made the S.S. Catherine ours.  On a personal level, I very much enjoyed sharing with the group the homeland of the Rhône varieties that we have nurtured at Tablas Creek Vineyard. 

About one half of our large group of adherents opted for the Paris-Champagne addition, July 30^th-August 1^st.  The Bel Ami Hotel was comfortable, nicely air-conditioned (needed in the hot weather France has been seeing this summer) and well placed around the corner from Paris landmarks on the Boulevard St. Germain, such as the Brasserie Lipp, and the cafés Deux Magots and Café de Flore.  

For the trip to Champagne, we arrived in Vrigny at the property of Roger Coulon, propriétaire-récoltant on the Montagne de Reims, with an hour and a half bus trip.  Coulon produces only about 90,000 bottles from his own vines.  His cellars were straightforward, simple but modern.  We tasted his wines.   They had an artisanal terroir character that I loved.  We enjoyed an excellent champagne lunch at his close-by restaurant, Les Clos des Terres Soudées.  He paired his various cuvées of champagne with each course.  We then visited the cellars of Taittinger -- quite a contrast -- with traditional old cellars cut deep into the Champagne chalk under Reims, followed by a tasting of their wines.  The visits were enjoyable and educational.  Some of us preferred the artisanal drier, richer style of Coulon and others the traditional "grande marque" style of Taittinger.

We had some time to spend on our own in Paris and then took the TGV from the Gare de Lyon in Paris to Avignon on the 2^nd to join the rest of the cruisers boarding the ship.  On my first visits to pre-autoroute France in the 1950’s, that trip down the N7 took 10 hours.  The TGV made it in 2. 

The famous Pont d'Avignon

The voyage began with a short overnight sail to Tarascon, a little south of Avignon, from where there were interesting shore visits to Tarascon, a city that dates back to the late bronze age.  It has a riverside castle from the 15th century that is known as "The King's Castle" (Château du Roi René).

There was also a visit to Arles, which is close-by.  Arles is a fascinating city.  It was a Phoenician port by about 800 B.C., taken by the Romans in 123 B.C., and still is home to some of the best-preserved Roman remains outside Italy.  In modern times it was an attractive abode for Vincent van Gogh, who arrived there in 1888.  Many of his most famous paintings were completed there, including The Night Café, the Yellow Room, Starry Night Over the Rhône, and L'Arlésienne.

The Roman amphitheater at Arles 

The centerpiece of the cruise was the stay in Avignon, which provided a base for twin cellar visits and delicious open-air lunches in the court of Château de Beaucastel.  It was fun to share the Beaucastel secrets with our group.  We were too large a group to all go at once so half the group went on the 3^rd and half on the 4^th.  Everybody got to taste from barrels and visit the old spotlessly clean cellars, as well as learn about Beaucastel's wine making.  Each day, those not on the Beaucastel visit got to tour the old city of the Popes with its palace and crenelated walls.

The cellars at Beaucastel

Lunch in the gardens at Beaucastel

The lunch menu

Barbara Haas, Robert Haas, and Francois Perrin at lunch

From Avignon we sailed north to Viviers, and then on to Tain- l'Ermitage. This stretch was during the day, so most of us assembled topside to enjoy the views and the passages through the écluses (locks).  I was fascinated by the ship's design, from the ballast tanks below that fill with water to the to the retractable pilot house, railings and awnings, all to lower the ship's profile in order to pass under low bridges across the Rhône.  

The lock at Viviers

Mind your heads!

Tain- l'Ermitage was a second highlight.   We received a very good tour of the Hermitage vineyard and a sit-down tasting of Chapoutier wines. We were also treated to an excellent lunch served with northern Rhône wines.  I was interested to see the upright cane and spur pruning of the Syrah, a pruning we have adopted at Tablas on "Scruffy Hill."

The remarkable hillside vineyards of the Northern Rhone

From there, we continued north to Lyon, passing the vineyards of Côte Rôtie and Condrieu on our port side just as we were served a dinner on board paired with wines of those very appellations from Maison Nicolas-Perrin. 

On day 5 of the cruise (August 7^th, for those keeping track) we got to tour Lyon, a center of classical French gastronomy, and home to the remains of two side-by-side spectacular Roman amphitheaters: one for music and the other for drama.   In the evening we reconvened on the Catherine for a nice Tablas Creek cocktail party in the ship's lounge, followed by dinner in the dining room. 

Lyon marks the northern edge of what France thinks of as the Rhone Valley (though the river originates in Lake Geneva, in Switzerland).  But the cruise continued north to dock in Macon on the Saône, for an excursion to nearby Burgundy.  Many guests took a bus to Beaune, toured some of the vineyards of the Côte de Beaune, and visited the 15th century Hospices de Beaune, scene of the annual wine auction of wines from its vineyards.  We heard this was all wonderful.  However, Barbara and I, along with Neil and Marci Collins, instead took a car and drove through the vineyards of Pouilly-Fuissé and Beaujolais to visit an old friend Claude Geoffray, the 7th generation proprietor of Château Thivin in the Côte de Brouilly. 

Radishes in the market in Beaune

From Macon we all sailed overnight back to Lyon where we debarked August 9^th and went our own ways. 

Although the unusually hot weather was noticeable on shore visits, no one seemed daunted, and they proceeded as planned and seemed to be enjoyed by all.  The ship, of course, was well air-conditioned and the cabins very comfortable.  The food and service aboard was excellent, far exceeding my expectations, and the wines from Famille Perrin, Beaucastel and Tablas Creek set the scene.  We were definitely on a Food and Wine Trail.  Lots of good conversation flowed in the Leopard Bar before and after dinner. 

The view from inside the cabin

We are already looking forward to our next cruise in 2017.

Harvest 2015 begins and sounds alarm bells about yields

Today we welcomed into the cellar the first fruit of 2015: eight bins of Viognier from Fralich Vineyard, for our Patelin de Tablas Blanc.  And with that, the 2015 harvest is underway:

Things look like they're moving pretty fast now, particularly after this past weekend saw temperatures soar into the low 100's both days.  It's cooled down since, but we're sampling most of the vineyards that we're expecting Syrah and Viognier from for Patelin and Patelin Blanc, and doing a first systematic pass through the same varieties in our own vineyard.  We'll get a little more fruit in tomorrow, then take a break to bottle the 2013 Esprit de Tablas before getting back at it next week.

It is wonderful to have the smell of new fruit in the cellar, particularly Viognier, which is as aromatic when it's newly picked as it is in the glass: honey and peaches and spice. And the fruit looked good.  But we were expecting something more like 15 bins today than the 8 we received. 

We expected that crop levels would be light in this fourth year of drought, and we know that some of the earlier grapes (notably Syrah and Viognier) were flowering during our unusually cool, breezy May.  These aren't ideal flowering conditions, and we've seen evidence of shatter in our own vineyard and from our expeditions to the vineyards we source from for Patelin.  But we were all taken by surprise by just how light this first pick turned out to be.

It is something of a maxim in vineyard analysis that when you see evidence of yields being light, they end up even lighter than you were thinking, while when you see evidence of heavier yields it ends up being even heavier than you expect.  And we have been seeing other evidence that yields will be light, from observations of lower cluster counts and smaller clusters to relatively high sugars and relatively high acids in our samples.  Perhaps less intuitively, further evidence is provided by the fact that the vines look notably healthy, when with heavier yields you would expect to see more signs of stress. 

So, I've been steeling myself for this news.  And with the Patelin, we have options; we have handshake agreements with several local vineyards that if we realize that we're light during harvest, they'll find some fruit for us.  We may not be able to make up all the difference, but we can bridge the gap a bit.  Those phone calls started this morning.

The estate vineyard, however, doesn't offer this recourse.  If we end up light, we just make less wine.  It's likely only another week before we find out the extent to which that will be true.

Coming (soon) to Fruition

By Chelsea Franchi

Anticipation of harvest is a primal feeling.  It's a dichotomous sensation made up of a humming excitement, a nervousness that simmers just below the surface, and a light touch of hysteria.  We're anxious for the first fruit of harvest to come in, while at the same time, we're hoping we can push it off for a little bit longer.  By all accounts, it looks as though harvest from our property will commence early September - but, as this is agriculture and Mother Nature is at the helm, that's nothing more than our best guess.

In preparation for this epic time of year, all the members of the vineyard and cellar crew are drinking up time with their loved ones as though every second is a fleeting, delicious drop.  It's fortunate we have a team that gets along, as we'll be seeing their faces far more than those of our chosen partners in the months to come.  Weekend plans are a luxury afforded to the time before and after harvest, but not during.  Currently, we're relishing the feeling of getting into our cars dry and comfortable, after a work shift that lasts eight hours.  All of that will be changing in the coming weeks, when our horizon will look more like this:

Our days are about to be filled with the whine of the must pump, the whir and tumble of the de-stemmer, and the rattle of the sorting table, all overlaid by the constant thumping music that was chosen by whoever arrived first and/or was thick-skinned enough to endure the inevitable complaints about their music selection from everyone around them (unless it's Thursday, because on Thursdays, we listen to R. Kelly and there can be no complaints.  Well, there can be complaints, but no one will listen.  They're about to be filled with wet heat and the sharp sting of carbon dioxide, both byproducts of fruit fermenting in tank and the deepest inhalations our lungs can handle every time we walk past the rosé tanks (I'm so looking forward to that smell!)  They're about to be filled with the most vibrant and ever-evolving selection of colors: from the bubble gum pink of counoise to the ox-blood red of syrah, from the electric green stems at the beginning of harvest to the golden, crackly leaves toward the end.  Harvest season is a true sensory overload - made even more overwhelming because all participants are exhausted in every sense of the word.

This job is unlike any other that I know of.  Yes, we work ourselves into the ground, but we do it with a common goal of making wines we're all undeniably proud of.  The team we've built shares the delight that's earned from crafting a product with one's own hands.  And there are times, too, when our job is just the way Hollywood portrays it.  There are long lunches on the crush pad, made from ingredients that were sourced from the property and slow cooked under the percipient eye of our Executive Winemaker/Vineyard Manager/Fearless Leader, Neil Collins, who just so happened to be a chef before turning his attention to the wine world.  These lunches are masterfully paired with beautiful wines, giving us a chance to remember, in the middle of the chaos, why it is that we do what we do.

For now, I plan on savoring my post-work gym routine (that's a laughable goal during harvest), my quiet meals at home with my husband, raucous weekends with friends and family, and the primal thrill I feel deep in my bones in anticipation of what's to come:

Bring it on.

Checking in on two of our earliest reds: 1997 Tablas Rouge and 1999 Reserve Cuvee

It pays to keep in touch with long-time fans.  We were lucky enough to have two of those fans, long-time club members Steve and Kathleen Vogeding, reach out to us in advance of a visit today, letting us know that they'd found two older Tablas Creek bottles in their wine cellar and asking if we would be interested in tasting these bottles with them.

Um... yes!

So, it was with pleasure that we circled around a tasting bar with them to open the 1997 Tablas Rouge and the 1999 Reserve Cuvee.  The honored guests:

The wines:

I wanted to share my notes on the wines, as well as a little of their histories.

1997 Tablas Rouge

• History: 1997 was the first year that we had much of our estate vineyard in production, albeit from very young vines.  Still, we felt that the quality was there to launch the Tablas Creek Vineyard label.  Working under a very traditional French model, we made just one red (called "Tablas Rouge") and one white (called "Tablas Blanc").  We didn't put the varietal mix on the label, although we did list on the back that the wine was made from Mourvedre, Grenache, Syrah, and Counoise, in that order.  As this was the only red wine we made in this vintage, it contains 100% of the red grapes harvested from the estate that year.  Still, we fermented each varietal separately, and waited until spring to confirm that all had gone well before blending the lots together and aging it in foudres in our cellar.  We made about 2000 cases of it, and most of it was sold and was drunk long ago, I'd guess.  It did get some nice press, particularly for a first release: it made it into Wine & Spirits Magazine's "Top 100 of 2000".  We have just a few bottles left in our own library.
• Tasting Notes: I was surprised with the vibrancy that the wine showed, lots of high-toned red fruit that reminded me of raspberry, with an appropriately brambly, brushy herbiness to it as well.  The palate was medium-weight, with vibrant acids highlighting the flavors of wild strawberry and raspberry, cooled by flavors of juniper and mint and then deepened by baking spices and balsamic reduction.  There were still some solid tannins, also highlighted by those acids.  I'm not sure how much longer it will go, but it didn't feel elderly at all to me.  A real pleasure, still pretty and lithe, if not profound.

1999 Reserve Cuvee

• History: By 1999, we had come to the conclusion that in order to make the best wine we could make, we needed a home for lots that offered friendliness but didn't have the concentration we wanted for our top wine.  So, we split our production into two wines, Reserve Cuvee (which, the next year, would become Esprit de Beaucastel) and Petite Cuvee (which, the next year, would become Cotes de Tablas).  Splitting our production had multiple benefits, one of the most important of which was to allow us to shift our top wine's personality more toward Mourvedre, while putting a higher percentage of Grenache into our second wine, and letting it shine there.  The resulting 1999 Reserve Cuvee was more marked by Mourvedre's dark, chewy, leathery meatiness than any wine we'd made before, resulted in our first-ever 90-point rating from Robert Parker, and convinced the Perrins that the winery was ready to add the Beaucastel name to the label the subsequent vintage.
• Tasting Notes: More mature on the nose than the 1997, and also deeper in tone, with aromas of cocoa hulls, leather, and baking spices.  On the palate, it was quite rich, more full-bodied than the 1997, and with lower acidity.  There's a little appealing smokiness that I thought was from fully-integrated oak, adding a nice edge to the characteristic meatiness of Mourvedre.  The tannins are soft at this point, and the finish quite long and textured, with the flavors more of mocha and spice than fruit or acid.  The wine was from a half-bottle, which tends to accelerate the aging process, which likely contributed to it being a bit more advanced than the 1997.

The last time we'd tasted these two wines together was nearly five years ago, and while I've had the 1999 Reserve Cuvee a few times in the interim I don't think I've had the 1997 Tablas Rouge since.  It's interesting to go back and look at my notes from that last tasting; the wines' personalities are still consistent, but the intervening years have continued the process of evolution.

I think we all underestimated the ageworthiness of our earliest wines.  If you find that you have one in your cellar, you're likely in for a treat. Thank you, Steve and Kathleen, for sharing the experience!

The Early Years of Tablas Creek

We recently received a treasure trove of photos from our original Nursery Manager, Dick Hoenisch.  He oversaw the initial phases of Tablas Creek, from developing and building our nursery to planting our first vineyard blocks to our initial harvests and ultimately the building of our winery in 1997.  He's remained a regular visitor and correspondent ever since, but even I had never seen most of the photos that he sent us.  As by the time I moved out here in 2002 the property had assumed more or less the shape it has now, these photos feel to me like a time capsule, and most definitely worth sharing.

So, without further ado, and with thanks to Dick, I'm sharing some of my favorites of the photos.  Dick gets pride of place in the first photo, posing next to two other firsts: our first vineyard truck, which we also think was the first thing ever to bear a Tablas Creek logo, in 1993:

In 1993, nearly all the activity was confined to the grapevine nursery.  You can see our first two greenhouses, in which we kept and propagated the "mother vines" (those vines that came through quarantine, and whose progeny populate our vineyard and all the others who have planted our clones) and the small section of rootstock in the foreground:

Inside the greenhouses were the mother vines that we'd recently gotten out of quarantine from the U.S.D.A.  These are many of the same vines that you can see in pots today on the patio outside our tasting room:

In 1992, we planted the top of our tallest hill to roughly two-acre blocks of the best quality California-sourced Rhone varieties we could find.  This photo, also from 1993, shows them at the time.  We have since grafted over the Syrah, Mourvedre, and Marsanne to French clones, though the Grenache (at the right) and Viognier (on the far side of the hilltop) remain.  I can't imagine how we farmed this, given that the road up to the top looks completely unimproved.  It must have been impassable all winter and most of the spring:

By 1995, we had come a long way in laying out the central part of the vineyard for planting, with vineyard on the hillsides and rootstock fields in the valley bottoms:

We may not have had a winery yet, but by 1995 enough was going on in the vineyard and nursery that the Perrins and my dad were here for long stretches of the year.  I'm happy to see that, even if they had to do it at a plastic picnic table, they took the time to enjoy appropriate vineyard lunches.  That's my dad at left, with Dick in the middle and Jean-Pierre Perrin at right:

Lest you think that the planting was easy, take a look at how much rock we uncovered just in digging the irrigation trench.  David Maduena, now our Vineyard Manager, is manning the backhoe:

One of the cool early projects that I remember, since it took place in part when I was out here for a visit, was the 1997 construction of a beehive-shaped brick water cistern at the top of the property, which we still use as a fire suppression reservoir.  We dug into the hilltop, built the cistern, and then filled the earth back in:

The construction of the winery was, as you would expect, a major milestone for us when it was happening in 1997.  You can see its first framing stages in a photo from the spring of that year, from a vantage point more or less where our grafting and nursery education area is now:

We'd made quite a bit of progress on the winery building (back right) by the early summer, when we were planting the Chardonnay block that would produce our Antithesis each year between 2000 and 2011 (it was then grafted over to Mourvedre and Counoise):

The winery did get finished -- and, as seems axiomatic in winery construction, just a few days before the 1997 harvest began -- but the rest of the building was still being worked on as the grapes began to come in:

I'll leave you with one last photo, of the construction of the dry-laid limestone wall surrounding the original parking lot.  You can see clearly how little topsoil there is above the calcareous clay, as well as the work involved in the wall's construction:

Thank you, Dick Hoenisch!