Why we're glad for the wet 2023-24 winter and glorying in the (so far) cool 2024 spring

This past weekend was Memorial Day, and we spent Saturday evening with friends on their patio. I wore jeans and a long-sleeve shirt and brought a quilted Tablas Creek pullover for after the sun went down. It turned out I needed it starting around 6pm, and the friends broke out their collection of blankets to keep us warm while we hung out and chatted as the light faded and the stars came out. It was lovely. But it was also weird. This is late May! Where was the heat?

We usually assume that Paso Robles Wine Festival, always the third weekend in May, is going to provide the first summer weather of the year. Our goal was always to get a prime table under a big spreading oak tree so we had shelter from the 90° heat. Not this year. The day was sunny but breezy and cool, and as the afternoon drew to a close and the wind started whipping, we were looking for patches of sun to warm our backs. I'm not complaining; I would always prefer conditions like this to it being sweltering for a wine festival. But take a close look at the fleece and denim among our pouring crew:

Those are just two anecdotal examples, but looking at the weather since the beginning of April bears out that it's been cooler than normal. The average high has been about 4°F cooler than normal, and the average nighttime low about 3°F cooler than normal. That may not seem like much. But six days haven't made it out of the 50s. Another 13 days haven't made it out of the 60s. And we have yet to hit 90°F even once. 

Looking at it a different way, the first two months of the 2024 growing season have seen high temperatures been slightly cooler than the same stretch last year, which was by far our coolest year in more than a decade. The net result is that we're just starting flowering at a time of year when in a more typical year (like 2021) we'd have been at its peak.

This slow progression is consistent with the winter that we saw. Now that we're likely past any more rain, we can compare the winter of 2023-24 with normal. First, total rainfall compared to previous years, where you'll notice that it was above average at more than 29 inches, but nothing close to the crazy rainfall we got last winter:

Looking by month, you'll see that we got pretty close to our average rainfall most months, with the exception of a somewhat dry beginning to the winter (which we're thankful for given the lateness of the 2023 harvest) and a February that produced roughly double normal rainfall:

The rain also came more gently than we often see in winters here, where most of the rain comes in a few big storms. We had 49 days with measurable rainfall, which means that we averaged only 0.59" of rain each rainy day. By contrast, in the winter of 2022-23, we had somewhat more rainy days (62) and those days averaged 0.8" of accumulation. They were also more concentrated in January and March, which were the months where we saw flooding.

While it's generally a solid rule that in California, there's no such thing as too much rain, we were just fine with this most recent winter. It takes about 15" of rain to saturate our calcareous soils and provide sufficient water for our dry-farmed vines to make it through the growing season. It takes another 10" of rain to refill our wells to capacity and start to refill the reservoirs. Anything beyond that flows off and becomes extra capacity. If the state is in a drought, extra water helps replenish critically low reservoir levels. But given that the ample rainfall last winter already did that, we didn't need another 40" year, and we were grateful not to have to deal with creeks jumping their banks or customers dealing with washouts or closures.

The moisture did help keep our soil temperatures low and delayed budbreak to a normal time. Since then, the cool weather has mostly meant that we're having to keep mowing since the grasses between the rows keep growing and with the new growth in the vines it's too late in the year for the sheep to help. That means we're living with a shaggier-than-normal vineyard profile:

In the mornings, we're seeing weather that wouldn't be surprising in a place like Santa Barbara or San Diego (where they have terms for this: "May grey" and "June gloom"). But in Paso Robles, what is normally a once- or twice-a-month phenomenon has been pretty regular. I took a few photos on my way into work last week in our Scruffy Hill block that will give you a sense. The atmosphere is lovely for photos, and it's relatively rare here:

A close-up of one of the vines, with others marching away down the hill in the fog, is one of my favorite recent vineyard photos:

Finally, in the afternoons we've been getting another pretty but usually rare phenomenon: a fog bank massing over the Santa Lucia Mountains to our west. That fog has burned off during the day, but you can see it looming there, ready to roll back in when the sun goes down:

We're not worried about any of this. The vineyard looks amazing and the lack of stress is a great thing for vine health. The wet winter and cool spring mean that you can reach into the soil anywhere and just an inch or two down you get to damp, dark earth. Plus, it always warms up in Paso Robles, and even in a cool year like 2023, we have a long enough growing season to get the grapes ripe. It looks like we might not have long to wait; the forecast for the next couple of weeks looks like we'll be getting into the 80s pretty regularly, with some low-90s possible Thursday and Friday. Meanwhile we'll enjoy the unusual scenery and glory in the lovely daytime weather. If you're visiting in the coming weeks, you're in for a treat.

"Seasons" by Taylor Collins: a song for Tablas Creek Vineyard

By Austin Collins

It is incredibly difficult to put into words what the subject of this blog means to me. The place I have called home for most of my life and my very best friend in one piece! My dear wife Taylor has written and recorded a song for Tablas Creek called "Seasons". Over the years since we moved here, she often spoke of the "living presence" this property evokes, a controlled chaos of natural farming bordered by the wilds of our oak woodlands. I am honored to present this project to you all, and I hope you listen to the song as you look at these photos that have become embedded in our minds of this beautiful place that we are lucky enough to call home.

Below, Taylor has provided a short account of the process of writing "Seasons":

Play Seasons by Taylor Collins

When I started writing the song, I had specific intentions for it. I wanted to convey the wild nature of the property and at the same time its feeling of comfort and home.

I tried a few things that made it feel too country and too constrained so I reworked it completely, but always had the lyrics about the cyclical pattern of the seasons and rejuvenation.

I felt it was important to continue the theme of regeneration, beginnings and endings, the way those things tie into the feelings we develop for a place. A place can feel like a family member, or an old friend.

Because of the way Tablas Creek is farmed and cared for, it retains its soul. It is not just a place of production and that has everything to do with how alive nature is here. I applied that cyclical theme to the chord structure as well and it both simplified the song and made it feel more free.

I loved writing a song about this place because it means so much to live here, and to raise children here where my husband grew up and now works. It feels like a complete circle that continues to turn, just like the soil and the life that lives through it and on it here at Tablas Creek.

What separates a great wine dinner from the many good ones?

I've hosted a lot of wine dinners the last few months. Restaurants, understaffed and overwhelmed in the aftermath of Covid, are starting to have the bandwidth to refocus on special events. Add to that the fact that after a few years where yields were low and demand was high, we finally have wine to sell, so I've been traveling more. And sprinkle on top some invitations that I thought were too cool to turn down, including the Paso Robles Asia tour and the Tasting Climate Change conference in Montreal. At each city I visit, I try to set up a dinner, because I think they are the best way to share the wines and story of Tablas Creek. 

All the dinners I've had the pleasure of hosting this year have been good. Most have been very good. But last week, I hosted a dinner with Chef Spike Gjerde at Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore that was one of the best I can ever remember, and it got me thinking about what it was that separated it from others. I think the event nailed all five of the elements of a great wine dinner:

• Inspiration. A great menu requires creativity. After all, a great pairing is not as simple as making a dish have similar flavors to the wine it's supposed to pair with. There are times where what a dish (or wine) needs is contrast. And then there's the talent that the greatest chefs have to make dishes that pull subtle notes out of the wines they're paired with and make it somehow taste more like itself. In my experience, great pairings are created by chefs who sit down with a wine and build the dish around it. After all, the wine isn't something that can be changed. The food has to have the right flavors and the right volume to have presence while still allowing the wine to shine. That's not an easy balance to strike. And the wines themselves should be selected because the chef found them inspiring to pair with. It’s hard to make a truly great dinner with, for example, the four wines your distributor may happen to have in quantity.
• Execution. It should go without saying that it takes more than a great menu to have a great meal. The food needs to be served promptly, and get to the diners hot. That's not easy when making the same dish for 20 or 40 or 70 people. That takes a chef with a good team and good organizational skills, and a front-of-house staff that can keep up.  
• Atmosphere. That doesn't need to be luxurious. The Woodberry Kitchen dinner was served outside on their brick patio on a drizzly evening. But the chairs were comfortable. The lighting was great. And the three large communal tables meant that the conversation was lively and everyone engaged. Restaurants often try to keep their standard table seating for wine dinners, and place each group at its own table. But in my experience that's a mistake. Bringing people together into larger tables creates a special sort of energy. It also means that solo diners aren't left by themselves.
• Pacing. A great wine dinner is like Goldilocks and the three bears: not too fast, not too slow. You need space for people to learn about the wines and hear from the winemaker. It's frustrating when people are poured a new wine, you start to talk about it, and then the food is served right away. You're left to talk over the hubbub of service while everyone’s food gets cold. Not ideal. But these multi-course affairs (typically 4 or 5 five courses, and sometimes more) can also drag if the kitchen can't keep up or there's too much time between courses. I finished one dinner at 11pm recently. That dinner started with a reception at 6pm. That's a marathon, and can often result in people losing energy (or drinking too much) before the last few courses are served.  
• Personality. Guests come to a wine dinner for more than a good meal. They come to learn about the winery, and about the restaurant. They want to hear the inspiration for the different courses, and come away with a new idea or two about food and wine pairing. That requires both a winery representative and a chef interested in sharing their stories and their inspiration and with the talent to keep an audience engaged and bring them along on a journey.

One complicating factor is that it's a surprising but true fact that most chefs aren't all that into wine. Some don't drink at all, or drink liquor or beer. Others like wine, but think of it as an accessory to their food rather than an equal partner. And these chefs can produce good, even very good wine dinners. After all, how wrong can you go with a delicious dish and a delicious wine? But the best wine dinners, in my experience, are designed and executed by chefs who love and are intrigued by wine's mysteries. And at last week's Woodberry Kitchen dinner, Chef Spike's love for the food he was cooking, the pairings he created, and the wines that were featured came through with clarity. 

These photos (thank you to Woodberry Kitchen for taking and sharing them) should give you a sense. The menu was remarkable, and included dishes like asparagus and crab en croute with caviar beurre blanc (left, paired with our Esprit de Tablas Blanc) and filet of beef en valise with smoked oysters and sauce treize cepages (right, paired with two older vintages of our Esprit de Tablas). And critically, all the courses got to the table in great time and at the right temperature.

The selection of wines included some unusual treats like 2012 and 2015 Esprit de Tablas, our 2022 Dianthus rosé, and the 2018 Vin de Paille Quintessence, which we shipped specially out from the winery.

The long, communal tables meant that the conversations were lively all night. Everyone had enough space without feeling isolated:

The pacing meant that I had a chance to tell the story of each wine. As if by magic, as soon as I was done speaking the next course appeared. Of course, that's not magic, that's planning and a great team:

Finally, at the end, Spike came out to accept a well-deserved ovation and talk about the inspiration for the dinner. He talked about a few of the courses, but like any good storyteller focused on the personal side of things: his own formative years as a young chef where he was invited by my brother to participate in a food and wine showcase in the Caribbean, and ended up between Jean-Pierre Perrin and Jean-Louis Chave listening to them dissect a meal and the pairings that went with it. Some thirty years later, we all were the beneficiaries of the lessons he learned, then and later.

 

You aren’t hearing as much about the Rocks District as you should be. You might be surprised why.

I’m not sure there’s any American Viticultural Area (AVA) as aptly named as the Rocks District of Milton-Freewater. Located in north-east Oregon just 15 minutes south of the city of Walla Walla, Washington, it’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the look of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Vines grow in deep beds of basalt cobblestones, the product of ancient volcanic eruptions, rolled and smoothed as they were tumbled down from the nearby Blue Mountains by the Walla Walla River and then deposited on the valley floor in an alluvial fan. Adding to the region's allure, it sits at roughly the same latitude as the southern Rhone. A majority of the vines are Rhone-derived; more than 45% of the vineyard acres are planted to Syrah, with other Rhone grapes like Grenache, Picpoul, Bourboulenc, Clairette, Grenache Blanc, and Roussanne all represented too. In just a few short years, the Rocks District has built a reputation as a place to find some of the most interesting Rhone varieties in America.

Neil, Cesar Perrin, Nicolas Brunier and I had the pleasure of exploring this remarkable terroir with Delmas Wines’ Brooke Robertson while we were in town for the recent Hospice du Rhone celebration.

If great wines are borne out of struggle, this region is destined for greatness. Not only do the vines have to navigate the rocks and the paltry twelve inches of rainfall, but they have to live through winter freezes so cold that most producers (including Delmas) now bury their vines every winter to provide insulation, and then unbury them in time to prune and start the growing season¹. The 300 days of sun, the long summer days due to the northern latitude, summer daily high temperatures routinely in the 90s°F and not infrequently in the 100s°F, allow for enough ripening in the short season, which can end with a freeze any time after the calendar flips to October. And did I mention the rocks?

At Hospice du Rhone, the wines from Rocks District fruit were among my highlights of the Grand Tasting, with as clear a signature as any AVA or appellation I can think of. The fact that it’s a small AVA (just 3,767 acres, or less than 1% of the acreage within the Paso Robles AVA) surely helps, along with its climatic uniformity, but I think that the rocks themselves play an important role. As in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, those rocks absorb and reflect the sun, warming the ripening clusters, producing rich, powerful wines with a distinctive umami flavor of baked loamy earth.

The AVA was created relatively recently, with work beginning in 2011 and formal recognition from the United States Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) in 2015. There are now, according to the AVA’s website, 52 vineyards encompassing 640 acres. More than 50 wineries source fruit from these vineyards, although there are only five production facilities within the AVA’s boundaries. Many more facilities are just a few minutes away, in Walla Walla, the center for wine production (and wine tourism) in the area, and the namesake of the larger AVA in which the Rocks District is nested. And that distance, minor though it seems, provides one of the region’s biggest challenges.

In the federal regulations that govern the American Viticultural Area (AVA) system², there’s a clause that I’d never noticed before this visit. It says that a wine may be labeled with a viticultural area appellation if it satisfies a series of criteria, one of which is that “it has been fully finished within the State, or one of the States, within which the labeled viticultural area is located”. This clause means that all the wineries with production facilities in Walla Walla (in Washington State) can’t label their Rocks District vineyards with its AVA because that AVA lies entirely in the state of Oregon. Delmas is one of those wineries, so their labels just say Walla Walla.

Neil, Cesar, Nicolas and I were frankly flabbergasted by this restriction when we learned about it. After all, what does a state boundary (or for that matter, where a production facility is located) have to do with viticultural distinctiveness? It seemed to me that this goes against the stated purpose of an AVA, which as explained on the TTB’s website, is:

“An AVA is a delimited grape-growing region with specific geographic or climatic features that distinguish it from the surrounding regions and affect how grapes are grown. Using an AVA designation on a wine label allows vintners to describe more accurately the origin of their wines to consumers and helps consumers identify wines they may purchase.”

That I never knew about this clause in the AVA regulations stems from California’s central place in the firmament of American wine. We’ve never seriously thought about getting fruit from other states. We’re excited, with the launch of our Lignée de Tablas program, to explore other California AVAs, and that’s no problem. But the fact that we can get fruit from the Sierra Foothills (6 hours away from Paso Robles) and use their AVA but Delmas can’t get fruit from their own vineyard, 15 minutes away from the winemaking facility they share with dozens of other local wineries, feels unfair.

The TTB in fact foresaw the challenge that the creation of this new Oregon AVA so close to the region’s winemaking nexus in Washington state would pose for producers. In the 2014 notice of proposed rulemaking for the Rocks District AVA, they solicit feedback on the topic:

“TTB is interested in comments from persons who believe they may be negatively impacted by the inability to use ‘The Rocks District of Milton– Freewater’ as an appellation of origin on a wine label solely because they use facilities located in Washington.”

The TTB must have received enough feedback to convince them that there was support for modifying their rules, because the next year they proposed a rule change to address it:

“The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) is proposing to amend its regulations to permit the use of American viticultural area names as appellations of origin on labels for wines that would otherwise qualify for the use of the AVA name, except that the wines have been fully finished in a State adjacent to the State in which the viticultural area is located, rather than the State in which the labeled viticultural area is located. The proposal would provide greater flexibility in wine production and labeling while still ensuring that consumers are provided with adequate information as to the identity of the wines they purchase.”

I would have thought that the TTB’s proposed rule change would have been uncontroversial, but it ended up far from the case. Organizations that submitted letters in opposition included Napa Valley Vintners, Family Winemakers of California, the Washington State Wine Commission, and the California Wine Institute. Some included proposed changes that would satisfy their concerns, while others just requested that the proposed new rule be scrapped. Even the Oregon Winegrowers Alliance & Walla Walla Wine Alliance submitted a comment in opposition, although the change that they requested was minor. In every case, the stated reason for opposition was because the regional associations worried that state laws that modify the federal regulations overseeing wine production would be unenforceable in a neighboring state. A good example would be the Oregon requirement that to be varietally labeled, a wine must contain 90% of the listed grape, a more restrictive standard than the federal requirement that a varietal wine contain at least 75% of the named grape.

A few of the comments hinted at a second reason: that they were worried that if a cheaper nearby state could make wine from a prestigious appellation, there might be an exodus of jobs to that lower-cost (or less regulated) state, with economic damage to the established reason.

As typically happens when it receives conflicting feedback, the TTB backtracked and the proposed change was never made. This may have avoided the unintended consequences that the regional associations were worried about, but it leaves the producers in the Rocks District with the same challenge that the TTB identified back in 2014. Are they supposed to all build wineries in Oregon when they’re already established in Washington State? Or establish the reputation of their new AVA without the powerful tool of identifying the wines’ place of origin on their labels?

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the economic argument (made mostly by commenters from the Napa Valley) given that California is already so large, and with such different costs of production, that any negative damage would likely have already happened. Does Napa Valley’s economy suffer when a Paso Robles winery buys grapes and puts out a Napa Valley AVA wine? I don’t see it.³ And even if you did see it, given the size of California, that ship has sailed. 

The other objection, that state wine laws that try to ensure a higher quality product would be unenforceable out-of-state, doesn’t seem to me like an unsolvable problem. In fact, the Wine Institute proposed an elegant solution in their comment objecting to the proposed rule (their addition emphasized):

“(iv) In the case of American wine, it has been fully finished (except for cellar treatment pursuant to §4.22(c), and blending which does not result in an alteration of class and type under §4.22(b)) within the State the viticultural area is located in or an adjacent state, or for, a viticultural area located in two or more States, within one of the States in which the viticultural area is located, and it conforms to the laws and regulations governing the composition, method of manufacture, and designation of wines in all of the States where the viticultural area is located.”

It seems to me like this solution gives something to everyone. Appellations like the Rocks District get to build their reputation by appearing on wine labels. Winemakers get the flexibility to source grapes from diverse regions and tell consumers where they come from, without having to build new wineries across state lines. Grape growers are able to benefit from the reputation of the region they help establish. States retain the ability to enforce regulations designed to enhance quality or distinctiveness. And consumers get more clarity on where the wines they love come from. Let's hope that the TTB revisits this issue soon, with a more tailored approach.

Meanwhile, go out and do a little research on which Walla Walla AVA wines actually come from the Rocks District, and try to find a bottle or three. You won’t be disappointed.

Footnotes:

1. How cold? This January 13^th, the low was -8°F and the high just 4°F.
2. That would be the Federal Register Title 27 Chapter I Subchapter A Part 4 Subpart C § 4.25(e)(3)(iv) for anyone keeping score.
3. I would also note that I think this argument raises commerce clause objections about a state using regulation to protect its businesses from competition from competing businesses in other states.