When Covid hit, we lost most of the avenues that we had used to market our wines. Our tasting room was closed. So were most restaurants. Wine festivals (and other large gatherings) were out of the question. We had our email list, to be sure, which was great for staying in touch with our fans, but how were we going to expand our reach beyond the already-converted? We settled on a multi-prong approach. We started hosting virtual tastings. We launched a video series Chelsea and the Shepherd that people could access from anywhere, on their own time. But our most consequential decision was to start leveraging some of the newer social media tools that were available, particularly those with live video capabilities. Our Director of Winemaking Neil Collins started hosting Facebook Live tastings with some of the many winemakers around the United States he's come to know over a four-decade career. Our Director of Marketing Ian Consoli reimagined what had been in-person events before Covid as live broadcasts over YouTube. And I decided to dive into Instagram Live.
Initially, I started with half-hour interviews of our own team, on a weekly basis. My goal was to share the people and the personalities behind Tablas Creek. But in a couple of months, after we'd run through the senior members of our team, Ian suggested that I reach out to some of the writers I knew who had recently published books as a chance to let them talk about their work. His idea turned out to be one of the best things to come out of the Covid pandemic. I kept the half-hour self-imposed limit, as I wanted to be sensitive to the time both of my guests and our viewers. And while I've continued to speak to writers, I realized that there was a whole world of fascinating wine or wine-adjacent people who I thought our fans might be interested in getting to know. I've spoken with winery owners and winemakers, sommeliers, chefs, people who manage wine associations, and some of the key people in the intersection of wine and the environment. These conversations, and the relationships they helped deepen, turned out to be so much fun, and so interesting, that a project I thought would last a few months has now lasted nearly five years.
I realized that weekly conversations was too much, and settled into an every-two-week pattern, with occasional longer intervals as life and most specifically my travel schedule has gotten back to pre-pandemic levels of business. Still, I look forward to these conversations every time, even now that I've hosted more than 100 episodes. In celebration, here's a look back at ten of my highlights from the series. Click on the image or the guest's name to watch the conversation. If you'd like to browse the full collection, visit the Live Broadcast Archive on the Tablas Creek website.
My highlights begin back in the pandemic's early days with the first person outside the Tablas Creek orbit I invited on. It was Elizabeth Schneider, author and host of the influential wine podcast Wine for Normal People. I had invited her on to talk about her new book, but also because she had me as a guest on her podcast and we are still, nearly a decade later, seeing people visit who learned about us from that episode. The experience opened my eyes to the power of the podcast medium, well before we reached the era of podcast saturation we're in now. And, as the conversation unfolded, it turned out that Tablas Creek had played a role in Elizabeth's own wine journey!
Next, the first person I invited who when they said yes I was like, holy cow, how cool. This guest was Elaine Chukan Brown, writer, illustrator, and one of the most innovative voices in wine. We dove deep into new avenues that the pandemic forced us to open and the impact these changes were having on wine, highlighting Elaine’s 37-episode series Behind the Wines that she produced for the California Wine Institute, sharing the stories of California wine in a year when wine went virtual. As always when I talk with Elaine, I came away impressed by the clarity and originality of her thinking, and with how quickly she grasped the changed dynamics around sharing wine's stories during a pandemic.
In late 2021 I began a string of fascinating winemaker guests. Kicking off this run was one of my icons, John Williams, owner and winemaker of Frog's Leap Winery. I wrote in a blog more than a decade ago about how influential a talk I heard John give was on how I think about a grapevine's relationship with its environment. In our live conversation, we got to talk about what connects the organic, biodynamic, and regenerative movements and how they together allow wine to speak of place, and dove deep into why we agreed wine has a key role to play in the climate change and social justice challenges we believe will define coming decades.
Finishing that amazing winemaker run (which also included Morgan Twain-Peterson of Bedrock Wines and Beth Novak of Spottswoode Winery) was another of my role models, Bob Lindquist of Lindquist Family Wines. We are lucky in the Rhone Rangers movement that so many of our founding members are not just still with us, but still making ground-breaking wines and continuing to redefine our category. In our conversation, I got to hear Bob's story of showing my dad and the Perrins around Paso Robles when they were first starting to look for land back in the late 1980s, and I came away with even greater admiration for someone who's been at the forefront of the Rhone Rangers movement for its entire existence.
In addition to the people who make or write about wine, I've tried also to talk to some key gatekeepers who bring wine to the people. One of the most important of these was Annette Alvarez-Peters, the woman who was until her retirement from Costco in 2020 the most powerful wine buyer in America. In our conversation, we discussed her move from electronics buying to the world of beverage alcohol, the lengths she went to to learn on the fly, and how she went about choosing what wines to share with Costco’s millions of customers. Then we pivoted to her important work now with groups like Wine Unify and the Batonnage Forum, mentoring women and people of color looking to make their mark in wine, and why embracing diversity is so important for the future success of the wine industry.
When I reached out to the iconic Jancis Robinson -- Master of Wine, author of wine's most important references, columnist for the Financial Times, and wine advisor to the Queen of England -- I thought it was the longest of long shots. With her characteristic grace, she replied right away and our conversation was lovely. She shared how the world of wine has grown in her five decades researching and writing about it, why she still points people to Greece, Portugal, and South Africa as areas with deep traditions yet less than the appropriate amount of respect in the wine market, how she comes up with topics to write about, what it meant to sell jancisrobinson.com, and why the royal cellar is in good hands with the current generation of royalty.
Speaking of iconic writers, one of my favorite conversations was with Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, Wall Street Journal wine columnists for 12 years who have written four books on wine including their acclaimed memoir Love by the Glass. Dottie and John shared fascinating insights into how their backgrounds in serious journalism shaped their approach to wine writing, the challenge of a weekly column -- and how they go about writing it together -- and why watching a wine evolve can be a profoundly moving experience. But more than that, they demonstrated how the best wine writing is driven by a genuine wonder about the world that produced it. They remain an example to me, decades after their first columns appeared.
One of the pleasures of this series has been highlighting people whose contributions make Tablas Creek what it is. After all, I started the series speaking to members of our team here, before branching out, and I've continued to check in with members of our team for the occasional piece around key moments like harvest or blending. But the wonder of virtual events is that it's no more difficult to speak with someone on another continent than it is to speak with someone in another room. So I've made it a point to speak to members of the Perrin family whenever I can. My last 2023 guest was co-founder of Tablas Creek and proprietor of Chateau de Beaucastel, Francois Perrin. We got to talk about Francois' early memories of my dad, the search for Tablas Creek, and the challenges and rewards of multi-generational family businesses. An inspiration, always.
After three years of speaking to figurative rock stars, this May I got to speak to a literal one: Alecia Moore (aka Pink) along with her co-winemaker of Two Wolves Wine, Alison Thomson. We discussed Alecia’s path discovering wine while on tour, her efforts to study wine, winemaking and viticulture between tour stops, her decision to move with her family to Santa Barbara Wine Country, and how she met Alison. We got to learn what pieces of the estate winemaking each looks forward to and which they dread, how they divide up their responsibilities, and how, in Alecia’s case, she balances being there to be hands on in the vineyard and winery with the demands of a grueling tour schedule.
For my 100th episode this August, I welcomed Antonio Galloni, Founder and CEO of Vinous. There are relatively few truly innovative voices at any given time in any industry, and anyone who has met Antonio notes how he fizzes with ideas. In our conversation, we discussed how his move to Boston to study music ended up with Antonio writing a newsletter called the Piedmont Report while posted to Italy by an investment firm. He shares how that went from a hobby to a side gig to an invitation to join Robert Parker’s team at the Wine Advocate, what he learned from Robert Parker, how his vision for Vinous differed from what came before, what it's like overseeing some of the most talented voices in wine, how he chooses what to cover and what to delegate, and why he rejects the doom and gloom that some in the industry are feeling.
It wouldn't be a series using new technology without some technical difficulties. Just twice in 105 episodes has Instagram failed in posting the conversation to the Tablas Creek feed. Of course, those two were two of the conversations I loved most, with seminal grape researcher, grower, and winemaker Carole Meredith of Lagier Meredith, and with lyrical writer Andrew Jefford. Oh, well. I suppose that it's not a terrible reminder that sometimes it's best to witness a live event live, in real time.
I'm profoundly grateful to all the amazing people in and around the world of wine who took time out of their days to share their stories. I come away from these conversations with renewed admiration for the passion and the creativity of the people who choose to make wine a career, and reenergized about wine's potential to be an agent of positive change in the world. And if you've watched or listened, thank you, thank you, thank you. There is plenty more to come. For a schedule of upcoming guests, check out tablascreek.com/events.