Our Most Memorable Wines of 2024

As I have done the last few years, I asked our team to share a wine or two that stuck with them from all the ones they'd tried in 2024, and why. This is always one of my favorite blogs to put together. I love seeing the breadth of wine interests of the Tablas Creek team. More than that, I love seeing what inspired them. If you don't work at a winery, you might expect that those of us who do spend most of our time drinking our own wines, but in my experience, that's far from the case. Most people who find a career in wine do so because they find it fascinating, and that interest doesn't go away just because they've landed at a particular winery, even a winery that they love. And most people who work at wineries look at exploring other wines as an enjoyable form of continuing education.

Each time I put this list together, I'm reminded of the degree to which the memorableness of a wine is tied to the occasion for which and the company with whom it was opened. That's one of the magical things about wine. It comes in a serving size that is meant to be shared. Most of the best wines shine particularly brightly with food. So opening a bottle of wine is a shared experience that unfolds over time. It fosters conversation and connection. And because each wine is alive revisiting one can be like checking in with an old friend.

Here's everyone's submission, in their own words and only very lightly edited, in alphabetical order (except mine, which is at the end, with some concluding thoughts):

Charlie Chester, Senior Assistant Tasting Room Manager
My most memorable wine wasn't the rarest or most expensive this year. It was a 2019 L.A. Cetto Nebbiolo enjoyed during our honeymoon on the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico, this past January.

Amber and I escaped the cold, wet winter of Paso Robles and spent ten unforgettable days exploring the Oaxacan coast, from Puerto Escondido to Bahia de La Luna. We dined at a 5-star restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean, savoring a fantastic meal alongside the Nebbiolo.

Sharing that bottle with my wife as the sun dipped below the horizon created a memory that goes beyond the wine itself. It's a reminder of our incredible journey through coastal Oaxaca and the magic of shared experiences. This experience showed me that the best times with wine can be more about the people, the place, and the feeling. These things can make a simple bottle of wine truly special.

Neil Collins, Director of Winemaking
Most memorable wine of the year. This is never easy because we do enjoy lots of bottles over the course of a year, and I have a sieve-like memory!!

I'm going to break the rules because sometimes one must! I'm going with a whole experience, I was able to visit Domaine Weinbach in Alsace with a group from Lone Madrone, during a Rhine River Cruise. I have wanted to visit Weinbach for decades. It did not disappoint, if there is a better white wine producer anywhere I have not been there! We poured Cuvée Catherine from magnum on the ship that night, perfect. The second is another cruise-related wine. We became very good friends with a couple on the first Tablas Rhone River cruise. We were visiting them in Carlsbad recently and they shared a bottle that they had picked up on a shore trip from a later cruise. A Chapoutier Hermitage Chante Alouette (Marsanne) 2014, it was stunning.

Ian Consoli, Director of Marketing
I enjoyed a lot of good wine in many fun situations in 2024. I participated in wine dinners, blind tastings, and good old-fashioned tableside chats with friends. The one wine that stands out was this 2014 Oveja Negra from Lone Madrone paired with Tablas Creek lamb. We had multiple heavy-hitting wines with that meal, but I just kept coming back to the pairing. My opinion is probably skewed from my host saying her goal was to make my most memorable wines of the year list, but hey, it worked, Lisa!

Terrence Crowe, Tasting Room
Some of the most memorable wines for me each year are thought provoking options that generally have a few years of cellar time prior to consumption. This year I opened a Tablas Creek 2011 Antithesis and was pleasantly surprised. It was one of those vintages from Paso where cellar time seemed necessary across the board. A delicate vintage that was less than showy upon release. The antithesis was one of those wines that never particularly drove my immediate interest in the tasting room upon release. This 2011 antithesis with extended bottle age was fantastic. The sheer joy I get from aged Roussanne and Chardonnay is profound. The day two pour of the 2011 antithesis did not disappoint either. 

The other memorable wines consist of a few magnum bottles bestowed upon me by Tablas Creek. For the holidays I received a 2015 Esprit Rouge and a 2015 Esprit Blanc offering in magnum format. The Esprits are world-class, highly age-worthy renditions that embody the essence of Tablas Creek vineyards. The overall generosity and my sheer enjoyment in the series with a few years in bottle couple to make this a truly fantastic gift. Gratitude and gustatory delight will exude outwardly as I consume these large format bottles in an optimal window for mass appeal. 

Chelsea Franchi, Senior Assistant Winemaker
My husband and I got married on October 9, which is planted squarely in the middle of the harvest season. That means every year it’s a toss-up to see if we’ll get to celebrate on our actual anniversary or if we’ll celebrate on a later (less busy) date. This year, we were able to go out to dinner on the real day, and it was spectacular.  We went to Six Test Kitchen, an intimate Michelin-starred restaurant nestled in Tin City here in Paso Robles. We had Champagne with the earlier, lighter courses, and for the richer, meatier courses, we brought along a bottle of 2015 Ridge Monte Bello. The wine was dense and chewy with intensely powerful purple and black fruit, plenty of herb and spice as well as the distinctive Ridge American oak nerve that was seamlessly laced through the wine. The whole evening, we couldn’t help but laugh every time we smelled the wine or took a sip; in that atmosphere, with that food and company, the wine was absolutely perfect. It always feels like a treat to have Ridge on the dinner table, but this night with this meal and this wine, was one of those magic moments.

Barbara Haas, Co-Founder
I don't remember every wine I drank this year, but I can't imagine a better wine than the 1988 Clos de la Roche of Ponsot that we drank with Christmas dinner. Perfectly balanced, quiet but complex, no element stealing the scene from another. Clear clean aroma and taste and great length. Delicious.

Ray King, Tasting Room
My most memorable wines of 2024 came all in one evening. The league of extraordinary gentlemen (a local group of wine and restaurant industry folks) were having dinner at Les Petites Canailles. The wines were flawless and all had a proper spot for this excellent dinner with great friends.

Billecart-Salmon, Brut Sous Bois, Champagne

Domaine de la Mordoree, 2017, Lirac, La Reine Des Bois (GSM)

Domaine Rolet, 2022, Arbois, Jura (Trousseau 58%, Pinot Noir 40%, Poulard 2%)

Le Puy Rolland, Vieilles Vignes, Chateauneuf du Pape, 2022

Mollydooker, McLaren Vale, Carnival of Love, 2018, Shiraz

The Farm Winery, The Big Game (Cabernet Sauvignon 66%, Syrah 27%, Malbec 5%, Petit Verdot 2%), 2018, Paso Robles

John Morris, Tasting Room Manager
My most memorable wine(s) of the year are again in-house, partially because I didn't taste as far and wide as usual, and partially because Tablas Creek wines are so darn good. But first, some background.  

As part of ongoing tasting room staff training, we indulged ourselves in a random sampling of Esprit de Tablas/Beaucastel Blanc, from as far back as 2000. While a few stood out (2004, 2010, 2015, 2017), I was most excited about something that doesn't fully exist yet: a barrel sample of the 2023 Esprit de Tablas Blanc. This wine was so pure, so balanced, and so, yes, exciting - thrilling even -  at this early stage that I literally can't wait for it to be bottled so I can taste it again. VINsiders - look for a bottle to be included in your fall 2025 shipment.

Followers of this page may know that we launched an elevated tasting this summer, the Legacy Tasting. This tasting offers an opportunity to taste new and old Esprits and Panoplies side by side. We've been thrilled with the results, but selfishly, the opportunity to taste the 2017 Panoplie as we open bottles for this tasting has been revelatory. For my money this may be the single best bottle we've yet produced.

...And As for Me
I spent more time on the road this year than I have in two decades. Some of that was because after a few scarce vintages we finally had enough wine to sell. Some of it was because I identified early in the year that export markets were likely to be a growth opportunity and was lucky enough to be invited to represent Paso Robles on a California Wine Institute tour to Japan and Korea. And some of it was because I made a point to go and visit Beaucastel and see the remarkable cellar that they have spent the last four years building. As my travel plans came into focus, I found myself with a few days to fill between commitments in the UK and my arrival in the Rhone. I decided to spend those days working with our German importer, Veritable Vins et Domaines, and was invited to arrive a day early to spend a day exploring the Rheingau with Christian Ress, co-founder of Veritable and fifth-generation proprietor of Balthasar Ress. I've long loved German Riesling, but had never visited wine country there. With Christian, I got to explore the vineyards on a glorious late fall day, and then taste through a range of his Rieslings. The experience was incredible, and the wines superb.

As great as all those Balthasar Ress wines were, I'm not picking one as my most memorable wine. It's incredibly difficult to have a wine of which you only got a taste be the most memorable, or one of a dozen wines you might have had at a tasting. But the experience definitely primed me for what I am choosing. About a month after I got home, I made an old-fashioned Chinese recipe that my dad used to love from the Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee's seminal 1972 The Chinese Cookbook.

To pair with the dish (chicken in tomato sauce with water chestnuts, garlic, and ginger) I was looking for a wine with verve and texture and just a hint of sweetness. I ended up picking a wine I'd been sent by a friend who once worked a harvest here at Tablas Creek before jumping into a career in wine retail and eventually distribution. It was the 2020 Peter Lauer Ayler Kupp Stirn Riesling Fass 15 Grosse Lage, a Grand Cru Riesling from the Saar region about 125 miles west of where I'd been in the Rheingau. I was expecting something good, and the wine was more than that. It was electric. There was sweetness, yes, but also vibrant acids, plentiful fruit, and a lovely saline note that I still feel like I can taste, two weeks later. It transformed the meal into something exceptional, and was a fascinating wine to discuss with everyone from my boys, who are just learning about wine, to my mother-in-law, who normally doesn't like sweet wines, to my wife Meghan, who has been alongside many of my most fascinating wine journeys over the last three decades.

A few concluding thoughts:
I did my best to link each wine to a page with information about it, should you want to research details. And while all these wines should be remarkable if you are able to find them, I don't think replicating a specific wine is necessarily the right goal. If there's one thing that I've learned from writing these end-of-year appreciations for a decade now, it's that it really is the confluence of wine and occasion that makes for the most memorable experiences. Wine, after all, is the ultimate social beverage. The size of a bottle means it's something that you share with others. The fact that wine is ephemeral, that each bottle is a reflection of particular grapes grown in a particular place in a particular vintage, means that each one is different and also a unique reflection of time and place. Add in the human element, where the winemaker or winemakers are taking (or not taking) actions based on what they see, smell, and taste, and you have what is in essence a time capsule that comes with the added benefit of helping you enjoy a meal and bring insight into the flavors it contains. It's the perfect starting point for a meaningful evening, and helps bring the food and the people together.

I wish you all memorable food and wine experiences in 2025, and even more than that, the opportunity to share them with people you love.

Five Reasons Why Winter Is the Best Season to Visit Wine Country

Most people think of wine country in the autumn, with colorful grapes on the vines, golden hillsides, and clear blue skies. And that is a pretty great backdrop for a wine country visit. But I'm here to tell you that as excellent as the fall is, it's the winter that you should be looking to visit Paso Robles or really any California wine country. To give you a sense of why, a photo to start:

So why do I think you should schedule your next wine country visit in winter?

• No crowds. There's not really an "in season" and "out of season" period in wine country, but our weekly traffic numbers should give you a sense. In March, April, and May we averaged 584 visitors per week. The summer is a little quieter, and in June through August we averaged 496 visitors per week. September through November we averaged 544 people per week. But unless your visit is in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, or over either MLK or President's Day weekend, our average weekly visitors last December through February was just 321 people per week. That means that you'll likely have the tours to yourself and tasting rooms nearly so, especially if you come during the week.  
• The weather is lovely. You might think that people avoid Paso Robles in the winter because of the weather. Of course, there is the occasional rainstorm, but even in winter here we get on average five sunny days per week. And relative to other parts of the country, the winter climate here is downright glorious. On those sunny days, the average high here is in the 60s. About a third of days between December and March top out in the 70s. That sounds pretty nice to me. Nights are chilly, yes. It's not unusual for it to drop below freezing. But that's what sweaters are for. And if you're worried about snow, don't be. The last time we saw any out at Tablas Creek was in 2011, and it was gone an hour later.  
• Winemakers and proprietors are around. One of the charms of a place like Paso Robles is that most of the wineries here are locally owned, and there's a pretty good chance that when you visit you'll meet the people who run the place and who make the wines. But during harvest, winemakers are buried in grapes, working 60-hour weeks. Vineyard managers become nocturnal. And the owners who aren't also doubling as vineyard managers or winemakers are likely on the road trying to sell their wines before the holiday season. By mid-November the selling season is over, as is the grind of harvest. Wines are largely pressed off and quietly finishing fermentations in barrel. And the wholesale market doesn't really get going again until March. So the key people are around. 
• Animals are out in the vineyards. OK, this isn't applicable to every winery. But more and more, wineries around California are realizing that one of the best ways to increase fertility and biodiversity (and therefore soil health) in their vineyards is to integrate grazing animals, mostly sheep, in the off-season. You can get sheep in the vineyard as early as the end of harvest, but there's not much for them to eat until the grasses get established at this time of year. But starting in mid-December, the next four months are when the flocks are most important in the vineyard. Most operations time lambing for November or December, so the lambs are being weaned when there's the most food available. So this is the time of year to see this piece of regenerative farming in action. Come budbreak in April, the sheep have to be exiled to unplanted areas so they don't switch over to eating the new buds and leaves.  
• The beauty. Back to my first point. Winter’s beauty here in Paso Robles may not have the drama of summer's golden hills and deep blue skies, but it's profound nonetheless. This is a more subtle beauty: layers of clouds and sky, carpets of green growing over deep brown earth, and textures that seem like they change daily.⁠ Right now, you have the end of the fall colors as the last leaves hang on the vines, at the same time as the hillsides are turning from brown to green. The earth, dampened from the first rains, turns dark brown. As the winter goes on, the green of the grasses deepens, eventually in March bursting into wildflower glory.

I'll share a couple more photos to give you a sense. First, a look west across one of our many dry-laid limestone walls toward a section of Grenache Blanc with a few yellow-green leaves hanging on above the rapidly growing cover crop.

And finally one more photo that to me captures the atmospheric loveliness of this time of year. This is taken at my home vineyard looking east over the town of Templeton. You can see the winter fog that sit over the Salinas River Valley and the towns of Templeton and Paso Robles. You can see the wild tangle of bare but unpruned grapevines. And you can feel the warmth of the day approaching. That day started at 28°F and was probably 33°F when I took the photo around 8am. By 3pm it was 71°F.

If you're coming in the next few months, you're in for a treat. If you haven't yet made your plans, put it on your list. You won't regret it.

American consumers' move toward white wines is happening fast. Most wineries will struggle to keep up.

We're in the middle of a major shift in the American wine market. Demographics are changing. High-end (and low-end) wines are suffering through their first prolonged slump in two generations. The market is adjusting to a profoundly negative (and in my opinion, incomplete) message on moderate alcohol consumption from a range of governmental and international organizations. That has led to some of the gloomiest headlines I can remember in my career in wine. But there are bright spots. The middle of the market (wines selling in the $20-$30 range) is actually doing pretty well. Categories like alternative packaging and chillable reds are hot. And there is one trend that we have noticed that that I don’t think enough people are talking about: a significant and accelerating switch in preference toward white wines.

Let's start with our example at Tablas Creek. When customers join our VINsider Wine Club they can choose between the Classic (Mixed) Selection that includes reds, whites, and the occasional rose, or they can choose Red Wine Selection or White Wine Selection if they want to limit their shipments to a single color. For the first five years that we offered people this choice, starting in 2014, the percentages who opted for each of the three alternatives hardly budged at all, with roughly 70% of people choosing the mix, 20% choosing all red wines, and 10% choosing all white wines. That held true right through to the onset of Covid. But starting in 2020 we began to see a shift, and that shift has accelerated in the last year.

Compared to 2019, the percentage of people choosing the White Wine Selection has jumped from 10% to 27% in four years. It's interesting that it hasn't taken that percentage from the red wine lovers; the percentage of VINsiders choosing the Red Wine Selection has stayed within a narrow range between 18% and 23% since 2014. Instead, it has taken its percentage from the people who would, last decade, have been choosing the Classic (Mixed) Selection.

We’re seeing something similar in the wholesale market. If you look at our 2024 wholesale depletions vs. 2023, and just at the three tiers of blends where we have red and white (so our Patelin, Cotes, and Esprit) depletions on our whites are up 35.3% vs. 2023 and the reds up 1.8%. I hesitate to make too much of this, as some of the issue is that last year we ran out of white and couldn't satisfy all the demand that we had, but it's still a pretty dramatic difference in performance.

We're not the only people reporting that white wines are hot in an otherwise chilly market. In a recent blog, Mike Veseth aka The Wine Economist dives into data showing that globally, white wine consumption was on a trend to surpass red, and white wine production already had. Traditional red wine regions as diverse as the Rhone, Australia, and Piedmont are making pushes to get more whites in the ground to respond to changing consumer preferences. Danny Brager and Dale Stratton, two of wine's most connected analysts, shared the following slide breaking down the performance in the American wholesale wine market by different categories last month to WineAmerica. Notice that over the last 12 months three of the five white categories show growth, while all six red categories show declines:

Why these changes are happening is surely due to a complex mix of factors, but I would suggest three that are the most significant:

• The move toward drinking wine away from formal meals. I believe that this is the most important and least understood factor driving changing habits around wine. Younger wine drinkers are drinking wine differently than previous generations did. They will have a glass of wine out at a bar. Or at the beach. Or in the back yard at a cookout. Or before a meal. These are occasions where you're not pairing a wine with a single dish. White wines can of course benefit from pairing as much as red, but they tend to feel more approachable without food than red wines (particularly rich, tannic red wines) do. At the same time, high-end restaurants, where many people would order bottles of powerful red wines as a matter of course, are struggling. 
• A desire to consume wines with lower alcohol. There is a ton of data out there suggesting that lower-alcohol wines are a bright spot in a difficult market. Most white wines are lower in alcohol than most red wines, and more importantly, most consumers think that white wines are lower alcohol than most red wines. This is a part of a greater push toward wellness with complicated impacts on all alcohol, but it tends to push drinkers toward whites rather than reds.
• The relatively lower costs of white wines. White wines, because they spend less time in the winery than reds and therefore accumulate less winemaking costs, tend to be less expensive than red wines. With the top end of the wine market struggling, the relatively cheaper option that whites offer is a refuge for price-sensitive wine lovers. 

Of course, none of these trends are absolute, and wine drinkers in the United States are a heterogeneous lot. But all three trends tend to shift people toward whites -- and toward the low-tannin chillable reds that are another bright spot in the wine marketplace -- and away from more traditional red wines.

Knowing that these trends are happening doesn't mean that it will be easy for an individual winery to make the necessary changes. Planting new vineyard takes time. It's typically five years from the decision to plant, which necessitates prepping the ground, ordering grapevines, planting -- to getting those vines into production. Then a winery needs to make (and potentially age) the wine, bottle it, and get it to market. Five years ago we were in a very different place! You can accelerate the process by grafting grapevines over from red to white, and I'm sure many vineyards are looking at that option, but even that requires investment and takes two years.

The relative scarcity of many of the white grapes that American wine lovers are looking for is another complicating factor. There's plenty of Chardonnay in the ground in California, but as the slide from Danny Brager and Dale Stratton showed, Chardonnay is the white wine category that is currently performing the worst here. And that makes sense if people are looking for lighter, fresher wines. Chardonnays, at least as typically made in California, tend to be on the rich and oaky end of the white wine spectrum, and both the demographics of the Chardonnay buyer and the situations in which Chardonnays are most likely to be bought likely correlate better with the traditional red categories rather than with the lighter-bodied whites that are the market's top performers. Yet more than half the total white wine grape acreage in California is dedicated to Chardonnay:

There are signs in the acreage data that people are starting to pay attention to the trends toward lighter-bodied whites. The complete list of varieties whose non-bearing acreage (basically grapes planted in the last 3 years) is greater than 8% of the total planted consists of Albarino, Chenin Blanc, Picpoul Blanc, and Vermentino. All four of those fit happily in the category of higher-acid, lighter-bodied white wines. (Side note: I’m also proud that two of these are here because of our grapevine nursery.) The significant nonbearing acreage of Pinot Gris and Sauvignon Blanc seems to me to be a positive sign as well. But the total acreage of the grapes that would make the white wines that it seems like consumers are most interested in buying is still relatively small and not growing as fast as it likely needs to to satisfy increasing demand.

If California wineries don't pivot quickly, they'll likely be giving up one of the few potential growth opportunities in a difficult market to imported wines. But even if they do, it's going to take a while to see the changes in what's available. 

OK, fellow California wineries. Let's get pivoting.

Highlights from five years of Instagram Live conversations with some of wine's most interesting people

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.

Elizabeth Schneider, May 2020

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! 

Elaine Chukan Brown, February 2021

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.  

John Williams, November 2021

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.

Bob Lindquist, May 2022

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.

Annette Alvarez-Peters, June 2022

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.

Jancis Robinson, September 2022

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.

Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, May 2023

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.  

Francois Perrin, December 2023

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.

Alecia Moore, May 2024

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.

Antonio Galloni, August 2024

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.