A Local Gem Shines at Tablas Creek: We Interview Tasting Room Lead Jules Giese

By Ian Consoli

When guests visit our tasting room, there's a handful of faces they are almost guaranteed to see. There's the old guard, such as John, Charlie, and Rumyn, and then there are newer faces like Jules. Jules, who has been with Tablas since 2022, embodies exactly the kind of welcome we aim to provide when you arrive. He is kind, good-spirited, with a quick, infectious smile that sets the tone for the warm tasting you are about to experience. Three years into his hire, it felt like time to give him a proper introduction here on the blog. Everyone, meet Jules.

Who are you?

My name's Jules. When asked, I tell people I may be a gem, but my name's not spelled that way. You may have seen me around the tasting room the past few years, as I've been working at Tablas Creek since 2022. I started out pouring wine on the patio, and now I'm part of the management team as a lead.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Templeton, CA, and have lived most of my life in San Luis Obispo County. 

Tell us a bit about your family.

As far as family goes, I'm the second of three boys. I got lucky and escaped the effects of middle child syndrome. My parents now live out of the area and are both going strong. 

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I spend most of my free time relaxing around the house, cooking and baking, or trying to crochet something. I also regularly play in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with some friends.

When and how did you get into wine?

I got into wine by growing up in the heart of wine country, I suppose, but it was really a friend who worked in the industry, sharing great wine with me, that started my wine journey. He'd bring over bottles after work and really showed me there is some fantastic wine out there that doesn't taste like alcoholic wood shavings.

How did you end up working at Tablas Creek?

I've always worked in the service industry, and at one point, I needed a change. I worked at another winery for a while and loved the environment and industry as a whole. Around three years ago, I heard that Tablas was going to have some openings, so I applied. Obviously, the interview was at least okay because I'm here answering questions three years later.

What do you enjoy most about working at Tablas Creek?

It's been amazing working here for many reasons, but I love being able to work outside. I grew up camping and hiking in the Boy Scouts, so I really enjoy a job that lets me enjoy the breeze and the birds.

If a genie said you could work at a winery anywhere in the world, where would you pick?

If I could work anywhere in the world of wine, I think I'd choose northern Italy. In Piedmont specifically. I've always loved the wines of the region, plus France is just a short hop away. 

Best bottle of wine you ever had?

While this isn't necessarily the most delicious bottle of wine I've ever had, it's probably my favorite experience. It was a random bottle of Chardonnay a friend brought out one night while we were hanging out, playing Clue with some other friends. I don't remember the name of the winery, but the wine contributed to a very fun night that we often look back on fondly. 

If you were stuck on an island, what three things would you bring?

1. A hammock 
2. A pizza oven 
3. A magic freezer that's always full of pizzas

Well, that's me. Hope to see y'all out here soon for a tasting!

2025 Summer Solstice Vineyard Tour: It's Been Average, Which Is Just Perfect

One month ago, I wrote about how we'd exited frost season and entered flowering in ideal conditions. Not too hot, not too cold, not too windy. Just... benign. I'm pleased to report that the last month warmed up, as you'd expect in late May and June, but stayed ideal for the season. Our average high has been 87.1°F, but no day has topped 97°F. Our average low has been 45.5°F but no night has gotten below 37.8°F. While every day has seen breezes into the teens, we haven't had a single 20mph gust. We're starting to get to the point where it's hot to be outside for a long time in the middle of the day, but we haven't had a heat wave and I've slept with my windows open and the AC off. It's honestly been glorious, and we're feeling lucky that it's this late in the year and we haven't yet seen any oppressive heat.

These conditions are ideal for grapevines to make rapid progress, and I decided to take a ramble around the vineyard this morning to document where we are. First, a look at a block of head-trained Grenache so healthy and vigorous that I challenge you to find the fruit tree in amongst these vines: 

One of the most commonly used tools to measure a growing year is a term called Growing Degree Days, which is essentially a measurement of how many hours a location has seen above a certain threshold, typically indexed to the crop's growing needs and for grapevines around 50ºF. Comparing what we've seen this year to the last few years as well as our 2010-2025 average, you can see how down-the middle 2025 has been so far. Not as hot as 2022. Not as cool as 2023. A little warmer than 2024 was, though you'll see that at this time of year in 2024, it was about to get a lot hotter (by contrast, the weather over the next week or so looks like it will be staying moderate). The Degree Day data supports the idea that things have been average so far. And in this case, average is just perfect:

We're largely through flowering, even in our latest varieties, but there's a large variation in how much fruit development we've seen. This is totally normal for this time of year. Compare an early grape like Grenache (left) with Mourvedre (right), which one of our latest.

All the grapes will grow in size over the next month or so, until they squish together into a cluster. They actually reach peak mass at the moment of veraison, when they start to soften and accumulate sugar, and will end up losing about 10% of their mass between veraison and harvest.

At this point, what we're mostly looking for is vine health. And we're seeing great evidence of that everywhere. Check out these two vines, again Grenache on the left and Mourvedre on the right. Although Grenache is more robust, both look like they're bursting with vigor:

We're continuing our work to try to achieve our desired vine density in some of our blocks where we've lost vines over the years. I wrote a couple of years ago about our work with layering, where we bury canes from nearby vines and train them up into missing vine positions. Those canes then sprout roots where they were buried, while being supported by the parent vine. You can see a great example of how this works, in a Syrah block. The cane is coming from the parent vine, on the right, and reappearing in the formerly-missing vine position on the left. That child vine already has clusters on it. Our success in layering Syrah played an important role, we think, in the fact that it was one of the only varieties last year to see increased production compared to 2023:

A nearby head-trained, dry-farmed, no-till Counoise block that we planted in 2021 saw some vine loss from the late spring frosts we got in 2022. How do we establish new vines in a block that we aren't irrigating? We use the low-tech solution that helped us plant our Scruffy Hill block in 2005 and 2006: five-gallon buckets with holes drilled in the bottom. We fill those buckets as needed with a water truck, and that water then drips out, supporting the new vines without negatively impacting the development of the established vines nearby:

We're continuing to try experiments that will help us determine the right way to reduce tillage at Tablas Creek. Most of the studies that have studied no-till farming have been done in places wetter than Paso Robles, or at least in places where there is rainfall year-round. Here, it stops raining in April and doesn't rain again until November. That means that unless you irrigate, water is never replenished from above during the growing season, and you have to do everything you can to preserve what falls during the winter. No-till farming does a great job of preserving soil networks and building organic matter, but it does allow other plants to compete with our vines for the limited water resources. In one block we're now on our third year of an experiment that compares spading (so where we chop up the cover crop into the topsoil each spring), mowing (where we mow the cover crops, a few times if necessary, but otherwise leave the soil undisturbed), and crimping (where we bend over the cover crop but leave it in place as a mulch layer). Here you can see the boundary between the mown and spaded sections:

In a Cinsaut block nearby, we had exceptionally tall cover crop growth because it was so wet that we couldn't deploy our sheep there this winter without worrying it would turn into a compacted mud pit. So we decided to alternate crimped rows with spaded rows. It seems like, based on our early returns, that some sort of hybrid approach like this might make the most sense of all:

Adding to the hopefulness of the moment is the new growth we're seeing in a block that we grafted from Tannat (of which we have plenty) over to two whites that we always wish we had more of: Picardan and Clairette Blanche. Those grafts, completed about a month ago, are now bursting to life, powered by the 20-year-old roots. We're hopeful that we'll get production off the new material as soon as next year: 

So, that's the report from the vineyard, as of mid-June. So far, so good. Next stop: veraison.

Celebrating the bottling of Muscardin... and the completion of the Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape collection

I can feel my dad smiling down on Tablas Creek this week. On Thursday, we'll be hosting an industry event in which we'll be showing varietal bottlings of all fourteen of the Chateauneuf-du-Pape grapes that we imported from Beaucastel. We know that this will be a first in America. We believe it will be a first anywhere in the world. The featured attraction will be our 2023 Muscardin, which we bottled, all 21 cases strong, in April. This will be its debut appearance.

Back in 1989, when my dad, along with Jean-Pierre and Francois Perrin, decided on Paso Robles as the site of their homage to Chateauneuf-du-Pape, we initially focused on six Chateauneuf-du-Pape grapes: Mourvedre, Grenache, Syrah, Counoise, Roussanne, and Grenache Blanc (along with the Cotes du Rhone grapes Viognier and Marsanne). Of those, we had high expectations for Mourvedre, Grenache, Syrah, and Roussanne, and modest hopes for Counoise and Grenache Blanc. Those varieties were entered into quarantine in 1989, released in 1992, and planted here at Tablas Creek in 1994. It didn't take us long to decide we wanted a more complete list. The bright acids of Picpoul Blanc beckoned, and we imported that in 1995, received it from quarantine in 1998, and planted it in 2000.

While we were gratified to see that the core grapes had as we'd hoped done well here, we were surprised and excited about how well the varieties like Counoise, Grenache Blanc, and Picpoul were showing even from very young vines. So in 2003 we decided to take the plunge and bring in all the rest of the grapes from Beaucastel. There were seven more. All entered quarantine in 2003, but because they were field cuttings and had viruses that needed to be cleaned up, it took a while (and in some cases, a very long while) for them to be released to us. The first two (Terret Noir and Clairette Blanche) were released in 2008 and planted here in 2010. Picardan was released in 2011 and planted here in 2013. We got three grapes (Bourboulenc, Vaccarese, and Cinsaut) in 2014, and planted them in 2016. And poor Muscardin stayed in quarantine until 2018. To save a year, rather than planting grafted vines, we grafted Muscardin buds onto some surplus Grenache Blanc trunks in 2019.

While you might expect that we would have been anxious to get the Muscardin into a bottle of its own, we wanted to wait to be sure that when we did it would represent the grape in a way we were proud of. So while we got production in 2021 and 2022, in both cases we thought the result not compelling enough to make history. In each of those years, we decided to include our Muscardin in our Le Complice bottling, where its herby spice seemed to play a role similar to that of Terret Noir. But when we got around the blending table to evaluate the 2023 red wines, the Muscardin seemed to have found itself. My comment when it appeared in one of our flights was, "Progress! Not only did we have a barrel of 100% Muscardin to taste, but it was delicious: spicy and floral, with flavors of raspberry and green herbs. I gave it a '1/2' and we decided to make it our first-ever varietal Muscardin bottling."

Fast forward another year, and we bottled that Muscardin in April. We know that because of its tiny quantity (just 21 cases, or 252 bottles) it's going to be more important as a symbol and a preview than it is as something to sell. But that doesn't mean we're any less excited to find opportunities to share it. The first will be this Thursday, at an industry party where we'll pour all fourteen varietal bottlings side by side. We're stashing some in our library to see how it evolves. We want to make sure that when people ask us, in a decade, how Muscardin ages, we'll have an answer. For now, we honestly don't know.

What is special about Muscardin? It's not its color; Muscardin is a pale grape. It's not its body; it's light- to medium-bodied. It's not its productivity; it's a modest producer. All these reasons likely play a role in why it became rare in the first place in France. But it has lovely floral character, pretty pomegranate fruit, bright acids, an herby complexity like walking on a Provencal hillside, and a little sneaky grip of tannins on the finish. That appeal is summarized in a great quote from Baron Le Roi of Chateau Fortia that John Livingstone-Learmonth's 1992 book The Wines of the Rhone: "You know, we would be better off here if we replaced the Cinsault with the Muscardin. The Muscardin doesn't produce a lot, makes wine of low degree and spreads out over the soil, preventing tractors from passing freely between the vines, all of which combine to put people off it. But I believe that it gives a freshness on the palate and helps the wine to achieve elegance."

Looking forward, we recently decided to make another small Muscardin bottling from the 2024 vintage. We're also looking for the opportunity to get a little more Muscardin in the ground, so we're looking at potential quantities more like 50-100 cases instead of 25. And I'd love, one day, to include Muscardin in the Esprit de Tablas. If getting each variety in bottle on its own is an important milestone, having all fourteen earn their way into the Esprit de Tablas in a year would be an even bigger one. But we're not going to force it. The Esprits have to represent the best of the estate, the grapes, and the vintage. Maybe Muscardin clears that bar next year. Maybe it takes a decade. But with this bottling, we have something we can evaluate, share, and discuss. And I'll be raising my first glass to my dad, who had the vision to set it in motion.

Raise a glass! Wine is a major American economic engine.

When I hear people talking about wine, and when I read articles written about wine, it's not usually about its economic value. It's much more likely to be an exploration of its flavors, or a celebration of its compatibility with food and conviviality, or its ability to reflect place. Maybe it's as a venue (think "wine country") that's a backdrop for experiences. Or maybe it's about how wine is intertwined with culture and history. But after 24 years working in wine, I can assure you it's a business too. And a recent economic impact study commissioned by WineAmerica and conducted by John Dunham & Associates was a dramatic reminder of just how important an economic driver it is here in the United States. I don't yet see this study getting the attention it deserves, so I'm diving in to pull out the highlights. I encourage you to check out the full report, which has lots more detail and also breaks out the economic impact of wine for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. 

I'll hit you with a few headline stats first. Nationwide, wine is responsible for:

• $323.55 billion in total economic activity
• 1,750,363 jobs 
• $102.1 billion in wages
• $53.2 billion in tax revenue

Let's look by sector at the report’s findings.

We are one of the country's 10,761 wine producers, which are found in all 50 states. We account for 125 of the 763,080 acres of vineyard planted nationwide. And we employ 47 people. American vineyards and wineries produce 95,987 jobs, with the farming of the vineyard accounting for 51,195 direct jobs and wineries adding an additional 44,792. American grapegrowing has an overall economic impact of $13.36 billion, while wine production and marketing adds another $22.5 billion in economic impact. But if you thought that most of wine's economic impact would come from domestic wineries, you'd be wrong. The jobs and the economic impact of American grapegrowing and winemaking account for less than 10% of wine's total impact.

Where else does wine contribute to the American economy? Look further down the distribution chain. The wholesale sector of wine produces 51,972 jobs, providing about $5.1 billion in wages and benefits, and contributing about $23.2 billion in economic activity. That total includes the distribution of American wine, sure, but also the roughly 135 million cases that are imported in a normal year and account for 37% of American consumption. Both domestic and imported wines need to go through distributors in each state, as a part of the mandated "three tier" system that replaced prohibition.

By far the largest contributor to jobs is the next tier, in which wine is sold to consumers at wine shops, restaurants, bars, and grocery stores. There, wine contributes to the employment of 688,725 people (measured in full-time-equivalency). These workers earn about $26.7 billion in wages and benefits while contributing $72.2 billion in economic activity to the U.S. economy. 

Still, when you add up the three tiers of the three tier system, you only get to about 39% of wine's total economic impact. So where are the other direct contributions? Don't forget wine tourism. The study found that 21.1 million people visit American wineries each year, making 74 million winery visits. These visits are responsible for 108,913 jobs and an economic impact of $11.9 billion. Add in about $500 million in impact from wine associations and educational institutions and you end up with a direct economic impact of $138.4 billion and over 927,000 jobs.

Of course, those are just the direct impacts of the production, sales, marketing, and education around wine. There is also indirect economic impact. As defined in economic impact report parlance, indirect impact measures the contributions of the suppliers who sell wineries, wholesales, and retailers the tools, materials, and services they need to do their businesses. These include machinery, tools, processing aids, and parts (think bottles, capsules, and labels), as well as agricultural services, personnel services, financial services, advertising services, consulting services, transportation services, and even the services of workers employed by state and federal governments responsible for the regulation of the wine industry. By the methodology of the study, it also includes independent grape growers, who sell their fruit to wineries to press, ferment, and eventually sell. That network of suppliers, service providers, and regulators is responsible for 383,476 jobs and generates about $90.8 billion in economic activity.

Finally, as anyone who has taken Economics 101 will know, economic activity begets more economic activity. So when wages are paid to workers in the production, sales, and distribution of wine, or through the suppliers who enable that production, sales, and distribution, that money is returned to the economy through the products and services that those employees purchase where they work and live. That is called "induced impact" and is a standard piece of any economic impact survey. The induced economic impact of wine produces another 439,854 jobs and $94.4 billion in economic activity.  

I'll summarize that in the chart below, if you prefer to absorb your data in tabular fashion:

Sector	Jobs Created	Economic Impact ($ in Billions)
Estate Vineyards	30,863	8.1
Wine Production & Marketing	44,792	22.5
Total Direct Impact: Production	75,655	30.6
Wholesale Sales	51,972	23.2
Retail & Restaurant Sales	688,725	72.2
Wine Tourism	108,913	11.9
Education & Associations	1,768	0.5
Total Direct Impact: Sales & Tourism	851,378	107.8
Independent Vineyards	20,332	5.3
Non-Grape Suppliers	363,144	85.5
Total Indirect Impact	383,476	90.8
Total Induced Impact	439,854	94.4
Total	1,750,363	323.6

That total economic impact of $323.6 billion is 1.1% of the United States' total GDP. That's a contribution of $951.48 per man, woman, and child in the country. And the over $53 billion in state and federal tax revenue that wine generates comes to $404.78 per American household.

One of the things I love about working in wine is that I'm the relatively rare person among my friends who is involved in making something tangible. We live in a service-dominated economy, and one that imports a large percentage of its goods. To be making something that I get to share with people, and something that I know brings people together and helps them enjoy those gatherings, feels special and rare. To see so clearly what an economic powerhouse wine is, at a moment when wine feels more under threat than ever, makes it feel all the more worth protecting.

Raise a glass, everyone.