A pilgrimage to a reimagined Beaucastel, built of the earth and with the Earth in mind

I just got back from two weeks in Europe. The first two-thirds of the trip involved visits to work with our importers in the UK (thank you, Liberty Wines) and Germany (thank you, Veritable Vins & Domaines). The last third of it I got to spend with the Perrins, checking in on their many projects in and around Chateauneuf-du-Pape. I've been visiting Beaucastel for my whole life¹, and the lovely cream-colored stone chateau with its cellar filled with foudres and unlabeled bottles has been the one relative constant among an ever-growing collection of estates, projects, and partnerships that the Perrin family have built over the last half-century. Now, Beaucastel, which has been run by the Perrins since 1909, has received its reimagining that manages to be ground-breakingly innovative while preserving a deeply traditional aesthetic.

I am excited to share with you the photos that I took of the new building and cellars at Beaucastel. It's jam-packed with the out-of-the-box thinking that the Perrin family is famous for. But first, an appreciation of the family that we've partnered with to develop Tablas Creek for the last 35 years. As a group they are so smart, and so innovative, and there are so many of them (nine family members at the moment all working on different aspects of the business) that their capacity to develop new projects and see them through is truly remarkable. They have been leaders in progressive farming since the 1950s, when Jacques Perrin converted the estate to organic before there was even a word for it in French. They've been innovating in the grape varieties they grow for just as long². They make some of the world's best wines under $10/bottle at La Vieille Ferme, a diverse collection of terroir-driven explorations of their Rhone Valley home through Famille Perrin, and some of the world's most collectible treasures at Beaucastel. They own and operate a Michelin-star restaurant, l'Oustalet in Gigondas.

Tablas Creek isn't their only foray into collaborative projects. The Perrins have developed partnerships with Nicolas Jaboulet to make the Les Alexandrins wines from the Northern Rhone, and with Brad Pitt to make Miraval rosé in Provence. They and Pitt partnered with renowned Champagne winemaker Rodolphe Péters to make Fleur de Miraval Champagne, with Master Distiller Tom Nichol to make Gardener Gin, and with two renowned French research professors on Beau Domaine Skincare, which uses the active ingredients in grape skins, sap, and trunks to make cosmetics. They recently purchased a woodworking studio that is allowing them to reimagine the wooden case boxes that they're famous for at a lower carbon footprint than cardboard. Internationally, they are one of twelve members of Primum Familiae Vini, one of the largest wineries to commit to membership in International Wineries for Climate Action, and founding supporters of the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation.

Is your mind reeling yet? Mine always is a bit after spending a visit with the Perrins. 

For all the change and growth in the Perrin world, Beaucastel has been relatively unchanged over the last thirty years. The central chateau, which houses the offices for the estate, was until about a decade ago the home of Jacques Perrin's widow Marguerite. A collection of outbuildings had grown up in a rough quadrangle around the back of the estate, housing a collection of workshops, tractors and equipment. The cellar, with its dramatic array of foudres and stacked bottles, was one of the most recognizable in the world. One of the major challenges of this construction project was doing it around this treasure of aging wine. It was great to see that this centerpiece was unchanged even as it had been surrounded by entirely new access and infrastructure:

In their reconstruction project, the cellar's viability in an ever-hotter world and the desire to minimize the resources required to make their wines were of paramount importance. Everything other than the original chateau was taken down to the ground and a new cellar excavated two stories below the surface. At the bottom of this newly-excavated cellar is a series of four reservoirs that together hold nearly half a million gallons of water, refilled naturally with rain harvested from the building's roof. Because of their depth, these reservoirs maintain a constant year-round temperature of 14°C (58°F). One of the reservoirs:

These reservoirs are more than just a supply of water. Their principal purpose is to cool the rest of the cellar. The building was reoriented so that on the north face it includes a series of wind towers that catch the prevailing wind (the famous Mistral that blows more than 100 days each year) and directs it down over the water to cool it. That air is then used to cool the cellar. The view from the north, from where most guests will arrive, shows the five towers taking up both stories of the left half of the building's facade:

The materials used in the construction are a big part of what makes the building so exciting. Instead of sourcing virgin concrete or quarrying new stone, the vast majority of the building is made either out of the stones and concrete that were deconstructed from the previous building, or from rammed earth and site-made concrete from the materials excavated to dig the cellar. And the textures of the new building's materials are one of my lasting memories of my visit. In the below photo, you can see the rammed earth walls that surround the olive courtyard, with another repeated element of the construction: views of one element from another (in this case, the vineyards outside):

A second example of that same idea -- to connect the different spaces visually -- is shown in the next photo, looking from the entrance into the cellar:

One more photo of textures and materials, before I move to the fermentation and aging spaces. This is the entrance stairway, showing the site concrete, which absorbs CO2 as it cures. I read a review of the architectural style that described it as "monastic" which I thought was evocative. There's a timelessness in the spaces, a connection between cool, dark insides and warm, earth-colored exterior courtyards, that hearkens back to the monasteries that dot the Mediterranean landscape.

The ecclesiastical feel to the architecture isn't restricted to the materials. The underground rooms are vaulted like Gothic cathedrals, and the lighting is marvelous. This room will be an aging room, with bottles stacked on each side of a central corridor:

The old bottle storage space has been reimagined as the cellar dedicated to their barrel-fermented whites. The vaulted ceilings are highlighted by new lights:

One of the goals was to create multiple spaces where guests could taste. They don't have a traditional tasting room at Beaucastel, but welcome thousands of visitors, mostly trade, to the property each year. I spent a summer there in my youth where helping with these visits was one of my responsibilities. I can attest to how valuable it will be to have different areas with different ambiance where they can bring different groups for their tasting. They even have small vault dedicated to their Hommage a Jacques Perrin wines, like a royal chapel tucked away on the edge of a larger cathedral:

In the lower level of this cellar they have left a window through the walls into the layers of soil -- a mix of calcareous clay, loam, and pebbles -- that makes Chateauneuf-du-Pape such a coveted terroir. I framed the photo with the edges of the window in view in the hopes that you can feel how much the materials of the construction are in fact the earth in which it was dug:

The exit back to the surface is dramatic as well. The warm Mediterranean light suffuses the stairway back to the Olive Courtyard, reconnecting you with the region's famous color palette:

Back in the courtyard, work was proceeding like a hive of activity, with a team of Portuguese tile specialists installing the walkway around the olive garden:

For me, it was inspiring to see Beaucastel be reimagined in a way that feels so timeless. I spent the beginning of my visit trying to remember what had been in a particular place before the construction, but I have a strong feeling that once everything is done and the interiors complete it will be almost impossible to imagine it having been put together any other way. That this renovation was also achieved in a way that is so conscientious about its use of resources also feels fitting. From construction materials repurposed from the construction itself, to the cisterns that will keep the cellar cool with minimal use of refrigeration, to the water harvesting and reuse that will allow it to use less of scarce resources, all this feels appropriate for an estate with such a long tradition of environmental sustainability.

Most importantly, the building feels appropriate for Beaucastel. The Perrins are remarkable in the degree to which they balance a reverence for tradition with a relentlessly innovative approach. And this building embodies that duality. It thinks about the next century while embracing an aesthetic that feels of the region and appreciative of its history. It is of the earth while also being light in its impacts on the earth. It should be a marvelous place to make wine, and to experience its magic.

How cool. 

Footnotes:

1. If you're unfamiliar with how our two families got together back in the late 1960s, my dad tells the story in a blog from 2014.
2. I think it's very likely that some of the thirteen traditional Chateaueuf-du-Pape grapes would have gone extinct if not for Jacques' efforts to find all the ones that had survived into the 1950s and bring them back to plant at Beaucastel. I chronicle those stories in my Grapes of the Rhone Valley series on this blog.

To Infinity (Bottling) and Beyond -- a New Era for Tablas Creek Wine Boxes

By Chelsea Franchi

Tablas Creek is well-versed in the meaning of partnership.  After all, in business and practice, we are a partnership ourselves.  This winery was built upon the personal and professional relationship of two esteemed families: the Perrin Family of Chateau de Beaucastel and the Haas Family of Vineyard Brands.  This initial partnership not only shaped our present approach to business but also serves as a guiding principle in nurturing future collaborations.  We take great pride in the work we put forth in the vineyard, the cellar, and the business, so any ancillary associations we forge have some high standards to live up to.

In addition to taking pride in how we conduct ourselves with others, we prioritize sustainability and recognize the profound impact our actions have on the planet.  In 2022, we released our first wine packaged in the bag-in-box format.  This radical decision was driven by several factors, many of which Jason has outlined in previous blog posts (also here, here and here) but at its core was reducing our carbon footprint.  Bag-in-box packaging offers an impressive 84% reduction in carbon emissions compared to traditional glass bottles.  However, venturing into the realm of boxed wine presented challenges due to our smaller production scale.  Dry goods (the bags and boxes) are difficult to source at a reasonable minimum order quantity and companies that have traditionally filled bags for boxed wine are built to run tens of thousands of bags in a day.  We were able to source packaging supplies from a company that works with our scale and we purchased a small semi-automatic filling machine, enabling us to launch our boxed wine program.

After six successful runs during 2022 and 2023 of the three colors of Patelin de Tablas, we decided it was time to increase production so we could send a small number of boxes out into the market (so you may now see them on the shelf of your favorite wine shop!)  This expanded production meant we needed to find a packaging partner with expertise in bottling; as much as we'd like to keep everything in-house, we simply don't have the time to do it all ourselves.

We'd been in close contact with the team at Really Good Boxed Wine - a high-end boxed wine project started in 2021 - and their guidance was an invaluable resource as we navigated our way through this new-to-us world of boxed wine.  Jake, the founder of RGBW, connected us with Infinity Bottling in Napa Valley, as they had recently invested in a bag-in-box filling machine that would be able to accommodate our production amounts.

Infinity Bottling in American Canyon

A few months, some Zoom meetings, phone calls, and countless emails later, we loaded portable tanks of the 2023 Patelin de Tablas Blanc onto a temperature-controlled semi-truck bound for Infinity Bottling.  On the day of the boxing, I drove up to tour the facility, observe the boxing run, and meet the Infinity crew in person.  It was well worth the trip.  The facility is gleaming and maintained with obvious care, the team is small and tight with strong leadership at the helm, and the quality control is continuous, consistent, and robust.  The team's efficiency and expertise ensured a seamless boxing process, giving us peace of mind knowing our wine was in capable, caring hands.  Partnering with Infinity Bottling underscored our commitment to working with companies that share our values of excellence and integrity while simultaneously reflecting our dedication to delivering only the highest quality wines to our customers.

Here's a little of what the process looked like (compare, if you'd like, to what it looked like when we were doing it in-house):

The semi-automatic Torr filling machine manned by a bottling expert at Infinity

Tablas Creek 3L boxes getting sealed shut

Finished 3L boxes are packaged in case boxes and palletized for shipping

This journey has led us to outstanding partners and immersed us in a community of like-minded individuals striving to redefine industry standards.  If you're curious about that community, check out the new Alternative Packaging Alliance, which we and six other brands formed earlier this year to help spread the word on this customer-friendly, low-carbon package.  Whether it's reducing the carbon footprint of packaging, elevating the quality of boxed wine, or maintaining impeccable standards in the packaging process, we're thrilled to be part of this exciting and transformative movement.  We've found some excellent partners, indeed.

Patelin Blanc in a 3L box and its bottled equivalent

Solar Powered -- in Ways You'd Expect, and in Ways You Probably Wouldn't

[Editor's note: a couple of weeks ago, when I was on the road, Director of Marketing Ian Consoli put together a social media post about our energy use. I realized that it told a story that we'd never fully addressed on the blog. So I expanded it into this.] 

One way or another, nearly all the energy we use as a society comes from the sun. The question is just whether we’re going to harness its current output, or the past output as stored by ancient plants and turned over time into coal, oil, or natural gas. So, as a business which is concerned with its impact on the environment, you have to wrestle with two questions: how to use less energy, and how to choose the sources where that energy comes from. At Tablas Creek, we're trying to approach both choices thoughtfully.

Before even thinking about sources of energy, it's important to look at how you can use less energy overall. After all, there's a reason why the EPA warns you against solarizing your inefficiencies. Even renewable energy comes with costs, both in hard costs of manufacturing and installation, and in opportunity costs in other projects that don't get done. So, how do we use less energy overall? Here's a short list. Our winery and office are entirely outfitted with motion-sensitive lights. We use 100% electric forklifts and quads powered by our solar array. In 2020 we built a highly insulated night-cooled, solar-powered wine storage building to store our on-site inventory and reduce trips to outside warehouses. We forward-stage our wine club shipments so that they can be shipped ground rather than air and still get to customers with two days or less transit time. Our cellar is extremely well insulated and utilizes night air exchange. We have individual heating and cooling coils in most of our fermentation (and some of our aging) vessels, including the wooden upright tanks you see front and center when you come to our tasting room:

Now for some things you might not expect. Packaging accounts for half the carbon footprint of the average winery. Carbon footprint is, essentially, a proxy for energy use. We’ve used lightweight glass for nearly 15 years, which alone reduces the total carbon footprint of a winery by between 10% and 20% depending on the weight of the glass that they were using before. We’ve sold our wines to restaurants and wine bars in reusable, zero-waste stainless steel kegs for even longer. Those kegs, even with the return shipment to California for washing and reuse, result in a 76% reduction in carbon footprint compared to glass. And, of course, over the last couple of years we’ve been putting our Patelin de Tablas wines in 3L boxes, in large part because they have an 84% lower carbon footprint than the same wine packaged in glass (photo credit to my wife Meghan, who brought one of our new Patelin Rosé boxes on a weekend trip recently).

As for the energy we do use, we've decided that solar is the way to go. If there is a resource we have in abundance in Paso Robles, it’s sun. Our 320 days of sun each year are a key part of why it’s such a great place to grow wine grapes. It also makes producing our own energy a great option, with an ROI of less than 10 years. We have four solar arrays, installed in 2006, 2015, 2019, and 2021. These arrays total 245kWp in capacity, and in 2022 produced 102% of the electricity we used to power our winery, office, and tasting room (we don't yet have the total from 2023 but expect to do even better given the more limited need for cooling in that cooler vintage). Using renewable energy, generated on site, means that you basically eliminate the 11% of the average California winery's carbon footprint that comes from energy use (chart below from the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance): 

Finally, one last unexpected way we use the sun’s energy to power our operations. Don’t underestimate the power of photosynthesis. Every square inch of leaf is like a little photovoltaic cell. Our regenerative farming prescribes avoiding bare ground and using cover crops. The plants we grow, both the grapevines in the summer and the cover crops in the winter, capture the sun’s energy as the power source that turns atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbohydrates. Our flock of sheep is the next stage in this energy transfer, eating grasses and ground cover and transferring 80% of that biomass to our soil, where it powers the vineyard without needing to bring in fertilizer or other inputs.

Our sun has been shining for some 4.5 billion years, and has another 5 billion years to go. There isn't a more reliable source out there. Leaning in and learning how to use it? That seems the safest, and most sustainable, bet we can make.

Thinking about the Box in Which we are Thinking Inside the Box

By Ian Consoli

I remember the day Proprietor Jason Haas came to me with the decision to allocate a portion of our 2021 Patelin de Tablas Rosé to release in the Bag in Box (BIB) format. We had addressed the idea in multiple managers' meetings, so it wasn't a surprise, but we had a quick turnaround ahead of us. On a short timeline, we picked up a standardized, cardstock, square box, printed the same label we would put on a bottle, and wrapped it over two sides of the box. While we all knew we could make a bigger statement from a design standpoint, our belief in the concept outweighed our worry about the aesthetics. We turned to the old adage of don't let perfect be the enemy of good and carried forward.

The launch, as you may already know, was incredibly successful. Another day I will never forget was releasing 300 3L BIBs in an email and watching the website traffic go off the charts while Jason saw the sales pinging away. We were walking back and forth between our offices with our hands on our heads in jubilant exasperation to the oft-frequented term, "bonkers!"

300 boxes filled with premium wine at $95 a piece sold in four hours without a single comment on the lack of design on the box. Yeah, bonkers.

We released 400 more, followed by the 2021 Patelin de Tablas Blanc and 2021 Patelin de Tablas red. Noting the program's success as we entered the second year of releases, we knew we wanted to expand the BIB program from our mailing list to retail shelves. As Jason highlighted in this blog, there were significant barriers to scaling the program up. We just had to figure out how to work around them.

So begins the next chapter in our premium BIB story.

Jason told the story of our boxed wine success as the keynote speaker at the 2023 DTC Wine Symposium, noting the positive reception in the DTC market and the current limitations preventing us from offering these boxes to wine shops requesting them.

Afterwards, Jake Whitman of Really Good Boxed Wine (RGBW) approached us. While we and other wineries had worked to build the reputation of premium BIBs in the DTC market, Jake and RGBW had been paving the way for a premium category of BIBs on retail shelves. He thought there might be a way for us to collaborate to solve some of the issues we addressed and work together to develop the category.

We worked with the team at Really Good Boxed Wine over the past year to expand production and design a box that would stand out on retail shelves nationwide. We are happy to introduce that box to you now, along with its benefits:

Design: The previous version of our boxed wine made sense for our current customers. Our wine club and mailing list know who we are; they read our reasons for releasing the wine, know the wine is good, and see the benefits of the BIB packaging. What does it matter what the packaging says when the contents are what you want?

This is not the case when it comes to retail shelves. We needed a box that would speak for us. One of the significant benefits of a box is the real estate on which we can share information. This contrasts with a wine label, where information must be limited. We used an entire panel to summarize the key benefits of the BIB format from one of our blogs, effectively communicating with a consumer who might not know who we are or why our BIB wine is priced differently from the BIBs they are used to seeing.

Shape: RGBW noticed retailers placed their earlier boxed wine designs in, well, the boxed wine section. A $70 BIB targeting a premium consumer in a section where budget shoppers are looking at $15, $20, and $25 BIBs is not competitive. In response, their team designed a box the width of a burgundy bottle. That size allows them to fit alongside wines in bottles in the premium category where they belong. It also means it will be easier for consumers to identify high-quality wine in BIB.

Shipping: The benefits are not all for the wholesale market. Our early trials revealed an issue with shipping multiple BIBs. An initial three-box limit proved too many, as the boxes would crush each other en route to their location, arriving in a dismal state. We then limited purchases to two boxes, shoving craft paper all around them to protect them. The presentation was as hodge-podge as it sounds.

Jake and his team developed shipping boxes specifically for this BIB design. They have grids that hold each box in place for one-packs, two-packs, and three-packs. Thanks to this change, we can now increase our limit back to three BIBs per customer!

Perception: We knew our original design was not a long-term solution. Premium wine in a box should feel premium, and this new box does. It is sturdy, has a clean design, and communicates our message of sustainability. We chose black ink on cardstock (similar to our case boxes) to ensure the recyclability of the packaging. This package will stand out on retail shelves and look nice in the fridge.

We plan to release about 950 boxes of the 2023 Patelin de Tablas Rosé in its newest package (Check those emails) and around 800 to retailers in California and a few other hand-selected states soon. These retailers (many of whom commented on our social media posts or responded to our emails to express interest), represent a test that, if successful, could lead to us rolling these boxes out more broadly around the country in 2025. We don't want to be the only ones talking about the benefits in sustainability, shelf-life, and space that boxes offer, and this gives us a chance to activate the network of cool independent retailers and hopefully even a few restaurants!

That national program will launch later this month, so feel free to contact us if you hope to find the boxes near you.

It only makes sense for me to conclude this blog post by thanking the team that made it all possible. The resources given freely by Jake and Michelle at Really Good Boxed Wine are on a level indicative of the most hospitable of the wine industry. With a rising tide lifts all ships mentality, they are to be admired. I strongly encourage you to find their wines near you or order online. Oh yeah, and the wine is Really Good.

This time of year, a vineyard's approach to sustainability is clear

If you've ever wondered whether the vineyards you see are farmed chemically or organically, this is the season to check here in California. In an organic vineyard (or at least, one that doesn't use herbicides) mid-winter should show a carpet of brilliant green between, under, and around the grapevine rows. Something like this, which I took out at Tablas last week:

If instead what you see looks like neat stripes of green and brown, you're looking at vineyard rows where the ground has been sprayed with herbicide. It's harder to tell in the summer, because it's standard practice to remove the weeds under vine rows so they don't interfere with the free passage of wind and light among the ripening clusters. Organically farmed vineyards just do that work mechanically instead of chemically. But at this time of year, when you see a vineyard that looks like this, you know what's happening:

There's no guarantee that a vineyard that isn't using herbicides is farming organically. Plenty of vineyards have moved away from glyphosate and other systemic herbicides but continue to use (or at least hold out the option of using) chemical pesticide or fungicide. But I'm not aware of any vineyards for which the opposite is true. Weed control is the easiest piece of moving to organic viticulture in a place like Paso Robles. If they're not doing that, the chances of them controlling insects or fungal pressures non-chemically is in my experience pretty remote.

As for the wineries who have moved away from glyphosate, even if they're still not ready to certify, good for them! I see lots of evidence that we've made progress in the last decade. It used to be, as I drove out Vineyard Drive toward Tablas Creek each day, that nearly every vineyard I'd drive by would have bare ground under the grapevine rows, even in February when the hillsides are vibrant green. Now, it's more like half. That's a sea change in approach. And it's driven by a growth in understanding in the role of soil in farming. Soil, after all, is more than the grains of mineral and organic matter that make up what we call dirt. One of the most fascinating talks I attended at the recent Tasting Climate Change conference was by Marc-André Selosse PhD, Professor at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. He pointed out that in a single gram of healthy soil there are one million bacteria, thousands of species of fungi, hundreds of amoebas, and tens of millions of virus. These microbes are turning rocks and minerals into nutrient building blocks while fungi are doing the same thing with organic matter. Insects and worms are digesting and mixing the layers. All this allows soil to integrate organic matter from surface plants, resulting in soils that have their own healthy ecosystem. Eliminating the plant layer at the surface strips the soil of the building blocks of fertility, decimates the microbial and fungal populations in the soil, and allows for its compaction, further reducing its ability to absorb and retain water. 

I have hope that we'll see more change coming soon to California. The recent announcement by Napa Green, probably California's most influential sustainability certification, that they'll require vineyards to move away from glyphosate if they want to maintain their sustainability certification, has made a major splash in industry groups. Of course, you're probably wondering if a winery that's been using glyphosate should ever have been able to claim certified sustainable status. And that's a fair point. I've made it myself. But that highlights how widespread its use has been, that in order to get wineries into their programs and then move them little by little to more sustainable practices, every one of the 20+ sustainability certifications in California has until now allowed the use of glyphosate.

Will wineries move to other non-glyphosate herbicides? Perhaps. It's still cheaper to spray with herbicide than it is to remove weeds mechanically each year. But that difference is small in a place like Paso Robles, where the rain stops in April or May and once you remove weeds they don't typically regrow. I am hopeful that other certifications will follow Napa Green's lead, and require that their certified sustainable vineyards will be required to take this first step away from chemical farming. And that this step will lead to more wineries moving toward holistic systems like Biodynamic and Regenerative Organic Certified.

Will they? Each February, you'll have a chance to check in and update your report card. Just look for the brown stripes of dirt.

The quest for sustainability: wine's "yes, and" moment

In improv comedy, there's an important concept called "yes, and". In essence, it means that you're taking what your team has done previously and building on it. This is important in improv because it's unscripted: you don't know what's going to come before, but it's your job to keep up and build the momentum. The website of the famous Chicago-based comedy group Second City has a great summary of its importance in the improv world:

A large part of improv is that you are always there for your scene partner or partners, and, in turn, they are always there for you. This is the goal of “Yes, And”! By saying yes to your scene partner, you create something much more entertaining. If you start a scene by saying that you are an alien, and your scene partner completely commits to also being an alien, being abducted by an alien, etc., both of you know you can count on the other person. On the other hand, if you start by saying you are a puppy, but your scene partner says “Wait, I thought you were a cat!”, the scene is compromised. Not only do you feel less confident, but also the audience is less entertained.

As the same page points out, "yes, and" has applications in real life as well, to the point that it's become a business school staple. I was reminded of the concept's relevance twice recently. The first time was when I shared on my various social channels my excitement at the news of Karen MacNeil's announcement that she was no longer going to accept wine packaged in heavy bottles for review. The responses fell along the lines that you would probably predict. The significant majority (about 80%, by my rough count) cheered the decision as an important step for a writer using her platform to nudge a tradition-loving industry in a positive direction. I got a few responses from the right wing fringe (maybe 5%) complaining that this was nothing more than virtue signaling and that things like carbon footprint and climate change were a hoax. But I also got some responses that while this was positive, it was of secondary importance to other environmental issues in grapegrowing, winemaking, or wine marketing. A few of the issues mentioned in these comments were pesticide use, the carbon footprint of wine tourism, and the prevalence of single-use packaging.

Now it's possible that these weren't good-faith comments in the first place. Deflections to other problems have become a favorite tactic of the anti-environmental lobby in recent years, with the goal of muddying the discussion of any particular solution and forcing proponents to defend their proposals against one idea after another. But these responses got me thinking. 

The second occasion recently where I was reminded of the importance of "yes, and" was at last week's Tasting Climate Change Conference in Montreal. The event was inspiring. We heard from experts in viticulture, resource use, and the soil microbiome; discussed the changes that wine regions have already observed and the best projections for what things will look like in another generation; and debated the best way forward for packaging, certifications, appellations, and grape varieties. I sat on a panel with a local importer and a representative from the SAQ (the province-wide monopoly on wine and liquor sales) to discuss the role that producers, importers, and retailers can play in moving the wine community toward a more sustainable future. A core piece of what I discussed was our experiment in recent years in releasing a high-end boxed wine due in large part to its more-than-80% reduction in the carbon footprint of the package compared to four glass bottles and the capsules, corks, and labels they require.

To begin my presentation, I wanted to establish that this experiment was not done in isolation, but instead part of a fundamental approach to how we conduct our business. Across our departments, we focus on making choices that have the fewest possible negative repercussions and the greatest possible positive impacts on our people, our land, our community, and the broader environment. I've written about most of these initiatives here on the blog, including: our longstanding commitment to organic and biodynamic farming; our move to lightweight glass; our embrace of kegs in our wholesale sales and our tasting room; our replacement of plastic water bottles with reusable canteens; our reduction in tillage; our move toward dry farming; the growth of our composting and biochar programs; and the installation of a wetland to treat our winery wastewater. One of the reasons we love the Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) program is because it's both rigorous and comprehensive, with meaningful requirements in soil health, biodiversity, resource use, animal welfare, and farmworker fairness. I fielded as many questions about our farming approach, or our commitment to our people, as I did our packaging.

That's why, to me, the deflections about there being other pressing issues in the world of wine beyond carbon footprint ring hollow. Addressing one issue doesn't mean not addressing another. Should you be using lighter bottles? Absolutely. Your customers will appreciate it, you'll save your winery significant money, and you'll reduce your overall carbon footprint by between 10% and 20% depending on the bottle you were using previously. But should you also move from conventional to organic farming, or from organic to biodynamic or regenerative farming? Also yes. You'll feel better about not exposing your land, your people, and your neighbors to chemicals. You'll improve your soil's resilience and its ability to withstand extreme rain events, heat spikes, and drought. And you'll almost certainly make better wine. How about coming up with new ways of connecting with your customers that don't require you to fly all over the country or them to fly out to see you? Also also yes. You'll save money and realize that the initiatives that you came up with allow you to reach a much higher percentage of your current (let alone potential) customers than you were able to before. I could go on.

If you don't believe that carbon footprint matters or that businesses have a responsibility for the carryon effects of their choices, I'm not sure that any of this will matter to you. But for the rest of us, this isn't a time to think of these challenges as either-or choices. Adopt a more comprehensive approach. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Get started, and adjust as you learn more.

Yes, and.

We Celebrate a Meaningful Honor: the 2023 California Green Medal for Environment

Last week I made the long drive up to Saint Helena to speak at Napa RISE, the event created last year by Napa Green's Anna Brittain and Martin Reyes, MW to bring focus to the urgency and opportunity the wine community has to address environmental issues like climate change, resource scarcity, and inequality. The first paragraph of the event's mission statement resonates with me:

The climate crisis is no longer imminent. It is here. It is not someone else’s problem. It is ours. Fires, drought, heat spikes will continue to strike our industry. Coming together as sustainable winegrowing leaders is no longer optional, it is imperative.

It was a huge honor for me to be invited to give a keynote speech in the heart of Napa Valley on the work that we're doing at Tablas Creek. Given Napa's long tradition at the epicenter of American wine, it's more common that speakers and ideas travel the other direction. But I think it was a reflection that we've made a commitment to sustainability central to who we are and that we've been willing to share our experience with others. We have the ability (and, I believe, the obligation) to make positive changes on the 270 acres that we own. But the reality is that this is just a tiny fraction of the acreage used to grow grapes in California. If we can inspire other people to make changes, even incremental ones, across the 615,000 acres of wine grapes in our state, that's where the impacts really start to be significant. And if wine can help lead the way toward greater sustainability within agriculture more broadly, which I think is possible, that's even more impactful. This photo from Napa RISE, where I'm flanked by the event's two founders, was taken just after my talk (note the elated relief): 

The opportunity to share what we're doing with a wider audience is the reason I'm particularly proud of having received our second California Green Medal a few weeks ago. The Green Medal program was created in 2015 by the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance to encourage and spread the word about the state's wine-led push to make grape growing and winemaking more environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable. There are four awards given each year, one each for innovation in a winery's environmental efforts, in a winery's community involvement, and in its business practices, as well as an umbrella award for demonstrating vision and leadership in promoting sustainability in all three categories.

We received the Community award back in 2016, and this time around I was hoping for the Leader award. But I'm thrilled that we received the Environment award. The CSWA produced a beautiful video in which they announced us as the award winner:

The effort of distilling down the most important lessons from our 30+ year quest toward sustainability into a 40-minutes talk helped me group our efforts into four main areas:

Farming. We've been organically farmed since our inception (certified since 2003), farming Biodynamically since 2010 (certified since 2017) and Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) since 2020. While we've continued the earlier certifications, what we love about ROC is that it is a rigorous and scientific but holistic look at the farm ecosystem. You are required to take actions that build healthy soils rich in organic matter (think cover crops, incorporating grazing flocks, composting, biochar, and reducing tilling) while also building biodiversity and developing natural controls over things like pests, weeds, and fertility. You are required to measure the impact of your choices to show that they're having the desired effect. And you're required to invest in your farmworkers -- the team that has their boots on the ground and their hands on the vines -- through paying living wages and providing ongoing training.

Resource Use. The resources that a vineyard and winery is most dependent upon are water and energy. We've invested in conserving both. For water, we've established roughly 40% of our planted acreage wide-spaced and dry-farmed, while weaning the older, closer-spaced blocks off of irrigation. In the cellar, we've converted most of our cleaning from water to steam, and capture our winery waste water in a wetland area that allows us to reuse it while providing habitat for birds and amphibians. Overall, even in a dry year like 2022 we use something like 80% less water per acre than the average Paso Robles vineyard. After a wet winter like our most recent one, we'll use even less. For energy, we've installed four banks of solar panels -- the first back in 2006 -- which together produced 402,906 kWh of energy in 2022, or 102% of our total energy use. After all, if there's a natural resource we have in abundance in Paso Robles, it's sun.

Packaging. The biggest revelation for me in the first carbon footprint analysis I did here was that packaging (and shipping, which is largely dependent upon your packaging choices) together make up more than half the carbon footprint of the average California winery. That realization is what has driven us to lightweight our bottles, to invest in kegs for wholesale and our tasting room, and to make our first forays into boxed wine. It's also why we've been looking harder at how we get our wine to our customers. The carbon footprint of air shipping is something like seven times greater per mile than ground shipping. So we've been looking to refrigerated trucks to bring our wine club members' wines to warehouses in Missouri and New York, from where they can go ground rather than air to members nearby, all without having the wines sit in transit. Win-win.

Advocacy. As I mentioned in my intro, we want to be the pebble that starts an avalanche. That means choosing to support organizations and events (like the Regenerative Organic Alliance and Napa RISE) that make inspiring change a part of their mission. It means hosting workshops here -- both for other growers and winemakers and for the general public -- where we share what we do. It means being a resource to other vineyards and wineries who are interested in following us down this path. And it means communicating why we're making the choices that we're making, whether that be here on the blog, in our consumer marketing through email and social media, or in the voices that we amplify through our partnerships and our conversations. It also means investing in the certifications, not just the practices, to help those certifications and the practices they support make it into the mainstream.    

It was interesting for me, after going back to how we communicated sustainability when we received our last Green Medal in 2016, to see how much the conversation around sustainability has changed. At that time, we essentially presented a laundry list of all the things we were working on in the categories they asked about: water use, soil & nutrition management, pest management, biodiversity & wildlife conservation, energy efficiency & greenhouse gas mitigation, human resources, solid waste management, and neighbors & community. Since that time, we've seen organizations spring up -- most notably for us the ROC program, but also the International Wineries for Climate Action and Porto Protocol focused directly on mitigating wine's contribution to climate change -- that are coordinating best practices and assembling coalitions so that membership means committing to a thought-out, coherent collection of practices. For example, anyone with an ROC seal on their label will have implemented gold standard practices within farming and resource management, as well as in animal welfare and farmworker fairness. You don't need to go through a checklist and wonder, for example, if they're conserving water as well as eliminating synthetic chemicals, or paying their workers fairly as well as embracing solar power. The rise of these organizations means we're not each making it up as we go along, and doing our best to communicate why this matters. We have a village at our backs.

One thing that hasn't changed: seven years ago, I commented that I thought the wine community was uniquely positioned to lead California agriculture toward sustainability. I still believe that's the case. Grapevines are very long lived, so vineyards can invest in long-term solutions. Most vineyards and wineries are family-owned, so there's the incentive to conserve for the future rather than just to chase the next quarterly profit. Wine is a value-added product, where the efforts we make toward sustainability -- which generally result in longer-lived vines and better grapes -- can be rewarded by higher prices in the marketplace. And the tools we have, through email, social media, and blogs like this one, give us unprecedented access to our customers and the chance to share why we believe that the sustainability investments we're making are important and offer value to them.

There are so many ways that a winery can move toward a more sustainable future. As I finished my Napa RISE talk by saying, that can feel paralyzing. But none of us should feel intimidated by all the ways that we can work toward sustainability, or even better, regeneration. No one should feel like they're failing if they don't invest everywhere. But there are no free passes, either. As Napa RISE reminds us, it's no longer optional. It's imperative.

Need another incentive to move to lightweight glass? How about $2.2 million over 14 years?

In recent months we've been thinking a lot about alternatives to the glass bottle. We've been focusing on reusable stainless steel kegs for sale to restaurants and wine bars and for our tasting room. We've put our first few wines in boxes, and received an enthusiastic response. That's important; finding packaging for wines that allow us to forego the bottle entirely is a key part of moving wine to a more sustainable future. But the reality is that no one has come up with a package that's comparable to glass for wines that are meant to age. Its combination of inertness, impermeability, durability, and track record means that most of our wines are likely to remain packaged in glass for the foreseeable future. That's why I'm so happy that we made the call back in 2010 to move to lightweight glass for all our wines.

Lightweight glass has a number of advantages. It takes fewer raw materials and less energy to make. It weighs less empty and full, so cases require less fuel to transport. You can fit more pallets on a truck before you reach the truck's weight limit. It makes bottles that are easier to pour and fit better in most people's wine racks. And according to the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance, a winery can reduce its total carbon footprint by 10% just by moving from average glass bottles (around 23 ounces each) to lightweight glass (around 16). If they instead are using a heavy bottle (something like 30 ounces, and there are even heavier bottles out there) the savings are even more substantial: something like 22%. From the CSWA's report:

All those are good reasons to move to lighter bottles. And those, along with the perception that our packaging was out of step with the environmental initiatives we'd implemented in the vineyard, are pretty much the reasons we did so. From a blog I wrote in 2010:

As we thought about the challenge and looked at bottle after bottle we came to the conclusion that the aesthetic idea that a broader, taller bottle is higher quality may be becoming a relic of a more profligate age, in the same way that it's easy to imagine a future where the luxury SUV -- for a time the epitome of solid, prosperous respectability -- carries an ever-greater implication of environmental tone-deafness.

For all that we knew that lighter glass costs less to make and transport, that consideration wasn't central to our decision. So when I was asked by a writer last week how much we were saving by using lighter glass, I needed to calculate it. When I did, I didn't believe what I had learned. That decision, back in 2010, has saved us something like $2,236,346 over the last 14 years. To come to this figure, I looked at just two sources of cost: what we pay for the bottles themselves, and what we pay to ship the filled bottles to our customers via UPS and FedEx. First, a little then-and-now. In our pre-2010 period, we were using two different bottles. One was a somewhat-lighter-than-average bottle, around 19 ounces, which we used for around 80% of our production. The other was a big, impressive, heavy bottle, modeled after the one used at Beaucastel, that weighed 31.5 ounces and which we reserved for the Esprit de Beaucastel, Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc, and Panoplie. We put about 20% of our production in that heavy bottle.

Looking back at our invoices that show what we paid for our new 16.5 ounce bottle vs. what we were paying for the previous bottles gives us the first figure. When we made the move, we paid $0.60/bottle less than the heavy bottle, and a little more than $0.06/bottle less than the mid-weight bottle we had been using. At our average 30,000 case/year (360,000 bottle/year) output, that produced a savings of $43,440 per year for the 20% of our production that had been packaged in heavy glass, and $19,760 for the 80% of our production that had been going into the mid-weight bottle. Add them up, and that's $63,200 per year in savings on glass purchases.

For the shipping, we looked at what we're charged by UPS and FedEx to ship our wines to our customers. It's not as simple as just calculating the reduction in weight, because shippers charge based on a combination of package dimensions and weight, but there are still significant savings. The average cost increase to ship mid-weight bottles vs. our current lightweight bottles would be about 5%. The average increase were we to ship heavy bottles (which weigh 30.6% more full than our current bottles) would be 16%. Last year, we spent $1,340,820 on shipping wine. It's our single largest expense after payroll. Adding 5% to our costs of shipping the 80% of our production that was in mid-weight bottles would increase that bill by $53,633 per year. Adding 16% to our costs of shipping the 20% in heavy bottles would add another $42,906. Together that's $96,539 of additional shipping costs that we'd be incurring now if we were still using the bottle mix we were in 2009. 

Add the $63,200 to the $96,539 and you get $159,739 per year. Over 14 years that adds up to $2,236,346. Wowza.

It's worth noting that this almost certainly understates the savings. Glass has gotten more expensive over the last 14 years, so the difference between lighter and heavier bottles has likely increased. I didn't try to calculate the difference in truckloads of palletized wine going our for distribution or to our shipping fulfilment provider. I didn't add in the greater physical footprint needed for the larger cases that are needed for larger bottles. And we were only using heavy bottles for 20% of our wine. If we'd been using 100% heavy bottles and had made this switch, our savings would have calculated out at $446,211 per year.

It seems like we're reaching a tipping point on moving toward lighter glass, driven by advocacy within the industry (from groups like the IWCA) and from press (shout-out to Jancis Robinson for being at the forefront). I'm hopeful that wineries are doing this from a genuine commitment to sustainability. But if they're not, there are other incentives out there. Millions of small, green, rectangular ones.

What's the most useless glass bottle? One that never leaves the winery.

Last week, I walked out of my office on my way to the mezzanine level of our cellar, on which we keep a few cases of each of our bottled-but-not-yet-released wines. I was looking for samples of our 2022 Patelin de Tablas Rosé, 2022 Dianthus, and 2022 Vermentino, to write tasting notes for our website in anticipation of the wines' release announcements. 

[Pause for a moment. Hooray for new wines! We've never been as scarce on wine as these past couple of months. I am always excited for the release of our rosés, but it's all the more exciting this year. If you've been looking disconsolately at our online shop as I have, wishing most of the wines didn't say "sold out", the cavalry is, at long last, on its way.]

I got about halfway to the mezzanine before I realized I didn't have to open a bottle. I took a right turn into our tasting room, walked up to the new tap system we installed last month, and poured myself tastes of each of the three wines out of keg. No bottle necessary.

We're long-time advocates for wine in keg. I wrote back in 2010 on the blog about how much potential the format had, but how frustrating it was that the industry hadn't settled on a standard for keg size and connection yet. By 2013 things had evolved enough that I could celebrate the launch of a national keg program for our Patelin de Tablas, Patelin de Tablas Blanc, and Patelin de Tablas Rosé. And in 2020 we expanded that with small batches of kegs of some of the wines normally only available in our tasting room. Why we're excited boils down to three main reasons:

• Freshness: The wine that is poured out of a keg is replaced by an inert gas, which means that what remains in the keg isn't exposed to oxygen. A bottle, on the other hand, starts oxidizing as soon as it is opened. Roughly half the glasses of wine I order at restaurants show some signs of oxidation... but not if they're served from keg.
• Less Waste: Restaurants expect to dump out the unused ends of most opened bottles at the end of each night, and the rest of any bottle that's been open multiple days. This adds up; restaurants I've spoken to estimate they may waste 25% or more of their glass pours this way. Keg wines are good down to their last pour.
• Sustainability: The bottles, capsules, corks and labels that help preserve, identify and market a wine between barrel and glass are temporary enclosures, that will be discarded when the bottle is consumed. That's a lot of resources tied up in something whose only purpose is to be used and (hopefully) recycled or (more often) thrown away. Kegs eliminate all this wasted packaging. When they're empty, they get returned to be washed and reused. Free Flow Wines, our partner in our national kegging program, recently shared the results of a study showing that reusable stainless steel kegs offer a 76% savings in carbon footprint vs. packaging the same wine in bottles. 

In 2022, our distributors sold roughly 640 of our kegs to restaurants and wine bars around the country. Earlier this week we shared a photo of our new tap handles on social media, and got a lot of excited customer responses and a few inquiries from accounts interested in pouring the wines on tap. Perfect.

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If you're a regular reader of the blog, you will know that we've been working to be more selective about our use of glass wine bottles. If not, you might be wondering why we're looking for alternatives, given that it's a package with thousands of years of history, made from a product that should be endlessly recyclable, and still the best vessel for long-term aging. Here's a quick summary. Because glass is energy-intensive to mine and mold -- and heavy and fragile to ship -- it accounts for more than half the carbon footprint of the average California winery. It's also bulky. You can reduce glass's packaging footprint by about 20% by moving to lightweight glass, which we did in 2010, but that's still 350% of the footprint of a lighter-weight package like bag-in-box. We've been experimenting with that, and while I think it's a step in the right direction for some wines, it's still a single-use package, requires the creation of some plastic, and isn't great for storage much longer than six months. The glass bottle would be less problematic if it were recycled reliably (it's not; the glass recycling rate in the United States is a dismal 31%) and could become a preferred solution again if we could figure out some sort of wash-and-reuse system along the lines of what soda producers do in Latin America. There are smart people working on this, but the logistical hurdles are daunting and it still seems a long way off. So while we don't expect to move our ageworthy wines out of glass bottle, we've been looking for ways to help at the margins.  

Kegs, filled through our partnership with Free Flow, accounted for 12% of the total volume of wine that we sold wholesale last year, and meant that more than 16,000 wine bottles, capsules, and corks/capsules/screwcaps, plus the cardboard needed for more than 1,300 cases, never needed to be created. That's not negligible. But what about our tasting room? We welcomed more than 28,000 guests for tastings last year, and we sell about the same amount of wine there as we do in wholesale. Those guests got six or seven tastes of wine each. Do the math on that and that's a bottle of wine for every four tasting room guests, or enough wine just for guest samples to fill 7,000 bottles. Add in that we taste each bottle when we open it to make sure it's sound, that we use the same bottles to pour by-the-glass wines in our tasting room, that we often discard the ends of bottles rather than hold them overnight for the next day, and that, to ensure that guests get only fresh wine, rarely-poured wines get sent home with our tasting room team after a few days even if they're mostly full, and you end up with a significantly larger number: the nearly 13,000 bottles that we signed out of inventory as tasting room samples in 2022.

Let that sink in a bit. We used more than 1,000 cases of wine just to pour tasting room samples. Some of those pours were of older wines, where their time in bottle would make a difference in how they showed, but nearly 70% of what we sampled out was used within a year of when it was bottled. That's ~9,000 bottles that were sourced, shipped to us, filled, closed, labeled, opened, poured, and recycled within a year. 

So I'm pleased to announce that we've sourced kegs, filling and cleaning machines for the cellar, and a modular dispensing system for the tasting room. At each bottling, we'll be setting aside a portion of each wine, putting it in keg. Last week's batch:

The initial reviews we've been getting from our tasting room guests have been enthusiastic. So, when you next come to taste with us, know that many of the samples we'll share with you will come out of our own kegs. As each keg is emptied, we'll wash and sterilize it, and then reuse it for a future wine. A photo of the setup, in use this morning:

We're not expecting to ever get to 100% wine service from keg in our tasting room, and that's fine. We always want to be able to offer wines with bottle age for tasting and sale, and while kegs are outstanding at preserving wine, after a year or so we would expect that the wine from keg would taste different than the same wine from bottle. We'll be trying some small-scale experiments this year to confirm or modify those assumptions. But if we can shift two-thirds or more of our tasting room sampling and glass pours from glass to reusable keg, that's a win. A win for our guests, who don't have to worry about oxidation in their samples. A win for us, since we're estimating we'll go through something like one-third less wine, and we don't have to worry about those pours coming from corked, oxidized, or otherwise flawed wines. And a win for the planet, as thousands of glass bottles and all the associated packaging no longer have a reason to be created.

After all, if glass is a problematic container for the industry at large (don't just take my word for it; the mainstream press has noticed) it seems downright crazy to use it for such temporary storage.

Hugelkultur in a Vineyard: A Permaculture Experiment

By Jordan Lonborg

One of the best parts of working at Tablas Creek Vineyard is that any idea that pertains to organic, biodynamic, or regenerative agriculture is on the table for discussion. During a harvest lunch, Assistant Winemaker Craig Hamm spoke with Winemaker Neil Collins about a hugelkultur project he’d started at his home, and the wheels started to spin. I had no clue what this term meant or where it came from. It was easy to find out about, though! The concepts of all forms of permaculture are fascinating and fit into Tablas Creek's recipe book quite nicely, using nature to enhance nature.

Hugelkultur (a German term that loosely translates to English as “mound culture”) is a form of permaculture developed in the late ’70 s by a few Austrian horticulturists. Essentially, hugelkultur is a form of a compost pile that uses wood logs as the base of the pile. The logs are then covered by smaller wooden materials (leaves, straw, prunings, etc.), compost, and a last layer of soil to cover the mound. This then breaks down over time, producing a massive mycorrhizal fungal mat (inter-connected fungi that have the capability of breaking down organic matter and creating a symbiotic relationship with living plant roots acting as a conduit for nutrient cycling) that provides nutrients and moisture to any plants on or near the area.

This form of permaculture is typically used for raised bed landscaping and/or vegetable gardening. We wanted to implement this method between grapevine rows. As we started to discuss where and how we could implement this at Tablas, Neil decided that these beds belong in our wagon wheel planting of Counoise:

This location seemed perfect for many reasons. First, the block is a showcase planting based on biodynamic principles, with the rays of the planting shape acting as vectors to help beneficial insects move throughout the block. Hugelkultur should facilitate this. Second, from the start, our idea was to set this block up as a no-till, dry-farmed planting to see, on a reasonable scale, if no-till dry farming was possible in our dry, hot Paso Robles Adelaida District climate. Because we aren’t planning to till this block, the hugelkultur can sit undisturbed. And third, this block is at one of the lowest points of the vineyard, surrounded by hills. Any water that runs off these hills ends up here. Hugelkultur, like any composting system, requires moisture.

We decided to develop sunken hugelkultur beds on either side of a grapevine row. Since the vineyard block is already planted, we couldn’t start at surface level. But these sunken beds have the added advantage of allowing us to capture runoff while providing moisture to the Hugelkutur.

We used a mini-excavator to dig a 3’-4’ trench on either side of a grapevine row. Our first sign that we’d made a good choice: even after a very long, dry, and hot growing season, there was a lot of moisture still trapped in the ground at the bottom of our trench.

Next, we filled 2’ of depth along the entire length of the trenches with oak logs. We followed with a layer of young compost (just started during harvest this year) made up of grape skins, pumice, rachis, grapevine prunings, oak wood chips, leaves, and hay. Then, we added a layer of finished compost made during last year’s harvest. Next, we pumped grey water, recaptured from the winery drains and can be pumped into a water truck, into the trenches to moisturize the hugelkultur. Finally, we covered the trenches with the material we removed when digging them.

In the next month or so, we’ll broadcast some cover crop seed and/or a beneficial seed mix blend to cap this process off. We’ll be looking for signs that the nearby rows show better health and vigor than the rest of the block. If the project is successful and we see positive signs in our grapevines, we will continue the trenching, creating two more hugelkultur rows annually.

Whether or not this will work remains to be seen. The fact that there was still a lot of moisture in the soil after a brutally hot summer provides some hope. We will keep you posted.

Source: https://vegogarden.com/blogs/academy/how-to-fill-raised-garden-beds-and-save-money