An appreciation of one of the most ambitious and exciting wine dinners I've hosted... and the remarkable Master Sommelier behind it

I just got back from two weeks on the east coast. This most recent week I was in Washington DC representing the members of WineAmerica, meeting with the offices of our senators and representatives, advocating for policies that will help American wineries. The week before, I was in New York, spending three days working with our Vineyard Brands team members there and hosting two evening events that were open to the public. The first was a lovely wine tasting at a very cool wine shop in Manhattan's Waterline Square neighborhood. The second was maybe the most ambitious and exciting wine dinner I’ve ever done.

This remarkable four-course, fourteen-wine dinner was organized and hosted by the incomparable Pascaline Lepeltier at her restaurant Chambers in Tribeca. If you don’t know Pascaline, she is one of the world’s most celebrated Master Sommeliers. She oversaw the Michelin-starred wine program at Rouge Tomate in Manhattan before opening her own restaurants. She was named Best French Sommelier in 2018, has represented France in international contests and earned fourth place at the ASI Best Sommelier in the World Competition in 2023. She’s an outstanding follow on social media, whose advocacy for and interest in the world’s under-recognized wines led her to publish the terrific book One Thousand Vines, published in both French and English and named a New York Times Best Wine Book of 2024.

Yes, I’m a fan.

So when, a few months ago, Pascaline agreed to host a Tablas Creek dinner at Chambers, I couldn’t have been more excited. That excitement grew when I learned the format that she chooses for her wine dinners. Each course is crafted to tell a different piece of the winery’s story, and Pascaline likes to feature three wines at a time, offering small pours of each to keep from overwhelming guests while allowing a deeper dive into the winery’s portfolio. She hosts the dinners at a single long table at the front of the restaurant. I’ve written about why I think communal tables are such a positive asset for a wine dinner: they bring people together, encourage deeper conversations, and emphasize the community-building capacity of wine. Let me take you through Pascaline’s orchestration of our dinner.

Scene 1: Welcome. As the participants arrived, they were greeted with a glass of our Dianthus. Yes, it’s a relatively rare wine in wholesale, but up to this point, nothing extraordinary, But it breaks the ice, and gives the group (all singles or doubles) a chance to get to know each other a bit before the first food course is served.

Scene 2: A Diversity of Red Wines. For our first food course, Pascaline chose a deceptively simple dish of spaetzle, mushrooms, and green garlic, and paired it with three of our small-production varietal red wines: our 2020 Cinsaut, 2020 Vaccarese, and 2021 Mourvedre. This gave me a chance to talk about our connection to the Perrin family, Jacques Perrin’s quest to bring all the traditional Chateauneuf-du-Pape grapes to Beaucastel in the 1950s, and our ongoing work to bring them into California. Showing these three rare monovarietal wines side by side was a treat.

Scene 3: Esprit de Tablas Through the Years. The next course was a classic southern French dish: a boudin blanc sausage with sunchokes and lightly pickled ramps. The wines were three vintages of our Esprit de Tablas: our current release from 2022, and two vintages out of our library: 2015 and 2013. The 2022 was youthful and exuberant, while the 2015 showed the weightless elegance I have always noted in that extreme drought year and the 2013 was starting to show some of the mature characteristics of leather and meat. The deep dive into our flagship wine allowed me to talk about our blending process, how we adjust to different vintages, and how different grapes play greater or lesser roles depending on the year.

Scene 4: A Diversity of White Wines. The main protein course was a lovely fillet of black sea bass, with broccoli rabe and a tangy meyer lemon hollandaise. Like the first course, it was paired with three of our small-production varietal wines, but on the white side: 2021 Picardan, 2021 Bourboulenc, and 2023 Grenache Blanc. We introduced all three grapes to California viticulture through our grapevine nursery, and it included our rarest: Picardan, which is so scarce that when we planted our half-acre in 2013, it increased the world’s total Picardan footprint by 40%. Putting these rare varietal bottlings in such a high-profile position in the dinner encouraged the guests to take them seriously, and they were up to the task, with all three showing vibrant citrus notes that bounced off the hollandaise and gave relief to the enveloping richness of the fish. A masterpiece.

Scene 5: Esprit de Tablas Blanc Through the Years. Unlike most wine dinners, which move from white to red, Pascaline chose this menu to begin with reds then move to whites. She did so largely because of this pairing. She wanted a cheese course and believes that cheeses are better matches with white wines than reds. The cheeses she chose (Pleasant Ridge Reserve from Uplands Cheese Company in Wisconsin and Reading Raclette from Spring Brook Farm in my home state of Vermont) were lovely in their own right. They also provided outstanding foils for three vintages of our Esprit de Tablas Blanc. The first was the current 2022 vintage, evenly balanced between the beeswax and poached pear richness of Roussanne and the brighter notes of the five other higher-toned varieties that make up the blend. The older wines, from 2015 and 2012, showed the rewards of aging Roussanne into its caramel and hazelnut maturity.

Scene 6: Wine Dessert. I find often that after multiple courses and multiple wines, a substantial dessert is often too much. In fact, in the two other dinners that I hosted this week, I only ate a bite or two of each dessert. Pascaline solved that problem by serving the dessert wine as the sweet course in itself. For a wine, we provided our 2018 Vin de Paille Quintessence, made from 100% Roussanne. It’s a beautiful wine anyway, but having it be the full show rather than a sidekick to a dessert allowed it to shine in all its glory.

Scene 7: Aftermath. We were two and a half hours in, but no one was ready to leave. So after the last wine had been poured and the dishes cleared, Pascaline’s team put all the fourteen bottles back down the center of the table, with about a third of each bottle left, and everyone revisited their favorites. By this point, the table had become a single unit. Everyone was sharing stories and enthusiasms, comparing notes and making plans to get together again. By the time people started to leave, it was 11:30pm and only after we got several photos together.

The dinner had a quiet confidence to it that is quintessentially Pascaline. The food wasn’t showy, but it was delicious. All of the dishes were restrained enough to let the wines play a starring role. The pacing was flawless, with wines poured first, giving me a chance to introduce them, and then the food appearing as if conjured from the kitchen the moment I started to wind down.

Contributing to the evening’s easy flow was its modest quantity. I didn’t get up from the table feeling overstuffed, or over-wined. That’s a surprising rarity in wine dinners, in my experience. Most of them pour too much wine and serve too much food. I always feel bad sending back my plates half-eaten and my glasses half-drunk, but if I consumed everything that was served at most wine dinners, I’d need assistance walking out. At this dinner, I finished every bite and every drop of the small (one ounce) pours and felt perfectly satisfied.

But ultimately, as I reflect, what made the dinner so compelling was its intimacy. I’ve done much larger dinners, as many as 110 people. This was a table for twelve. But at twelve it didn’t feel underpopulated. Instead, it felt curated, personal, and human-scaled. Twelve is pretty much the maximum number you can put at a single table and expect everyone to be able to talk to everyone else. And that was what this felt like: a conversation rather than a performance.

Here's to more intimately-scaled wine conversations in 2025. Thanks, Pascaline, for lighting the way.

Social media used to be a lousy way to promote wine events. Then we started thinking of it like we were a band on tour.

Last year I started thinking differently about one of the ways that we use social media at Tablas Creek.

What spurred it was my own effort to get out and see more live music now that our kids are getting older and are mobile on their own or out of the house. I realized as I started following more of my favorite bands on Instagram that one of the most useful types of posts was the tour update so I could see at a glance where they were going to be and when without having to go to their website and do the research.

So, we launched the #TablasOnTour series where we share where we’ll be the next 6-8 weeks every month. Here's the one we're sharing today:

It’s been fascinating to see the reach of these posts, which are typically double the reach of our standard social media posts diving into farming or winemaking, and roughly quadruple the reach of posts talking about any individual event we’ll be participating in. Diving into the analytics, it’s all because of shares: people seeing an event they might want to attend and sending the post to friends or family they’d want to go with. Those shares are further augmented by the partners we're coordinating the events with, who share the post to their audience. Beyond the eyeballs that see these shares, Instagram has prioritized shares and comments over views and likes, so these sorts of interactions encourage the algorithm to organically show the post to more people.

It's worth noting that posts on individual events are among our lowest-performing posts, to the point that we've just about stopped doing them. There are good reasons why these sorts of posts typically struggle to connect over social media. An event is an inherently participatory thing. Whatever the event is that you're promoting, the audience that is going to be interested is limited by geography, timing, and format. A wine dinner in Cincinnati, Miami, or San Francisco? Probably not appealing unless you live in that specific city. An event that already happened? Sure, some of the 80-or-so people who attended might chime in with how fun it was, but how many of those are going to see it on your social media? Not a lot, and it's hard to interest someone who didn't attend in an event that's already concluded. An upcoming blending seminar at the winery? Better, but still, most of the people you reach probably aren't going to be free on that afternoon. (Note: if you are free, our 2025 blending seminar is on Sunday, April 27th, and it's going to be super fun.)

Because these sorts of "on tour" posts aggregate the interest in each of the events that they list, they largely avoid the "only interesting to a small percentage of your audience" issue that drives down the success of individual event posts. What's more, they are visible, shareable gestures of support for the restaurants, wine shops, and organizations that are hosting us around the country. These posts build goodwill among our partners as well as driving interest and attendance at the events themselves.

Before we launched the #TablasOnTour series, we were mostly promoting the events we participated in via our email list. We would draw a radius around the event location and send out a geographically-targeted email to mailing list members within that radius. And we're continuing to do this. There's nothing like appearing in someone's inbox letting them know that you'll be in their neck of the woods. But geo-targeted emails aren't a perfect solution. Imagine a wine club member who will be on vacation near where we'll be hosting an event. There's no way we can know to send them an email. Or a friend who works for a local winery with friends or family in the event's location, who might be able to pass along news of something interesting happening. We are trying to avoid having all our promotional eggs in a single email basket. 

What's more, if we're trying to attract younger wine lovers, we can't rely principally on email, as there's good data that while younger consumers all have email addresses, it's not how most of them prefer to receive information. Add that to the increasing push by email providers working to keep promotional emails out of their users' inboxes, and we know that emails are less likely than ever before to reach their target audience. Sharing the same information across multiple channels helps us know that the information is more likely to get to the audience who will want to see it. 

This moment in wine feels like an important one to rethink how we promote events. All the wineries and wine organizations that I speak to share stories about how they're having to work harder to drive event attendance. But at the same time, getting out and showcasing your wines is one of the tried and true ways for a winery to promote itself. I know that we've never been working harder to take the Tablas Creek story on the road; we already have 26 events on our calendar between now and just the end of June. There are huge incentives for us to spread the word.

Until recently, social media wasn't helping this push much. Now it is.

Creating a New Legacy (Tasting) at Tablas Creek

By John Morris

Wine can feel complicated a lot of the time. So when we can, here at Tablas Creek, we’ve tried to keep things simple. Remember the days of elbowing up to a crowded, standing bar with just one tasting list available? That was the experience anyone visiting Tablas Creek had until about 2015. Sure, we would customize based on guests’ requests, getting special wines out of the back room, but the starting point for this personalization was the same for everyone. Personally I love going to a restaurant where there’s just six or seven entrees on the menu. It's a statement of belief in who you are, and can create a more purposeful, curated experience. And for a long time we felt pretty much the same way about our tasting. Why complicate things when we’re confident in who we are and the pedigree and classic composition of our wines?

But as time went on, options at other wineries proliferated, and we started getting requests from guests asking why we didn’t have a “reserve” tasting. We would explain that our standard tasting included our flagship wines, and that we were, in effect, giving everyone a reserve-level tasting, but you could almost hear the customers’ doubts over the phone. So we put our heads together and tried to figure out what an elevated tasting experience at Tablas Creek should look like. We ended up offering two, to compliment the standard bar tasting that was still what the vast majority of our customers chose. The first was a Seated Flight Tasting, which customers reserved in advance and for which they chose from a mixed (red and white) flight or a flight of all red wines or all white wines. The second was what we called our Collector’s Tasting (after the VINsider Wine Club Collector’s Edition), which was in essence a vertical tasting of our flagship Esprit de Tablas wines.

If the Seated Flight Tasting sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because it became our standard offering when we reopened outdoors after our Covid-mandated closure. Giving guests their own space felt safe as we all started reintegrating with the world in a new pandemic-changed environment. Serving our wines in two flights meant that we weren’t in our customers’ space all the time. And the chance to compare and contrast among wines meant that guests got a great picture of what we made. We believe that making this elevated experience the standard tasting for most guests is a huge improvement, as it seems to offer something for everyone. But one of the casualties of Covid was that we paused the Collector’s Tasting at the same time, and just never brought it back.

Why didn’t we bring the Collector’s Tasting back sooner? There were two reasons. One, we were selling through our older Esprits and were having a hard time keeping enough inventory to pour six different vintages of Esprit. Two, even though we loved this tasting, as did many of you, somehow it just never fully resonated with the public. I can’t tell you how many times guests booked this tasting and then asked something like, “Why are we tasting 6 of the same wines? And only reds?” Our takeaway was that while this tasting was ideal for our some of our existing fans who knew the Esprit de Tablas story and wanted a deeper exploration of that wine, it was too specialized to satisfy all the visitors looking for a premium experience, and not a great introduction for people visiting for the first time.

Last summer, we decided to take another crack at offering an elevated experience. We took the shortcomings of the Collector’s Tasting to heart, and created a new experience that offers something beyond the regular tasting, while giving a more complete look at the breadth of our wine and who we are. We christened this new experience the Legacy Tasting. In this tasting we offer a chance to delve a little deeper into our portfolio and focus on our top blends. The current Legacy Tasting includes both a young and an aged Esprit de Tablas, a young and aged Panoplie, an Esprit de Tablas Blanc, and other treats that change depending on the season. If you’re a member, or someone who visits often, you probably know the Panoplie is quite limited in supply, and has never been poured in the tasting room with some rare exceptions. Over the last eight months we’ve hosted about 730 legacy tastings, and the response has been outstanding. Our wine club team hears regularly from members who signed up for Legacy tastings and loved them. Our tasting room folks are equally enthusiastic. As Senior Tasting Room Manager Charlie Chester said today, "it's the tasting that best tells the Tablas Creek story."

If you haven’t had the chance to experience a legacy tasting, we’d love to host you. For those who are not members yet, this special tasting is $75 per guest, each tasting waived per $250 purchase. For members of our Collector’s Edition wine club, a complimentary Legacy Tasting for two is a member benefit, available once per calendar year. For our other members this is $40 per person, also waived with a $250 purchase. This is bookable online for up to four guests. If you don’t see a time that works for you, or if you would like a splurge for a larger party, please reach out to us at [email protected] and we'll do our best to accommodate you.

We’d love to have you be part of our legacy at Tablas Creek.

200% tariffs on European wines would be extremely dangerous for California wineries

In 2019, I wrote a blog explaining why proposed 100% tariffs on European wines would create a cascade of negative impacts on American wineries, and shared the letter I submitted to the Office of the US Trade Representative in opposition to the plan. In the end, the tariffs didn't come to pass, either then or the following year when the threat was renewed. Well, even more substantial tariffs against European wines are now again on the table, and some of the hot takes in response have been badly off base. I responded to one of these hot takes on Threads, from journalist Christina Binkley, who has written on the business of culture and style for outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Town & Country, and Vogue:

To her credit, Christina posted a response owning up to the mistake after reading the responses she received. And I'm not posting her initial piece to pile on. But I've heard a variation of her take from lots of people outside the world of wine and wanted to dive a little deeper into why I am convinced that tripling the price on European wines would have negative spillover effects onto those of us who make wine here in America.

I'll start with the direct impacts. These tariffs post an extinction-level threat to importers of European wines. A thread by importer Lyle Fass, proprietor of Fass Selections, laid out the math. Tariffs are taxes due from the importer to the US government at the port of entry. Importers would be on the hook for double what they've paid for any wine that they order, including wine already paid for and in transit:

 

Let’s talk about the financial catastrophe these 200% wine tariffs will create. Not in theory but in reality.

In my case, the $350,000 worth of wine I have coming in September? I’ve already paid for it. That money is gone. Now I have to pay a 200% tariff just to bring it into the country. That means coughing up another $700,000 overnight.

That’s just me. Now imagine what this does to the entire industry.

Fine, I hear you asking, but how is this bad for a California winery like Tablas Creek? I see the danger in three areas:

• We are dependent upon wholesalers, all of whom sell both imports and domestic wines. We sell about half our production through a network of state-licensed wholesalers. This distribution system is mandated by law. A producer like us cannot sell directly to restaurants and retailers in other states, and our ability to sell directly to consumers, while growing, is still restricted. So, our success is dependent upon the health of this distribution network. None of the 50+ distributors that we work with represents exclusively domestic wines; all have a diverse portfolio including wines that would be impacted by the proposed tariffs. Many get the majority of their business from European wines. A significant number are also importers. For those importer/distributors, the proposed tariffs amount to a death sentence. For the distributors with a mix of imported and domestic wineries, sales will fall, perhaps dramatically, limiting their ability to buy our wines. To save money, they will lay off salespeople, limiting their ability to sell our wines. Could American wines fill in the gap? Not for years. The production of American wines is currently about 300 million cases. Consumption of wine in the United States is about 375 million cases. It takes roughly five years for new plantings to produce grapes, be fermented and bottled, and eventually reach the market. By the time that American wines could make up the difference, the damage to wholesalers would be done.
• Our exports, which have been a growing piece of our mix, would likely be subject to retaliatory tariffs. We've already seen this play out in Canada, whose provinces have responded to the on-again-off-again threats to impose across-the-board 25% tariffs by pulling all American products off the shelves of the province-wide monopolies that are the only legal outlets for wine in the country. We have already received cancellations of confirmed orders to Quebec and Ontario. If European wine is targeted in a new round of tariffs, it's very likely that American wine will be on the list of reciprocal targets. While export markets aren't a huge piece of our business, we've been investing in them in recent years and have been rewarded with significant growth. Last year we spent a little over $42,000 to grow our sales in our export markets, including visits I've written about on this blog to Asia, to Canada, and to Europe, and saw our export sales grow from $78,000 in 2023 to $175,000 in 2024. We expected additional growth in our export sales in 2025. Those prospects are looking shaky.
• The uncertainty is already inhibiting investment in an American wine ecosystem that is under record strain. I have heard from several distributors that because of the uncertain climate around tariffs this year that they're holding off on hiring new staff, bringing in new inventory, or taking on new suppliers. That impact is hard to quantify, but I know it's cost us at least one opportunity with a high profile distributor and it's reduced the coverage of the distributor teams we do work with as many are trying to make do with fewer salespeople to cover their existing network of accounts. And the distributor network is already under dangerous levels of strain. The country's two largest distributors, Southern Glazers and RNDC, have both executed multiple waves of layoffs in recent months. Constellation Brands, the country's fourth-largest wine company, is reported to be exiting the wine sphere entirely. If a major producer or distributor should declare bankruptcy the cascade of impacts on their suppliers and customers would almost certainly cause other failures.

Would tariffs hurt European producers? Absolutely. But because of the legally-mandated channels that alcohol must be distributed through, Americans would be hurt more. The US Wine Trade Alliance has calculated that for every $1.00 in damage tariffs would inflict on the EU, they cause $4.52 in losses to American businesses. 

That $4.52 in losses doesn't include the losses in export sales by the imposition of reciprocal tariffs, or the damage to the international reputation of American wine, which could be both sharp and lasting. Canada has been California wine's largest export partner for decades, at a total value of over $1 billion last year. The recent tariff dispute has already created a boycott of American wines (and other products) that will likely render the market less welcoming even after any trade issues have been resolved. It's taken decades to build up the international reputation for American wine. That goodwill can disappear fast, as evidenced by these signs now posted in the American wine sections of Ontario's LCBO stores:

But would there be a larger piece of the pie here for California wineries? Not much of one, I don't think. As I mentioned above, the additional capacity here is finite. It's also not clear that American wines would be the first choices for replacing the lost business from European wines. At the low end, the likely substitute for European wines would be wines from other New World countries like Chile, Argentina, and Australia, all of which do better in the under-$15 segment than American wineries. At the high end, the places that wines come from are inseparable from the wines' identities. An Oregon Pinot Noir isn't going to smoothly replace a Grand Cru Burgundy, nor is a California Nebbiolo going to replace a Barolo. Classic wines aren't commodities produced by formula from specific grapes, that could be grown anywhere. My guess, based on what we saw last time, is that at the high end, there would be a period where restaurants and retailers scavenge inventory from warehouses around the country, and then sales would drop sharply as buyers wait and hope the tariffs are rescinded. We might see a few new placement opportunities but those benefits would be overwhelmed by the disruption in our distribution network.

I also think that the long-term impacts would be negative for the broader world of restaurants and hospitality. The restaurant business is never easy. It's famously low-margin, with half of all restaurants closing within 5 years. Wine offers restaurants an area where they do make good margins, and while I have my complaints about that model, I still want restaurants to be successful. Can a neighborhood Italian joint replace its inexpensive Chianti with a California Sangiovese? Probably not when that grape represents less than one-half of one percent of the red wine grape acreage here in California. Instead, they probably sell more cocktails or beer and less wine, and the wine they sell will be more expensive and less good, as they trade down to find the cheapest available wines that fit the category they're looking to fill. That will make restaurants more expensive, discouraging customers from dining out and from including wine when they do. Would there be some additional opportunities for California wines, either in new placements or in the opportunity to raise their prices? I'm sure there would. But the resulting higher prices of wine to restaurants and consumers would drive people to other categories of alcohol and to other non-alcohol options, with negative impacts to the category over both short and long term.

All of these economic costs to wineries and the wine ecosystem are serious. It's also worth noting that it would mean the end of an era for the American wine consumer. For nearly a century, the United States has enjoyed the world's most dynamic wine market, with vibrant domestic wineries in every state and the world's best selection of imported wines. That has led to the flowering of wine culture here and allowed the wine market to grow from about 4 bottles per person per year in the 1950s to the roughly 15 bottles per year that are enjoyed today. It has vaulted the United States to its position as the world's largest wine market, the home to two-thirds of the world's Master Sommeliers, and an appealing destination for generations of winemakers, both domestic and international, who settle here, like us, with dreams of making wines that will compete on the world's stage.

Are these tariffs a serious proposal, or just a negotiating tactic? I hope it's the latter. [Editor's note 3/21/25: Yesterday, the European Union announced a two-week delay on the imposition of the tariffs to which the 200% tariffs on wine were a response. That is a sign that both sides are looking for negotiating time. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.] But the reality is that even the discussion of them has negative consequences for American wineries. Their implementation would usher in a new era with much greater and more unpredictable dangers. If this is an issue you care about, please reach out to your federal representatives and let them know. Sometimes an eye for an eye really does make the whole world blind.

Lessons from My "Be Your Own Influencer" Panel This Week

This past week I made the long drive up to Sacramento to be a part of a panel at the California wine community's most important trade show, the Unified Grape and Wine Symposium. The panel was titled "Be Your Own Influencer" and was organized and moderated by superstar somm and (yes) influencer Amanda McCrossin, aka @sommvivant. Joining me on the panel was a great cross-section of wineries (and one writer) who Amanda had flagged for doing a good job of creating follow-worthy content. From left, after me, Samantha Cole-Johnson of JancisRobinson.com, Marcus Marquez of Brasswood in Napa Valley, Damian Doffo of Doffo Winery and MotoDoffo in Temecula, and Amanda herself.

The panel discussion was terrific. I was taking notes myself as I was listening to the other members of the panel share their approaches, their challenges, and their surprises. That's one of the things that I love about the wine community: its openness to sharing what works. I think that's in part because of the sort of people who wine attracts as a career, but it's also helped by the fact that wine isn't a zero-sum product. Hardly any wine lovers buy from just one winery. So helping another winery do better doesn't make a customer less likely to buy from you. In fact, I've always thought that if someone buys wine from one of our neighbors, or someone else in the Rhone community, or someone who farms regeneratively, that makes them more likely to buy from Tablas Creek. That makes it easy to want to participate on panels like these.

Now that I've had a few days to reflect on the panel, I thought it might be interesting -- and potentially even helpful -- if I shared a few of my take-home lessons. These are, in essence, the things I've come to believe are important if a winery wants to be successful in social media. Some of these are probably intuitive and we've been trying to implement them for years, but others are ideas that were crystallized by the discussions before and during the panel. While I'm intending these for other members of the wine community, there's very little that's wine-specific so they are hopefully applicable to a wide range of consumer-facing businesses. 

• Be authentically you. If there was one most important message of the panel, it was this. Amanda began by asking the audience to think about how they say hello to customers and guests in person, and then to think about if that's consistent with what they do online. I hadn't thought about it in exactly that way before, but ultimately, that's what social media does at its best. It personalizes a business. It shares the experience of a product with people who might not be able to be there in person. And there are as many ways to do this as there are personality types. Some wineries (Brasswood was a great example of this) lean into humor. Others (like Doffo, with their connection to motorcycles) lean into adventure. Others, like us, lean into education. And there must be dozens of other approaches that work. But any good approach will be authentic to who you are as a brand.  
• Include at least some video content. People connect to other people. And there's no better way to have your personality come through than on video. This doesn't mean that it's the right approach to only produce video content. That might work for some influencers, but it's probably not going to be right for a business. Video can be a lot of work to produce, and there is certain content that neither requires or benefits from it. But if a business is putting together nothing but still photos or carousels, it's probably not going to be doing a great job of personalizing itself. The social media algorithms also prioritize video content in many situations. Amanda was quick to point out that no one feels comfortable on video at first, and not to let that scare you off. I can second that. But there's nothing like talking to your audience. It's worth pushing through that initial discomfort.
• Don't feel you need to make it polished. Related to the last point, all the panelists agreed that you didn't need to be producing something that felt glossy. That doesn't mean that it's fine to post things that are sloppy or inaccurate. We all talked about the value of scheduling tools and having someone else on our teams to read and edit the work that we put together. And Sam was quick to point out that her own content, which represents an iconic journalistic outlet, needed to be fact-checked and edited even before she sits down to film her weekly segment. But the audience wants to connect with you. If your content comes across as slick, that can make it harder to relate to. Similarly, that's why obviously staged photos (think the ubiquitous "wine still life") tend to do less well in social media feeds than posts that feel more like they could be plucked from the audience's lives.  
• Post regularly. There isn't a hard and fast rule here. We were the only winery on the panel that makes a point to post something every day. But you want to be consistent. You wouldn't reach out to a friend twice a week and then go dark for a month. A good post a few times a week is a great start, and within the capabilities of pretty much any business. That said, I would advocate for posting at least every other day. Most users check their social media daily, at least. You're competing for mind share, and you lose a little bit of that share each day you don't have content in the feeds your customer is scrolling through. 
• Collaborate. You wouldn't want to spend much time with a friend who only talked about themselves, would you? So figure out ways to create content that becomes a conversation. Maybe that's a joint post with another winery, or a writer, or an attraction. Maybe it's an Instagram Live conversation like the series that I started when Covid shut down all our traditional ways of interacting with our customers. Maybe it's something like our monthly #OurSLOCounty series where we ask our team to share three local wineries, one restaurant, and one activity that they love. There's a reason that people call it the "wine community". We're all a part of an infrastructure that includes other wineries as well as restaurants, shops, attractions, and trends. Take advantage of the social media tools, especially on Instagram, that allow collaborative posts and show those posts to both accounts' audiences.
• Interact. We made a commitment a few years ago to acknowledge every comment that we received on all our social media platforms. That's something I see done consistently on most of the best social media accounts I follow. On the one hand, it's simple politeness. But it's also a powerful way to continue personalizing your business. It's not without its time costs, but if it takes us, with our 75,000 followers across four major platforms, a few hours per week, it's within the capabilities of just about any business. I'd add that we've found great value in sharing posts (or stories) that mention us in our stories. Doing so builds your audience, rewards the people who have taken the time to mention you, and is likely to lead to them re-sharing these posts and further bringing new eyes to your feed.
• Come up with relevant series. If this all sounds daunting, I encourage you to think about putting together series that allow you to cycle through content without having to come up with a half-dozen new ideas each week. Some of the series that we've done at Tablas Creek over the last few years (for which we typically try to create a hashtag so people can find the collection from whichever one they first stumble across, and which they can choose to follow if they want) include:
  • The #ConversationWithJason series I mentioned earlier of my Instagram Live conversations with people around the world of wine (roughly every 2-3 weeks, ongoing)
  • The #OurSLOCounty series where we ask our team to share their favorites (monthly, ongoing)
  • The #TablasOnTour series where we share the events we'll be participating in (monthly, ongoing)
  • The new #DogsOfTablas series where we'll be sharing photos and profiles of the many canine members of the Tablas Creek team (monthly, just getting started)
  • The periodic explainer series where I share something cool that I've found in the vineyard or winery, or where I answer a question I've been getting recently (irregular)
  • The #GrapeMinute video series where I distill one minute of essentials on each of the 19 grapes that we grow at Tablas Creek (weekly, late 2022-early 2023)
  • The #GrapeLoveLetter series where we shared the history, growing tendencies, winemaking specifics, flavor profile, and uses of our grapes (weekly, 2021)
• Don't chase virality. This may seem counter-intuitive. After all, don't you want your post shown to thousands (or millions) of potential new fans? But Amanda's advice resonated with our experience. It's often unpredictable what will go viral. The people to whom your viral post is shown may not have a ton of overlap with your target audience or be familiar with your brand. And the post that does go viral may well not be something that would be your choice to introduce people to you. I had the chance to share the example of the below Facebook post of a cluster that we'd thinned to ensure the others would ripen (with the caption "sometimes greatness requires sacrifice") that ended up being shown to more than 2 million accounts. The first 10,000 or so were our fans, which was great. But then it ended up way outside of our audience and attracted lots of comments like "what a waste starving people all over the world" and "All this for alcohol, what a waste of space food and resources." Instead of going for virality, Amanda suggested that wineries think about being as useful and as interesting as possible to their fans. That makes a lot of sense to me.

I'm curious: if you're a part of a winery's social media team, what do you think of this list? If you're a follower of wineries (and if you're reading this, you're a follower of at least one) what do you find most compelling and valuable? We all want to find ways to make wine a more regular and more valued part of people's lives. Social media is likely to be one of the most powerful tools in our collective toolkit.

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.

Why are Rhone white grapes like Picpoul and Grenache Blanc so different in California?

Most grapes have a pretty well defined character. If you read the literature about Cabernet Sauvignon, it will give you a good sense of what it's going to taste like whether the bottle you're tasting is from Bordeaux, or Chile, or Sonoma. Same with Pinot Noir, whether you're tasting from Santa Rita Hills, the Willamette Valley, or Volnay. This isn't to say there aren't regional signatures or a stylistic range depending on the region's specific soils and climate, or the producer's preference for ripeness, oak, or winemaking techniques, but there's still a pretty recognizable through-line irrespective of region. 

So what the heck is going on with a grape like Grenache Blanc? If you read the older literature of what it tastes like from France or Spain, it sounds like an entirely different grape than we know. Take the description of Grenache Blanc in Jancis Robinson's "Guide to Wine Grapes" from 1996:

"...the variety is much planted in Roussillon, where it produces fat, soft white table wines. It need not necessarily be consigned to the blending vat, however, and since the early 1990s, flattering, soft, supple, almost blowsy varietal versions have been marketed."

Is this the same Grenache Blanc that we've found to achieve ripeness at high acids and produce wines with exceptional tension, minerality, and high-toned fruit? It sure doesn't seem like it. How about Picpoul? Here's what Jancis has to say in the same reference:

"It can produce usefully crisp blending material in the Languedoc"

Talk about damning with faint praise. Here at Tablas Creek, and more generally in California's Central Coast, both grapes come with a remarkable balance of medium-to-full body, bright acids, and crystalline fruit. They have different flavors, with Grenache Blanc leaning more toward petrichor minerality and green apple/white grapefruit fruit, while Picpoul Blanc is more tropical, with a saline sea spray mineral character that reinforces its reputation as the Rhone's preeminent oyster wine, but in both cases what we're seeing here is nearly unrecognizable from these European descriptions. Now I will admit that I am stacking the deck a little by looking at older references. In more recent editions, writers like Jancis have started to paint more nuanced portraits, often with a caveat explaining that the grapes show differently in California. So, what do I think is going on? I'd attribute what we're seeing to some combination of four factors:

The specifics of the California climate

When we purchased our property in Paso Robles back in 1989 we thought we'd found a perfect match for the climate of Chateauneuf du Pape. It turned out we had chosen a place that was a bit cooler overall. The mid-summer days are hotter here, yes, but the nights are colder, and in fact more colder than the days are hotter. For example, Monday of this week was the beginning of the little heat wave that we've had. The day topped out at 98.0°F. But the coolest point of the morning was a chilly 48.2°F. That's a swing of 50°F! And it's not just about the low during the night. Those chilly nights mean that the mornings are cool quite late. At 11am it was just 72.8°F, and it only hit 90°F at 3pm. Four hours later, it was back down in the 80s. It's important to remember that it's not just the high temperatures but the duration of the heat (and cool) that matters to grapevines as they ripen their fruit.  

The net result of these cooler average temperatures mean that we pick the same grapes on average about 10 days later than they do at Beaucastel, with slightly lower sugars and somewhat higher acids. If you ask the grapevines whether it's cooler or warmer, they will tell you unequivocally that it's cooler, most years, in Paso Robles than it is in Chateauneuf du Pape. What's more, the differences in soils further differentiate the two terroirs. In Chateauneuf, the rounded river stones known as galets serve to absorb the daytime sun and warmth and radiate it back to the vines in the nights. That was critical in earlier eras because it allowed the region's vineyards to ripen late-ripening grapes like Mourvedre and Roussanne before the rainy season got going in earnest in late October. In Paso Robles we have no such stones at the surface, and our move toward regenerative farming has meant that we're doing everything we can to avoid bare ground and instead focusing on having the sun hit plant material that can absorb it for photosynthesis while guarding moisture and keeping the soils below cooler.

Finally, there is good evidence that calcareous soils preserve acidity in grapes because the omnipresence of calcium ions tends to displace potassium, which grapevines use to break down acids in the ripening process. I dove into that in detail in a blog from 2020. While both Chateauneuf-du-Pape and west Paso Robles have calcareous sub-soils (it's a main reason why we chose to found what would become Tablas Creek here) those soils are closer to the surface here, on average, than they are in the Rhone. I had the opportunity recently to dive into (almost literally) our soils in a recent explainer video posted to Instagram:

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A post shared by Tablas Creek Vineyard (@tablascreek)

Taken together, all these climate and soil factors tend to preserve acidity in wines as they ripen. That allows us to give grapevines longer hang times, which tends to produce wines with more texture and more opportunity to develop well-delineated fruit, which is in turn highlighted by the acids. 

An attention to yields

We're convinced that grapes like Picpoul and (to a lesser extent, Grenache Blanc) are victims of a vicious circle in France. Because they're not much respected and don't command a high price on the market, they tend to be only viable economically if they're cropped heavily. So, they're usually overcropped and then earmarked for quick fermentations and inexpensive bottles, which reinforces that they're of low value. Here in California, we crop them modestly and give them the attention in the cellar they deserve. 

Take Picpoul de Pinet. A quick look on Wine Searcher produces 131 results. Of those, just 3 are listed for more than $20. Several are below $10. For that price, the wine needs to be grown and made, bottled, shipped to America, imported (and marked up), sold to a distributor (and marked up again), and finally sold to a retailer (and marked up a third time). The three markups typically double, at least, the price that the producer receives. Imagine how cheap the grapes have to be to sustain a wine at this price! One of the ways that you can keep grape cost low is to produce more tons per acre. To protect against overproduction, the laws that govern the Picpoul de Pinet AOC specify a maximum number of kilograms per hectare (10,000, or about 4.5 tons per acre) as well as a maximum yield of juice (66 hectoliters per hectare, which works out similarly). And side note: it's amazing to me that at those yields and those prices a grapegrower can earn a living.

A picpoul vine, from below

Compare that, though, to the Picpoul yields here at Tablas Creek. Even if we wanted to increase our yields, the dry climate and often punishing summer heat mean that we've never averaged even 4 tons per acre. Over the last 20 years, our average has been 3.07. That inherently gives you more concentration, while the longer hang time from the cooler climate allows you greater intensity of fruit. Add while the AOC limits are just that -- limits -- the low prices that the wines from a grape like Picpoul have historically commanded has meant that the only way to make a living there is to get as close to those limits as you can.

More focus on whites and the modern fermentation techniques to match

While Picpoul has had the advantage of a regional AOC that mandates its use, Grenache Blanc has not. Instead, it's mostly planted in places where red wines are dominant. Take Cotes du Rhone. Despite significant increases since 2015, white wines only account for 11% of the production there. In Chateauneuf du Pape, as of 2009, the total was even lower: just 7% of acreage was dedicated to whites, and while the most-planted of these was Grenache Blanc, it only accounted for 2.5% of the appellation's total. 

With whites making up such a small part of most wineries' production, it's probably not surprising that in many cases there was not the incentive to invest in the technology -- specifically stainless steel and temperature control -- that we take for granted when making white wines here in California. What's more, picking crews were typically hired to pick at the time the Grenache Noir (which makes up roughly 60% of Cotes du Rhone's acreage and 70% of that in Chateauneuf-du-Pape) was ripe. In our experience, Grenache Blanc is at its best picked about 2 weeks before Grenache Noir. If you're picking Grenache Blanc at the time you've hired your picking crew to pick Grenache, it likely started off a little overripe. If you ferment it in the same concrete tanks and age it in the same old neutral oak barrels that are traditional for the reds from the region, you're likely going to further squander whatever brightness you had when you picked.

Two Grenache Blanc clusters, nearly ripe in August

It's important to note that these two things are changing fast in France now. Many more Rhone producers are focusing on whites, and the old-fashioned cellars without temperature control are much rarer than they were. We've know from our conversations with the Perrins and other Chateauneuf-du-Pape producers that there is a renewed surge of interest in particularly the higher-acid white grapes like Clairette Blanche and Bourboulenc. But the formative era when many of these mostly-British writers were cataloguing the white wines of the Rhone was one in which whites were more likely to be an afterthought.  

The direct-to-consumer customer marketplace

Finally, what a luxury it is having direct contact with the customers who we hope to share our examples of these lesser-known grapes with. We can write stories about them on our blog (for example, see here, here, here, and here). We can share on-the-spot video of visits to the vineyard blocks, as we did in this YouTube short video series. We can announce their release to our mailing list and tell the story of how the wines are made and why people should care.

The direct contact with our customers means that we are not subject to the game of telephone that selling wine in wholesale inevitably becomes. For our wholesale sales, we tell our national marketing agent, who tells their distributor brand managers, who hopefully tell their sales team, who tell the buyers at the retailers and restaurants they call on. It's rare that the message stays consistent through all those links. The challenges involved are why there is typically so much less diversity on display on the shelves at grocery stores and at box retail than there is when you visit a winery. Most larger retailers don't have the time or the staff to talk customers through things they don't know, and so focus on large selections of the major categories.

Economies of scale come into play here too. If we make, say, 150 cases of an obscure white grape, how exactly is that supposed to be divided up among our 50 distributors. Should we give North Carolina, which represents 1.5% of our national sales this year, 2 cases? Or Connecticut, which represents 0.3%, 5 bottles? In either case, that wine will sit orphaned on a distributor's shelves with quantities so low that no sales rep will even pull a sample bottle. Multiply that out by a dozen different small-production wines each year, and thousands of wineries in the book of the average wholesaler, and you start to get a sense of the scope of the challenge.

Instead, we just sidestep the whole issue and reach out directly to the list of people who have over the years shared their contact information with us. We'll often sell out a small-production white in a few weeks after sending out an email. That allows us the confidence to plant it, and the better margins that we get from our direct sales allow us the resources to invest in its import, propagation, planting, and production.

Would we have trouble marketing a $40 bottle of Tablas Creek Picpoul in the national (or international) marketplace? Maybe. It's hard -- though not impossible, if you look at our box wine program -- swimming upstream against the current of what the marketplace thinks a particular grape "should" sell for. But does that mean that a bottle of Regenerative Organic Certified Picpoul Blanc or Grenache Blanc, made with love by the Tablas Creek team from grapevines imported from France, electric with acid and yet with plenty of fruit, shouldn't cost $40? I would argue that they should, and invite you to put one up against a similarly priced example of a more exalted white grape (say a Premier Cru Chablis, or a dry Alsacian Riesling). I think you'll find it will shine.

And maybe it will put the idea to bed that these grapes are fat, soft, and should be consigned to the blending vat.

AI and Wine Marketing – A Current Assessment

By Josh Kaiser

Exploring AI's Role in Wine Marketing

In today's world, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant concept that’s associated only with science fiction; it has seamlessly become a part of our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not. From voice-activated assistants like Alexa and Siri to personalized recommendations on Netflix and Spotify or Grammarly helping edit this blog for grammatical errors, AI is everywhere, doing its best to make our lives more convenient and tailored to our preferences while providing moments of unintentional comedy as we realize the limits of the technology. Marketing is one area that has seen a boom in the use of AI recently, with marketers looking to leverage the tool to streamline their processes and make their content more personalized. With its rise in popularity, I’ve been studying the many uses of AI in business during my time at Cal Lutheran University as well as my previous internship before Tablas Creek. When I arrived at Tablas for my summer marketing internship, Ian (our Director of Marketing) suggested we dive into AI’s potential uses at a winery like Tablas Creek to better understand its capabilities, figure out its shortcomings as well as strengths, and decide if we think AI might be a viable tool in wine marketing.

We thought this info might be useful or interesting to our readers as well.

Image generated by Gemini AI using prompt: "Please tell me what AI software looks like in an image."

State of AI Today

Artificial Intelligence is a field of software engineering concerned with building computers and machines that can reason, learn, and act in a way similar to how a human can, using its access to a vast information database. AI has seen a major rise in popularity over the last several years, and the many uses for AI software have fueled a tech boom over the past few years. From risk assessment in finance, to streaming service algorithms and online shopping recommendations, to more personal uses like designing diets and workout plans, there are thousands of AI programs for just about any need you can think of.

Uses for AI in Marketing

Based on my previous experience with AI systems, I was aware of how easily one can get overwhelmed by the number of options there are out there. To stay focused we took into account all the potential uses we were interested in, and narrowed it down to three main categories of features that seem to be in the broadest use:

• Generating written content such as social media captions, website information, emails, or blog posts. We found AI can generate copy of varying length for all these different channels quickly and easily. Whether you need a catchy Instagram caption or multiple email drafts, you simply instruct the AI software on what you want (for instance, an Instagram caption detailing different Rhone grape varieties) and poof! In seconds, the software scans its vast database and uses its knowledge about Instagram post captions and grapes from the Rhone Valley to generate text that is formatted like a caption and should fit the parameters set. That’s the plus side. There are two negatives, neither insignificant. First, there are still real issues with the reliability of the information generated, especially when working with more obscure topics like unusual grape varieties or topics where information in one part of the world may or may not have relevance in another, such as viticulture or weather phenomena. Quite often, the information generated by the AI was factually incorrect or interpreted in a way that wasn’t quite right. That means that every result has to be checked and cannot be used directly from the software. The second negative was that the language was often full of adjectives and adverbs: flowery and sometimes overdone. There’s a classic bit of writing advice that is “show, don’t tell”. The AI output always skewed toward the “tell” side.
• Generating photos. There are now programs that allow you to input any text and it will generate an image of what you input. While this was pretty impressive, the accuracy was certainly not perfect, and the systems often generate random additions to the photo on top of what you asked for. Think of the photos that circulate online where upon closer investigation people have extra fingers, or the lighting is inconsistent from element to element. One use we were hoping for was to find AI software that would allow us to edit text on an image while keeping the same font – think updating the vintage on a bottle in a lifestyle shot -- but we never got an image that we found convincing. AI still struggles with adding or editing text on images.
• We found that many marketers are using AI to assist in brainstorming ideas for all sorts of different content. A big part of marketing is trying to stay on top of trends and come up with fresh ideas to engage with your audience, and AI should theoretically be a great help in both of those. Instead of the marketing team scrolling through hours of social media posts and websites to try and discover new trends, AI can generate trending topics, hashtags, headlines, keywords, and even titles of trending music for things like Instagram Reels in mere seconds. This can be useful, although a critical aspect is ensuring the system has real time data. Some AI engines do not have up to date databases, for instance before the update in September of 2023 ChatGPT only had data up to 2021, two years behind. Meaning the “trending” ideas it generated would be what was trending in 2021, not current day. Real time data is becoming more and more common, so you probably don’t need to worry too much, but it’s definitely something to be aware of.

Concerns with AI

As with any new technology there are a few concerns that anyone experimenting with AI should be aware of.

• Probably the biggest issue with AI as of now is the information that the programs generate is not yet reliable enough to trust. It’s still necessary to carefully read and make edits to all the content an AI engine puts out. This is exacerbated in an age where misinformation on the Internet is all too common.
• Many systems also do not have data that is current and up to date. While this might not matter for rephrasing text or brainstorming ideas, it can be an important drawback when you’re looking to share information on new research or topics on which there is relatively little data available online.
• The content generated can sound robotic and not flow well, or just have a tone that feels inappropriate to your business. There are now things that can be done to train the AI in a tone or voice to try and avoid this (by giving the software content from a website, social captions, blog posts, etc. you can “teach” the AI your tone and how you write), but it is difficult to fully teach the system a voice, and there will often still be times that it does not come out the way you envisioned.
• Photo generation and editing is still lagging. Sure, AI can turn a text prompt into a photo quickly, but the accuracy was lacking. When generating photos there would always be a few details off, or a few unwanted additions. We hoped to find a program that easily edits text on images, like changing the vintage or the percentages of the grapes in on a wine label in a photograph. This could save needing to retaking photos each bottling. However, we found AI struggles greatly when trying to edit small details of text on images, and in general the photo sector of AI has a long way to go (the picture below illustrates one example of an attempt to change the vintage, as well as blend percentages on an Esprit de Tablas. The system tried to match the font and the size, but as you can see it was not very successful). In fact, strangely-rendered text is one of the surest tells on an AI-generated image at the moment. That said, now that apps like Photoshop and Illustrator are adding AI capabilities, I have no doubt the photo sector of AI will advance rapidly.

Bottleshot adjustment attempted using Canva AI

Pricing

In AI, as in much of life, you get what you pay for. Although the free versions of AI software like Chat GPT get a lot of the press, we found that they are often quite limited. These tools can handle simple tasks such as rewording sentences or generating synonyms quickly. There are also paid platforms such as JasperAI (starting at $40/month per account) or HypotenuseAI (starting at $56/month) which offer more advanced features including generating images or creating automated email workflows. In general, the paid platforms offer:

• A free version or free trial with minimal capabilities and limited trial periods aimed at enticing users to upgrade
• A basic tier, ranging from $10 to $50 per month, suitable for individuals or small teams interested in a few basic tools, with additional capabilities
• A premium tier around $60 to $80 per month, offering more accounts, more features, and increased personalization.
• Some platforms also provide more flexible “business” plans, that advertise “custom” or “flexible” pricing. These are targeted towards larger teams who are ready to heavily invest in AI, and likely offer more robust and personalized capabilities. But these were expensive enough that we didn’t try them out.

One challenge (or opportunity, depending on your perspective) is that at this stage of AI’s life there are a dizzying range of engines to choose from. Do enough digging that you find a software that fits what your needs may be. Then plan to put in the time to train that software to your liking. And expect that in order to access the latest technology, data, and optimal user interface, you’ll likely have to go beyond a free engine or the free introductory version of the platform you choose.

Key Takeaways

AI's ability to streamline tasks and personalize experiences is undeniable, however, as our exploration has shown, there are also notable challenges and limitations, particularly regarding the accuracy and reliability of AI-generated content.

Despite these hurdles, the potential of AI is vast, and its continuous evolution promises even greater capabilities in the future. For now, it's important to approach AI with a balanced perspective, leveraging its strengths while remaining vigilant about its shortcomings. Ultimately, AI is a tool that, when used thoughtfully and judiciously, is already capable of enhancing marketing efforts and providing value to our, or your, audience. But thankfully (as a marketing professional) it seems like it’s going to be a while before it can step in and do our job for us, particularly at a place like Tablas Creek where we value the human touch and authenticity of real experience. If we can use AI to enhance bringing that experience to you, we will. But the journey with AI is just beginning, and we look forward to navigating it together!

Artificial Intern image created by DeepAI using prompt: "Make the person in the image look like a robot"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes:

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