By Ian Consoli Every year, we like to sit with our newest harvest interns and introduce them to the Tablas Creek Blog audience. We typically do this about this time of year, when they have at least a week of harvesting fruit under their belt and an idea of how harvest is going. Well, as you have likely read on this blog, that's not the case this year! One week into September, this new batch of interns eagerly awaits the first fruit to drop into the cellar. So, this year, we sat down before the rush. What stood out to me is how different their personalities are, yet they are motivated by the sa ..read more

In September of 2013, the TTB published a notice of proposed rulemaking that gave a preliminary stamp of approval on the Paso Robles wine community's proposal to subdivide the Paso Robles AVA into 11 new sub-regions. I celebrated this milestone with an article on this blog where I laid out why I thought it was such an important development for our region. It's worth remembering that at the time there was some resistance to the proposal as being disproportionately complex given that up until that point everyone had used just the single overarching Paso Robles AVA. I tried to summarize why I th ..read more

Veraison, if you're unfamiliar with the term, is a physiological stage of grape development where the berries stop accumulating mass and start accumulating sugar. More visibly, red grapes start their color change from green, while white grapes take on more of a yellow tint. Both red and white grapes start to soften. The onset of veraison comes roughly six weeks before the beginning of harvest, and gives us our best estimate for what sort of schedule we're likely looking at. And it's lovely. Witness this Tannat cluster, roughly halfway through veraison as of this morning: The fact that I'm wr ..read more

Exactly one year ago we started the 2022 harvest with four tons of Viognier off the estate. Not this year. Here we're still in such an early stage of veraison that there's a lot more green than red out there in the vineyard. On a positive note, the more time that the grapes have on the vines, all other things being equal, the more complexity of flavors. The flip side to that is that the same things that caused us to be behind can potentially impact our yields. I'll dive into the three main issues we're seeing in this blog, and share some conclusions, as best we can tell at this point, at the e ..read more

My family and I spent most of July in Vermont. I grew up there, and each year we try to go back and give our kids the chance to discover the streams and forests, fields and ponds I spent my childhood exploring. My sister and her family make their home next door, and my mom still spends half the year there, in the house I grew up in. I know that the setting hasn't changed much in the last 50 years. It probably hasn't changed much in a century: When we go back, we're a group of nine, five adults and (this year) kids aged 18, 15, 13, and 9. Everyone likes to eat, and a many of our most memorable ..read more

Each spring and fall, we send out a selection of six wines to the members of our VINsider Wine Club.  In many cases, these are wines that only go out to our club. In others, the club gets a first look at wines that may see a later national release. Before each shipment, we reintroduce ourselves to these wines (which, in some cases, we may not have tasted since before bottling) by opening the full lineup and writing the notes that will be included with the club shipments. This morning I sat down with Senior Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Franchi and we dove into this fall's collection. W ..read more

Here at Tablas Creek we're pretty cautious about jumping into new projects. In my 20 years we've made one significant addition to the lineup of wines, back in 2010 when we started working with a handful of Paso Robles vineyards to produce our first-ever non-estate wine, the Patelin de Tablas. That decision came after the shock of the 2009 vintage, where the combination of drought and frost reduced our crops by nearly 50% and forced us to choose between keeping our wine club and tasting room supplied and maintaining our presence in the wholesale and export markets. At the same time, the 2008 fi ..read more

Seeing a new team member join us at Tablas Creek is always exciting. Just recently, Kaitlyn Glynn joined our cellar team in advance of harvest 2023. She comes to us with tons of experience, much of it from other wineries in Paso Robles. It became evident that she is well-known and well-liked when she made a cameo on one of our Instagram posts, and most responses were addressed to her. In the newest piece for our Get to Know the Tablas Cru series, we sat down with Tablas Creek's newest employee to learn more about her path to our cellar.  Who are you? I'm Kaitlyn Glynn, the new cellar ass ..read more

By Ian Consoli As the vineyard that participated in the Regenerative Organic Alliance's pilot program and the first Regenerative Organic Certified® vineyard in the world, we at Tablas Creek have kept a watchful eye on the growth of wineries pursuing and achieving ROC® status (For more info on ROC, start with this blog post from our viticulturist Jordan Lonborg). Their current membership is 14 vineyards from around the world. That number includes wineries in California, Oregon, Chile, and Argentina, with interest from other wineries around the globe. I recently had an excuse to stay on the Nort ..read more

Each summer, I taste through library vintages of our Esprit and Esprit Blanc to choose the wines for the upcoming VINsider Wine Club Collector's Edition shipment. We created the Collector's Edition version of our VINsider Wine Club back in 2009 to give our biggest fans a chance to see what our flagship wines were like aged in perfect conditions. Members also get a slightly larger allocation of the current release of Esprits to track as they evolve. This club gives us a chance show off our wines' ageworthiness, and it's been a great success, generati ..read more