Rethinking the Entrance to Tablas Creek

By Ian Consoli

Visitors to our tasting room over the past month may have noticed a new design in our front entry area. We reimagined this space to provide an area where guests can take a quintessential Tablas Creek tasting room visit photo to share through social media. The focus of the space is the Beaucastel-Tablas Creek directional sign, which has become an iconic symbol of Tablas Creek Vineyard.

The decision and process behind creating this space, and the history it uncovered, felt like one of those stories worth sharing with you here.

The Dilemma:

We’ve always thought about the unspoken message that someone approaching Tablas Creek receives. Jason wrote about it on the blog back in 2011, when we were building the tasting room that we moved into later that year. A guest walking into our entrance saw our solar panels. They saw a dry-farmed Mourvedre vineyard. They saw the grapevines that we were selling, descendants of the Rhone varieties we imported from France. They even saw the mother vines in big terra cotta pots that were those first arrivals back in 1992. All of these helped provide visual cues to who we were and what we cared about. But what we’ve come to realize is that they didn’t see, most of the time, was a place for themselves.

As the importance of Instagram and shareable imagery has grown over the past decade, we have struggled to design an easily accessible spot for our 30,000 tasting room guests to create a photo memory they can share with their friends, family, and followers. Aware of the need but unsure of the best approach, we explored various options over the past six months. Those approaches included painting a wall mural, building a dry-stacked stone wall behind our current sign, or fixing a steel Tablas Creek logo to a wall on our building. Sensing a theme? They were all doable, but would come at a significant cost and take some time. Additionally, they didn't feel unique. There had to be a solution that felt intrinsically Tablas Creek.

One idea that kept coming back to me was how iconic our Tablas Creek-Beaucastel directional sign is. Everyone wants to take a photo next to it, but it's behind a box hedge, making it difficult to stand next to, and set low, so it's hard to see behind the people being photographed. Additionally, it's positioned in front of a nondescript wall with the entrance to our cleaning and service area, creating a less-than-ideal backdrop.

César and Francois Perrin in front of the sign in 2023

Then it hit me: move the sign to the other side of the sidewalk. What a straightforward solution that had been staring us in the face this whole time.

The History:

As readers may know, our longtime winemaker, Neil Collins, spent a year apprenticing at Château de Beaucastel, from the harvest of 1997 through the summer of 1998. Neil moved his family back to Paso Robles in July 1998 to take over winemaking and vineyard management at Tablas Creek, but not before adding a passenger. On his way out, he came across this Beaucastel arrow on a trash heap destined for irrelevance. He asked Beaucastel's longtime winemaker, Claude, if he could have it, to which he obliged. Neil took it upon himself to transport it back to Paso Robles. It sat in a barn here until we opened our first tasting room in 2002, at which point Neil volunteered it to stand outside the entrance. Figuring that people might want to know just how far it was, we plugged in the locations into a GPS calculator and added a “9009 km” pointer below the old sign. When we built our new tasting room on the east side of the winery in 2011, Neil had one more good idea. He contracted local blacksmith, artist, and friend Randy Augsberger to create a Tablas Creek duplicate for the other side. We didn’t need a GPS to measure the distance there, and lots of guests have gotten a chuckle at the “9 yards” we added below. Since then, the two signs have worked as a marker of one's arrival at the Tablas Creek tasting room.

Neil once told us the story of how Jean-Pierre Perrin, on a visit to Tablas Creek, was shocked to see their old Beaucastel sign at Tablas Creek. He had no idea Neil salvaged it from their junk pile and brought it back to the estate. We're sure happy he did!

The Beaucastel sign outside our old tasting room in 2004

The Process:

First, we made adjustments to the sign. Randy, still a reliable resource for Tablas Creek, raised the height of the mounting pole so the arrows would be above guests' heads in the photos. He then cleaned up the old paint that had faded over the past 27 years.

The sign is great on its own, but we needed to create a scene around this piece of art. Luckily, our talented shepherd, Ivan, has a knack for stone masonry. We approached him with the idea of building a path, pad, and bench made from the calcareous and limestone rocks we pulled out of the ground when planting our vineyard. Ivan excitedly accepted the task and began working on it with his right-hand man, Augustine. They hand-laid this area in just three working days. Absolutely incredible.

Constructing the calcareous and limestone rock pad

We finished the area off with landscaping that incorporates some of the beneficial plants one will find as they venture through our vineyard.

The Result:

Ivan and Augustine after a job well done

Now, everyone has a place to take the quintessential Tablas Creek tasting room photo when they come to visit. We hope you have a chance to sit on our stone bench the next time you are one of those visitors. And don't forget to tag @tablascreek in your post!