Reimagining the Rhone Rangers Experience

I've been watching a lot of the NBA the last few weeks, and there's a Google Pixel commercial with Steph Curry that keeps coming on. In it, Steph talks about how he's loyal to a fault, staying with the same team for 17 years, the same coach for 11, and even takes his first warmup shot from the same place, passed to him by the same Warriors assistant. It's a pretty funny spot:

I feel like that could be describing me. I don't generally like change. At Tablas Creek, we have had most of the same management team for the better part of two decades. We have kept the same labels since they debuted in 1997. And I've been on the board of directors of the Rhone Rangers organization since 2004.

A lot has changed, for Rhone producers and the world, in that time. The organization used to be focused around a single event at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Then it added an annual event in Los Angeles and a road show series that took the group to cities like Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington DC, and Seattle. As costs went up in some of the big cities, we refocused the organization's event footprint in wine country, where our member wineries can assist with hosting and logistics. This year, we hosted events here in Paso Robles, in Sonoma, and in the Texas Hill Country.

To be fair, the Paso Robles event has been going on, in one venue or another, since 2008. For the first decade, it was just a Paso Robles chapter event (we called it the Paso Robles Rhone Rangers Experience) and open only to Paso Robles wineries. But as the big tastings in the big cities became untenably expensive, we moved the event to a larger venue (the Paso Robles Event Center) and in 2020 opened it up to all members. We rebranded it just slightly as the Rhone Rangers Experience and it welcomes between 500 and 1000 Rhone lovers to Paso Robles each spring.

Even since the beginning when it was only open to Paso Robles Rhone Rangers, the event format has been pretty consistent:

• A morning panel seminar with producers representing the major categories of American Rhone wines, moderated by a nationally recognized writer or Master Sommelier
• A sit-down lunch where Rhone Rangers winemakers bring special wines (often library vintage or magnums) to share
• A walk-around Grand Tasting where each of the roughly 80 wineries have a table and are showing their wines
• A silent auction featuring cool wines and experiences during the Grand Tasting

The seminar has historically been my favorite part. The writers we've had moderate have included Patrick Comiskey (Wine & Spirits Magazine and author of American Rhone), Esther Mobley (San Francisco Chronicle), Samantha Cole-Johnson (JancisRobinson.com), Ray Isle (Food & Wine), Erin Brooks (Wine Advocate) and Matt Kettmann (Wine Enthusiast), among many other luminaries. The insights from winemakers and the banter back and forth in what is still a small, close-knit community of producers is always fun. But while in the early years it was easy to sell out the event, in recent years attendance has been harder to come by. After last year's event the committee that organized it sat down for a freewheeling brainstorming session about how we might reinvigorate something that we felt had become too static.

We came to three conclusions, all of which we'll be implementing for the 2026 Rhone Rangers Experience that we just announced for March 2oth and 21st.

First, we decided it was time to shake up the seminar to create more opportunities for meaningful interaction with winemakers. To do this, we turned to the concept of speed dating. Instead of a single seminar with nine presenters, we created eight sessions, each with two winemakers presenting a wine on a theme. Those sessions will be capped at 25 people, and there will be five 15-minute time slots available. So each guest will choose five of the eight experiences to attend, one after another, and spend 15 minutes tasting two wines, hearing from the winemakers, and getting a chance to ask questions before moving on to the next session. The sessions sound like fun to me:

• Battle of the Vessels: Concrete vs. Amphora (A chance to taste a wine made in concrete and one made in amphora and hear from winemakers as to why they made each choice and what it brings to the wine) 
• Shining the Spotlight on the backup dancers in our favorite white Rhone blends (Tasting varietal bottlings of white Rhone grapes beyond the big 3 of Viognier, Roussanne and Marsanne)
• Shining the Spotlight on the backup dancers in our favorite red Rhone blends (Tasting varietal bottlings of red Rhone grapes beyond the big 3 of Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvedre)
• Taste Like a Sommelier (Learn how to blind taste like an expert)
• Bubbles & Banter (The exciting world of sparkling wines made from Rhone grapes)
• The 2006 vintage, twenty years later (A tasting of a classic Rhone Ranger vintage with 20 years of bottle age)
• Expressions of Syrah from both cool and warm climate regions (A cool climate and warm climate Syrah, tasted side by side, with a discussion of what climate brings to the Rhone movement's most important grape)
• New Rhone Frontiers (Rhone Rangers wines beyond the established regions of California, Washington, and Oregon: so Texas, Virginia, Arizona and more)

I really love the name that we chose for the sessions: "Choose Your Rhone Adventure".

Our second conclusion was that we needed to be extremely conscious of price. I have always felt like these Rhone Rangers tastings offer great value, but our costs have been creeping up, and so have the prices of the events. Last year, a full-day pass (including the seminar, lunch, and Grand Tasting) was $195. Tickets for the Grand Tasting alone were $85. We looked at what some of our costs were and decided that we could reduce the price of the Grand Tasting to $65, which is a screaming bargain to taste potentially 250+ wines. We were able to reduce the cost of the Saturday day pass to $155 per person. We have heard, again and again, that the biggest barrier to getting new enthusiasts into wine is cost. I'm not sure you'll find a better tasting value in California at the moment.

Our third change was to make the event more a la carte. We had lots of discussion at our brainstorming session about how, based on our experience at other events we participate in, the audience for a seminar, for a dinner, and for a walk-around tasting can be pretty different. And yet we'd set up the event assuming that anyone who wanted to attend the seminar needed to purchase the All-Access Pass which included the lunch and tasting. So we offered a la carte options to not just the Grand Tasting but also to the Choose Your Rhone Adventure sessions and (see below) to the opening night celebration.

Finally, we have been looking for the right sort of event at which we can celebrate the Lifetime Achievement Award winner that we name each year. [Editor's note, the blog that I wrote when my dad was the recipient back in 2014 made for a pretty emotional read when I just revisited it today.] In the early years, we had a gala dinner and live auction in San Francisco where we gave out the award, which was perfect. But as the tasting that anchored that event became untenable we've struggled to find something similarly appropriate. We've tried that during the lunch, and during the seminar, and it has never felt like those events had the right amount of formality for the occasion. We had a lovely evening celebrating Steve Edmunds at Girl & the Fig in Sonoma in 2024, but we weren't able to make that event happen in 2025 and we've decided to alternate between events in Sonoma and the Pacific Northwest going forward, which means that it's not on the table for this year.

So, we decided to add a celebratory discussion with some of the original Rhone Rangers to kick off the event on Friday, which we're calling "Legacies &  Legends: The Rhone Rangers OGs". The panel includes four Rhone Rangers legends (Randall Grahm, Bill Easton, Fred Cline, and Adam Tolmach) each of whom will be showing a wine from their early years and another from their current work. The event will be done lounge-style at the new Ava Hotel, and will be moderated by Patrick Comiskey, who is the American Rhone movement's primary historian. During the event, we'll honor this year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner. The cost to attend this once-in-a-lifetime experience is just $75, and available a la carte or as a part of a weekend package that's just $215.

Tickets to this reimagined Rhone Rangers Experience went on sale last week. Details, including links to hotel partners offering special rates, are on the Rhone Rangers website.

I hope we'll see many of you in March. I hope you'll join us, and choose your Rhone adventure.