Alouette for the Masses

It’s relatively rare that we add a new wine to our portfolio. Now (I can hear you saying) you wouldn’t know it looking at the 38 different wines that we have on offer on our website right now. But I blame that on the diversity of the Rhone Valley giving us so many grapes to play with, our desire to give a fun and diverse range of wines to our wine club members, and to my own stubbornness in not often trimming down wines that we’ve made in the past and that people may have come to love. But it’s true. We add a new wine (or a new idea for a wine) maybe once every five years.

In 2023, that new idea was to take the brightest, crunchiest, most cranberry-and-herb edge of the spectrum of Grenache that we get each year and make it into a chillable red of its own. In previous years we would have found a way to incorporate it into one of our blends, or maybe into the varietal Grenache. But we realized that keeping as a separate production gave us something delicious and fun while also helping make our blends more serious. Have you tried the Cotes de Tablas the past few vintages? It’s not an accident that the 2023 got 93-94 point ratings from James Suckling, Decanter, Wine Enthusiast, and Vinous, and the newly-released 2024 is on track to exceed that, with 93s from Vinous and Owen Bargreen and a 95 from Karen MacNeil.

It was Chelsea who, as we were sitting around the blending table, having made most of the 2023 reds but still struggling to come up with a home for the last few lots of pale, vibrant Grenache, came up with the idea of releasing it as a chillable red. As the rest of us were staring at each other or at our notes, she commented, “you know, I’d love a box of this in my fridge this summer.” And we realized she was right. These weren’t lots that would be made better by putting in barrel to deepen, or with the addition of Syrah for darkness and structure. They were lots that needed to be celebrated for what they were, not corrected for what they were not.

It took us a while to come up with a name that felt right. My initial ideas were mostly unexciting or already trademarked. But when we came up with the idea of calling it “Alouette” – the French word for “lark” – everything clicked. It’s a word that has the same double meaning in French as its translation does in English. Yes, it’s a song-bird (and the start of a French nursery rhyme that I’m guessing many of you are humming as you read this) but also can be used to connote something done spontaneously, or for fun. And that’s what this wine is, something fun, with which you can be spontaneous.

While there is no industry-agreed definition of a "chillable red" category and therefore no easily quotable statistic about its growth, publications as diverse as VinePair, Vogue, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle have reported on the growth of the category over the last couple of years. In a market when many more traditional wines are seeing declining sales, that’s exciting. It’s also understandable. The categories of wine that are doing best are those that are lighter in body, more appropriate for informal occasions rather than only for white-tablecloth dinners. They are generally wines that can be enjoyed right away, rather than ones that require cellar aging. And they tend to be wines that feel appropriate with or without food. In general, if you feel like a wine is appropriate to bring to a garden party, it’s likely a category that is doing well. On the white side, that tends to be unoaked, lower-alcohol bottlings of grapes like Sauvignon Blanc, Vermentino, Muscadet, and Vinho Verde. But there’s plenty of space for reds that fit that same general profile.

For the first vintage of Alouette, we decided to leave the glass bottle behind entirely and split our production between boxes (to sell at the winery) and kegs (to sell to restaurants and wine bars). We sold out of both in about three weeks. For the 2024 vintage, we added a production of bottles, for two reasons. From our direct customers, we got the feedback that while the boxes were great for home use (just put it in your fridge) they were cumbersome to bring on outings because they couldn’t be plopped in an ice bucket for rapid chilling. In the wholesale world, it was hard for our distributors to sell the kegs because there was nothing for the salespeople to sample, and we had nothing to offer retailers. So to the same production of boxes and kegs we added about 450 cases of bottles, and those were received with enthusiasm.

Enter 2025. After the notably (and unexpectedly) low yields that we received in 2024, the 2025 vintage felt like a windfall, especially in Grenache. From 76.5 tons, the production increased to 114.7 tons. That gave us plenty of Grenache to play with, and play we did. We had outstanding Grenache lots to incorporate into Panoplie, Esprit de Tablas, and Le Complice, and to play lead the En Gobelet and Cotes de Tablas. We made a healthy production of our varietal Grenache. And we were able to increase our production of Alouette from about 900 cases (across all packages) to something like 3200 cases. Those went into box, bottle, and keg in the last couple of weeks.

Beyond the increased production, there are two new changes for 2025. The first is the label. This wine is fun, and we wanted the label to reflect that, while still reading clearly as a member of the Tablas Creek family. I’m excited for the new design. It increases the focus on the Alouette name, and breaks out of the lines that separate the label sections. What’s more, the writing is Chelsea’s. If you’ve walked through the cellar or seen our harvest chalkboard, you’ve likely admired Chelsea’s calligraphy. I love that we can celebrate this on the label:

The second change is price. We found that the $35 suggested retail for a bottle in the 2024 vintage was slightly too high for most restaurants to pour by the glass, and a little high compared to the other chillable reds in the relevant sections (or coolers) where they could be found in wine shops. So we are dropping the price to $30 suggested retail, the same as our Patelin de Tablas wines. Because of Grenache’s generous production, we can still make this work financially. And it means that one of our Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC™) wines will be in broad distribution, spreading the word about the farming that we love to an audience that may not have been able to approach it before.

I think this is going to fly. Once we had the basic plan for making more Alouette Grenache in 2025, we chose four states that hadn’t yet received the 2024 Alouette to receive an allocation this spring, at the price at which the 2025 is going to be released. I worked those markets this spring, and in every case, the Alouette got rave reviews. Not only were we selling it to the cool downtown wine bars and natural-leaning wine shops where I thought it would be a slam dunk, but we were getting orders from restaurants, mainstream retailers, even a country club that mentioned that their members were asking for a crisp red wine to enjoy outside. At the Nantucket Wine & Food Festival weekend-before-last, it was the most popular wine at my table during the Grand Tastings.

I’m used to being five years (at least) ahead of every trend. From Rhone varieties to blends to Paso Robles to organic to kegs and boxes to Paso Robles to regenerative farming, I feel like I’ve spent my career trying to show not only that our wines deserve to be mentioned with the best in whatever category they represent, but also advocate for the category itself as worthy of support. For the first time since we launched the Patelin de Tablas Rosé in the 2012 vintage, right as the Provence-style dry rosé trend was gathering steam, I think that we are releasing the right wine, at the right price, with the right package, at the right time.

Direct customers, look for an email tomorrow announcing the release of the bottles and boxes. Everyone else, we should have the wine in our distributors' inventories within the next month.

Alouette, coming (very) soon.