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Jason Haas

The future of the proprietary blend

This week, I joined much of the rest of the California wine community in Sacramento for the Unified Grape and Wine Symposium. Unified, as it's called, is part trade show, part educational conference, and part social hall, with nightly reunions of all the significant viticultural universities and lots

Vintage Hollywood

I have recently been finding myself contrasting two recent vintages primarily in terms of their personalities, rather than (or at least, in addition to) their flavors. Our 2011 vintage produced wines that are tense, wound-up, powerful and brooding, that make you make an effort to get to know them. The

Why "California's Driest Year on Record" is less serious (and more) than you're hearing

As January 2014 dawned, California residents were greeted with a collection of terrifying headlines about the lack of rain the state received in 2013. The Weather Channel posted a national story titled "Record Driest Year in California, Parts of Oregon". The San Francisco Chronicle warned "After dry

Looking back a decade later at the 2004 vintage at Tablas Creek

2014 is a year of milestones for Tablas Creek. It's been 25 years since we bought our property in 1989. It's been 20 years since we picked our first grapes and made our first wines, in rented space at Adelaida Cellars down the road, in 1994.

Malolactic, Misunderstood

There is a recurring item on the Wine Spectator Web site called "Ask Dr. Vinny". In it, the Spectator writers take on commonly asked questions about winemaking and wine consumption. Last month there was a question from a reader in the United Arab Emirates: "Is there any

What Facebook's News Feed Changes Mean for the Wine Community

There was a bit of a flap in social media circles a couple of weeks ago when Ad Age broke the story that Facebook would be reducing the organic reach of pages and requiring those pages that wanted to reach a significant percentage of their fans to advertise to do

Why we're celebrating our frosty mornings

This morning I arrived at the vineyard to find a landscape encased in frost: This was the fourth time in five nights we've gotten down into the teens. The one night we didn't freeze we received about six-tenths of an inch of rain. Between the cold

Winterizing the vineyard as we wait and hope for rain

By Levi Glenn The falling leaves mark the commencement of the “slow time” of the year in the vineyard. Harvest is in the rear-view mirror. All the grapes have been fermented and the wines are resting comfortably in their respective vessels, yet one last series of tasks needs to be

Wine on tap: an idea whose time has (finally) come

In 2010, I wrote a blog post with the title "the appeal of wine in keg, and an appeal to the restaurants who want it". In it, I lamented that despite keg wine's appeal in terms of freshness, cost savings and environmental responsibility, there hadn'

Who says Americans don't age wine?

I've written before, in a handful of contexts, about what a great tool I think CellarTracker is. I use it to monitor what our customers are saying about our wines, to track when wines seem to be going through dumb stages, and to look in on how some