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Jason Haas

Thanksgiving Wine Suggestions from the Tablas Creek Staff

We've always felt that Tablas Creek wines make great pairings with Thanksgiving meals. The Rhone whites (particularly those based on Roussanne) are rich enough to stand up to turkey or ham, and the Rhone reds (particularly those based on Grenache) are fruity enough, spicy enough, and have enough

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 6: Winter's Approach

Without particularly intending to, I realized that I'd taken several vineyard photos that showed the approach of the winter season through a chilly quality of the light and a selection of wind-blown leaves and (comparatively) bare vines. It seems a fitting conclusion to this autumn vineyard photo essay

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 5: Grenache

Our Grenache section is always one of the most beautiful in the vineyard. Grenache vines are vigorous, and provide satisfyingly thick trunks from even fairly young vines. The leaves are a vibrant yellow-green during the spring and summer, noticeably brighter than other varietals. They stay green later in the season,

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 4: Seeding the Cover Crop

There's not much to do in the vineyard at this time of year. You need to wait for everything to go fully dormant before you prune, and once harvest is complete, the only typical action you take is to make sure that the vines get some irrigation as

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 3: Relics of a Challenging Vintage

2008 was a challenging vintage. As I described in my 2008 vintage assessment, we saw issues with late frosts in the spring, early frosts in the fall, low yields, shatter and uneven ripening. These all left marks on the vineyard which you can see even now. This first photo shows

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 2: Near and Far

One of the things that I always love to try to capture in my photographs are the perception of distance. It's a challenging thing to try to translate the wide open spaces of the vineyard (and that feel of having something interesting all around you) into the fixed

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 1: A Riot of Color

One consequence of the end of daylight savings has been that I'm at the vineyard at the end of the day a lot more often. At this time of year particularly, the combination of the late-day slanting yellow sun and the foliage turning colors makes for some spectacular

Challenges in assessing a vintage like 2008

I had a meeting with the Paso Robles Rhone Rangers yesterday, and while we were waiting for everyone to arrive we spent some time kicking around impressions of the recently concluded harvest. The general consensus was that all we were missing from our list of calamities was a plague of

End of Harvest 2008: two weeks of Mourvedre, Roussanne, and Counoise, and a better picture on yields than we'd been expecting

We're concluding the 2008 harvest today. Yesterday, we brought in 6 tons of Mourvedre, and today added another 2.5 from from a last pass through late-ripening areas where we left odd bits here and there. Yesterday's bins of Mourvedre are below: We were pleased (and

Autumn Images in the Vineyard

As I was leaving the vineyard yesterday, I was struck by the quality of the light, which was quintessentially autumn: low and raking, illuminating the turning colors of the vineyard. It was so dramatic that I ran back inside to grab the camera and clambered into the Mourvedre block behind