Planting Her Roots Where She Began: An Interview with Tasting Room Lead Elizabeth "Lizzie" Williams

By Ian Consoli When sitting down with Tasting Room Lead Elizabeth Williams, there is an immediate feeling of contentedness. She has a warm personality that puts everyone around her at ease. We recognized this when she first started at Tablas Creek as she quickly grew into a full-time role and

Tasting the wines in the 2021 VINsider "Collector's Edition" shipment

Each summer, I taste through library vintages of our Esprit and Esprit Blanc to choose the wines for the upcoming VINsider Wine Club Collector's Edition shipment. We created the Collector's Edition version of our VINsider Wine Club back in 2009 to give our biggest fans a

Shepherd 2.0: How Dane Jensen became Tablas Creek’s Shepherd

By Ian Consoli When someone lists "Shepherd" on their business card, you are guaranteed one thing: this will be an interesting person. I've spoken with an abnormal amount of shepherds for a person in the 21st century. In every instance (OK, both instances) I find a

Obscure Pairings: Terret Noir and Lebanese Meatballs

[Editor’s Note: We would like to introduce Troy Tucker to the Tablas Creek blog audience. Troy has worked in our tasting room for the past year while operating multiple wine endeavors of his own. One of those is as the proprietor of Terroir to You, a wine and pairing

Gustavo's Garden: Benefits for Our Vineyard... and Our Team

By Ian Consoli The first summer I worked at Tablas Creek, I was pleasantly surprised to find a constant stream of fresh fruits and vegetables appearing in the kitchen. It didn't take long to find out that the man delivering these treats was Gustavo Prieto. Gustavo has worked

A Summer Solstice Vineyard Tour

Over the last year, I've probably spent more time taking pictures in our vineyard than ever before. Part of the reason is because I'm here all the time; in pre-Covid times I would usually be on the road a week or two each month. I'

Tasting two decades of Tablas Creek Roussanne, 2001-2020

There are two ways that we try to work systematically through the collection of wines in our library. At the beginning of each year, we taste every wine we made ten years earlier. These horizontal retrospectives give us an in-depth look at a particular year, and a check-in with how

California Re-Opening: How COVID Changed our Tasting Room Model Going Forward

[Editor's Note: thanks to Director of Marketing Ian Consoli, who contributed many of the ideas we're implementing, including an early draft of this blog and its photos.] Sometimes, it takes a crisis to spur you to change something fundamental to your business. So it was when

Flowering 2021: So Far, So Good As the 2021 Growing Season Kicks Off

Budbreak gave us the first sign that we were looking at something of a "normal" season this year. Flowering, which began a couple of weeks ago but which has proceeded slowly, confirms that we're still tracking neither notably ahead nor behind what we'd expect,

A Winery Carbon Footprint Self-Assessment: Why I Can't Give Us an "A" Despite All Our Progress

When you consider a winery's environmental footprint, what do you think of? Their vineyard certifications? Whether they're using recycled materials? How well insulated their winery building is? If so, you might be surprised to learn that the largest contributors to a winery's carbon footprint1