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When the 3-tier system works as it's supposed to, it's a beautiful thing.

Every summer, I spend a couple of weeks in Vermont. I'm from there, and my mom still spends summers in the house I grew up in. My sister and her family are 50 yards away. And I get a chance to remind my California kids that there are

The Voice on the Other End of the Phone: Q&A with Monica O'Connor, Direct Sales Manager

By Linnea Frazier Here at Tablas Creek there are faces you see often, out in the market or when you visit our tasting room. But there are other faces, equally important, who operate behind the scenes. And these people play a huge role in making this vineyard what it has

Choosing the Wines for the Fall 2018 VINsider "Collector's Edition" Shipment

Each summer, I have the pleasure of tasting through library vintages of our Esprit de Beaucastel and Esprit de Beaucastel 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

A mid-summer vineyard assessment suggests 2018 is looking like a throwback to the 2000s

I feel like I'm inviting disaster just by typing this sentence, but it's been, well, benign so far this summer. I got back from two weeks in Europe, some vacation and some work, to find a vineyard significantly advanced over where it was in the first

Into the Heart of Darkness: Tasting every Tablas Creek Tannat 2002-2017

Each year, we pick a wine we've been making for a while and open up all that wine's vintages, for the dual purposes of better understanding how it ages over time and better advising our fans which vintages to open if they're looking for

Rethinking the Role of Wine Festivals in the Age of Yelp and Instagram

Last month, we participated in the Paso Robles Wine Festival, as we do every year. This year was particularly nice, with gorgeous weather and a great vibe at both Friday evening's Reserve Event and Saturday afternoon's Grand Tasting in the downtown park. If you came to

Flowering 2018: Might We Be Seeing Our First Moderate Vintage of the Decade?

There are five viticultural markers that we use each year as markers: notable reference points that indicate where we are compared to other years. These are, in order: * Budbreak (typically late March or early April) * Flowering (typically May sometime) * Veraison (typically late July or early August) * First Harvest (typically late

Other Wines We Love: 2012 Qupe Sawyer Lindquist Vineyard Grenache

The next in an occasional series of our non-Tablas Creek wine discoveries. Bob Lindquist is one of my favorite people in the wine business. As the founder of Qupe and one of the pioneers of California's Rhone movement, Bob probably needs little introduction to most fans of Tablas

Blending the 2017 reds confirms that we're looking at a vintage for the ages

Last week, after three weeks of work, we finally got a chance to taste all 12 red wines we'll be making from the 2017 vintage. It was a treat. Esprit and Panoplie were rich, lush, and intense, but with good structure and no sense of heaviness. The Mourvedre,

Direct Shipping Shenanigans, Delaware Edition

After a burst of progress on wine direct shipping in 2016, in which Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Arizona all opened up, we've had a bit of a pause for the last 18 months or so. Some of that is because most states are now open, and most of the