Veraison 2024 suggests an early-September kickoff to harvest... then a break… then a mid-September kickoff to harvest

By Ian Consoli Veraison, if you're unfamiliar with the term, is a physiological stage of grape development where the berries stop accumulating mass and start accumulating sugar. More visibly, red grapes start their color change from green, while white grapes take on more of a yellow tint. Both

AI and Wine Marketing – A Current Assessment

By Josh Kaiser Exploring AI's Role in Wine Marketing In today's world, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant concept that’s associated only with science fiction; it has seamlessly become a part of our everyday lives, whether we realize it or not. From voice-activated

Introducing Alouette, a chillable Grenache for which we leave the glass bottle behind

While we make a lot of wines at Tablas Creek, we don’t make a lot of new wines at Tablas Creek. Yes, we’ve added a few varietal bottlings in recent years, and we launched the Lignée de Tablas series in 2023. Those are always exciting. Before that, you

Tasting the Wines in the Fall 2024 VINsider Wine Club Shipments

Each spring and fall, we send out a selection of six wines to the members of our VINsider Wine Club. We have three variants each time: our classic (mixed) selection, which includes reds, whites, and the occasional rose, a white wine selection, and a red wine selection. In many cases,

Tasting the Library Wines in the Fall 2024 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

Sunburn and silver linings: Taking stock after 2024's first heat wave.

The cool start to the growing season feels like eons ago. For the last three weeks, since June 21st, we've been in a classic Paso Robles summer heat wave. It didn't start out all that dramatic; between June 21st and June 30th the average high temperatures

Tablas Creek Through Three Eras: Tasting Every Esprit de Beaucastel and Esprit de Tablas, 2000-2023

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

A Pillar of Tablas Creek Gets his Due: John Morris

By Ian Consoli On May 23rd of this year, our longtime Tasting Room Manager, John Morris, received the 2024 Hospitality & Tourism Award for Visitor Experience in the wine category presented by Travel Paso. The award noted John's long-term commitment to "creating guest experiences that are above

A decadent pairing: Moussaka and 2007 Esprit de Beaucastel

One of my favorite cookbooks is the classic (and sadly now out of print) Mediterranean Cooking by Paula Wolfert. There are probably a dozen recipes in it that we’ve made multiple times, and one of them has become a family favorite that we return to at least a few

2023 Red Blending: Dazzling Wines from a Cool Year... including a Chillable Grenache

Last week we finally got to sit down and taste the eighteen (!) red wines from the 2023 vintage we'd built around the blending table over the past month. The tasting highlighted the incredible combination of vibrancy and depth that we'd all remarked upon during the blending