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What's that in my wine: tartrate crystals

A few weeks ago, we received the following email from a customer (edited to protect identity): Not the most pleasant of emails to receive. And I'm sure that to the customer who wrote, the surprise at the end of the bottle colored his experience of the wine he&

A first look at the 2010 reds: Wow.

Neil, Ryan, Chelsea, my dad and I spent the last two days tasting through our 2010 reds. 55 lots later, we have a much clearer sense of what the vintage is like. I'll get into details below, but overall, it was a very impressive tasting. The Grenaches were

Tablas Creek is in Vogue!

No, literally. We're in Vogue Magazine, at least the online version Vogue Daily, in an Earth Day-themed article called The Green List. Somewhat more affordable than the $100 repairative moisturizer from an organic farm in Vermont, the vacation in a sustainably-sourced villa in Vietnam, or the beautiful geode-and-responsibly-mined-diamond

Frost Damage and Recovery

We're two weeks removed from the frosts of April 7-9, which look like they'll play a major role in defining the 2011 vintage. With temperatures down to 24 degrees on consecutive nights, we sustained near 100% damage in the Grenache, Grenache Blanc, Viognier and Marsanne (the

Foudres, Demi Muids, Puncheons, and Wood Fermenters: The Appeal of Large Oak

Foudre- (Food’r)- French term for a large cask of indefinite size1 At Tablas Creek we follow the Châteauneuf-du-Pape tradition of maturing our red wines in 1200 gallon (4500 liter) French oak foudres rather than in the more familiar 60 gallon (225 liter) oak barrels. These smaller barrels – known

Crazy April Weather: Ice, Thunder, Hail and Snow in Paso Robles

The warm, sunny weather of last week seems like a distant memory. In the last 24 hours we've had two hailstorms (the second with peals of thunder), a hard freeze, with temperatures down as low as 24 degrees in our coldest spots and even the tops of the

Blending, blending, blending... and an eventual look at the 2010 whites!

Over the last month, we've been narrowing down our options for what we'll make for estate white wines in the 2010 vintage. This isn't really practical before March, as too many lots are still finishing up their fermentations, but beginning in mid-March most everything

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Every year, there's one day where all of a sudden it feels like spring. This year, that day is today. After a week of storms, and a month and a half of cloudy, wet, cool and often cold weather, today the sun is out, the air is soft

Zombie legislation: HR 5034 lurches back to life as HR 1161

Last year, beer and wine wholesalers' associations spearheaded the introduction of HR 5034 into the US House of Representatives. Although the legislation was never passed (it never even made it out of committee) by the end of the legislative year it had amassed 153 co-sponsors, or more than one-third

A welcome wet start to Spring

In an ideal world, we wouldn't receive five inches of rain on one of our three busiest tasting room weekends of the year. But we're not complaining. We're now up over 31 inches of rain for the winter, topping last year's total