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Dry-Farming

A collection of 26 issues

In the winter, west Paso Robles is a rain forest. In the summer, it's a desert.

I was struck recently by a headline posted recently by a Seattle-dwelling friend of mine: Seattle just broke a 122-year-old record for rain. The total rainfall for this famously rainy city between October 2016 and April 2017? 44.67". Here at Tablas Creek, over the same period, we'

One last gasp of winter amid spring's progress

Over the last week, we've seen what feels like the last gasp of winter. Two storms have come through, the first dropping about an inch and a half of rain (a lot for April; our long-term average for the entire month is just 1.86") and a

January set the table for a wet winter. February brought us home.

At the end of January, I wrote a blog announcing that January 2017 had become our wettest month ever. But at that time, we were only at 23.88" for the rain year (July-June), which while better than in recent years was still below our 20-year average, albeit with

January 2017 is Tablas Creek's wettest month ever

Sometime around 6:30 this morning, as the third of three powerful storms pushed through the Paso Robles area, our rain gauge for January passed 16.32" for the month and displaced February 1998 as the wettest single month in Tablas Creek's history. Our running total (with

Spring Cleaning in the Vineyard: How Eliminating Surface Grasses Conserves Water

Over the course of about six weeks, the vineyard has gone from looking like: To looking like: This transformation takes place as the rainy season ends, and our focus shifts from encouraging a cover crop to hold the topsoil in place to making sure that the vines (rather than the

Harvesting under the stars

By: Lauren Phelps I arrived at the vineyard today at 4:00 AM in the crisp morning air to photograph the "night harvest" of one of our last blocks of Mourvedre. Our crew used only head-lamps and the lights from the tractors to harvest which was challenging to

Harvest 2015 update: just over 15% completed & yields are looking low

By: Lauren Phelps In the cellar, things are in full-gear! According to veteran Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Franchi harvest is already over 15% completed. As of August 29th, we have worked with 65.82 tons of fruit. The 1700 gallon French oak upright fermenters are all full fermenting Syrah for the

Did 2.6" of rain in July really just happen?

Yesterday, we hosted a seminar on dry-farming. In the rain. In Paso Robles. In July. And it wasn't just a little rain, either. As we were talking about how we've been working to plant increasing acres of vines without any irrigation infrastructure, and how we'

Dry Farming in California's Drought, Part 3: How We Got Here (and Where We Go Next)

I was struck by a quote from Tegan Passalaqua, the winemaker at Turley, in a recent article on JancisRobinson.com. In an interview with Alder Yarrow, Tegan said "In a Mediterranean climate like we have, vertical shoot positioning and 3 by 6 vineyard spacing is basically farming hydroponically"

A Vertical Tasting of En Gobelet, 2007-2013

When we first made En Gobelet in 2007, it was driven by our feeling that the dry-farmed lots we tasted in our annual blind tastings shared a distinctive character, different from our trellised lots. In my blog post from 2009 announcing the first vintage, I talked about these dry-farmed lots: