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Dry-Farming

A collection of 26 issues

Dry-Farming in California's Drought, Part 2: Looking Forward to the Past

In the first part of this 3-part series on farming in California's drought, I looked at how our climate here in California differs in crucial ways from that in the Mediterranean, and what lessons we took from these differences in how we would choose to farm. In this

Dry-Farming in California's Drought, Part 1: Understanding California's Only-Sorta-Mediterranean Climate

Over the last few months, it seems like everyone I meet, whether locally or around the country, is wondering how we're doing in what our governor has termed a "historic drought". Many are surprised to hear that while we're watching it warily, we think

Photo essay: head-trained, dry-farmed Grenache on Scruffy Hill

Over recent years, we've become more and more convinced that dry farming is perhaps our most powerful tool in making wines that express their place. I wrote about this in detail in 2010, and since then most of our new plantings have been very traditional: head-trained, dry-farmed and

Biodynamics and dry-farming: repairing the failings of "modern" viticulture

Week before last, I had the privilege of representing Tablas Creek at the Yosemite Vintners' Holidays. This event (which I wrote about a few months back in my post 5 great events for food&wine lovers) was as usual a treat, with unexpectedly warm weather, about 175 attendees

Creating a new wine: En Gobelet

Our model at Tablas Creek is pretty consistent from year to year. We make our Esprit de Beaucastel (red and white) and Cotes de Tablas (red and white). We make our Rosé. We make somewhere between six and nine single varietal wines depending on what's compelling when we&

Getting Ready to Plant "Scruffy Hill"

After a five-year hiatus in planting, we're getting ready to begin again, at the deliberate rate of 5 acres per year over the next five years. This will allow us to gradually build our capacity from the around-16,000 case level we are now (on 80 acres) to