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Vineyard

A collection of 402 posts

Harvest, Week of September 21st

The weather did indeed heat up. It has topped out around 102 most of this week, and is forecast to stay hot through the weekend (and then cool down). This heat wave has been a touch gentler than the forecasts were predicting, which is a good thing. And this late

Harvest, Week of September 14th

We've (finally!) started harvesting our reds. We are bringing in Syrah today, and expecting about 10 tons. The fruit looks tremendous: low pH (around 3.35), good sugars (around 25 Brix) and excellent flavors. It seems to me that the grapes have lots of texture and solids rather

Harvest 2009 Begins... Slowly

It's clear at this point that it's going to be a long harvest. We picked our first grapes early last week (September 1st): Viognier from the top of the tallest hill on the property -- typically the first part of the vineyard we harvest -- and

Veraison 2009

It's always exciting when we see the first signs of veraison in the vineyard. The red grapes start to soften and turn red, while the white grapes start softening and add a little yellow to their green tone. It typically marks a point about six weeks from the

A great blue heron visits the Tablas Creek wetlands

Several of us were sitting on our patio having lunch when a blue heron sailed over the vineyard before coming to rest in the Tablas Creek wetlands that border Adelaida road, just downhill from our entrance. I got one decent shot (right) before I scared it off by getting too

Early impressions of the cool 2009 early summer

So far, except for a scorching hot weekend that (of course) coincided with the 2009 Paso Robles Wine Festival, it's been cool. Days typically have been topping out in the mid- to high-70's, with relatively frequent cloud cover at night. Normally, by June, we're

Paso Robles Big Sky

I spent an hour or so rambling around the vineyard on Monday to get a sense of to what extent we'd been hit by the frosts the mornings of April 25th and 26th. It looks like the damage was serious -- the worst that we've seen

The importance of hang time

This past weekend was Hospice du Rhone. It's always one of my favorite events of the year, where hundreds of people (maybe pushing 1000, all told) who are enthusiastic supporters of Rhone varietals get together for a weekend of seriously lighthearted consideration of all things Rhone. You get

Signs of Spring

We've been getting lots of small rainstorms over the last month. It's a lot better than what we saw in January, so I'm not really complaining, but we're still missing that one big five-inch dousing that will really replenish the reservoirs and

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&