Sign in Subscribe

Topic

Vineyard

A collection of 408 posts

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'

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 since

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

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&

Fog in the Vineyard

It's not foggy out at Tablas Creek very often. Our elevation (1500 feet) and the barrier of the Santa Lucia Mountains mean that neither the Salinas Valley fog that settles in areas close to town on summer mornings nor the Pacific fog that comes through the Templeton Gap

Snow in the Vineyard

We're (finally, thankfully) in a cold, wet winter weather pattern. Over the past four days we've received about 3.5 inches of rain, and it appears that we have Pacific storms dropping down out of Alaska every other day for the next ten days or so.

Modern Organic, Stone Ground Olive Oil

When we started planning out the Tablas Creek vineyard, we decided to line the roads within the vineyard with olive trees. Olives are traditional in the Rhone, and they have the added advantage that they aren't much work, won't grow so big they'd shade

Autumn Vineyard Photo Essay, Part 1: A Riot of Color

One consequence of the end of daylight savings has been that I'm at the vineyard at the end of the day a lot more often. At this time of year particularly, the combination of the late-day slanting yellow sun and the foliage turning colors makes for some