Alouette for the Masses
In a world where many traditional wine categories are seeing declining sales, chillable reds is growing sharply. How exciting that this trend coincides with us having our most plentiful Grenache vintage ever!
Topic
Winery & Winemaking
A collection of 228 posts
2025 Red Blending: A Magical Year for Mourvedre
I asked the blending team to sum up 2025. Chelsea said, “It was powerfully structured and chewy, even on varieties you wouldn’t expect.” Austin commented, “They’ve all got liveliness. Nothing feels weighed down by its depth.” And Craig summed it up: “It’s the year of Mourvedre and Roussanne.”
Blending the 2025 white wines: a vintage of lushness and lift produces a full lineup of varietal whites for the first time since 2021
We welcomed Francois and Matthieu Perrin last week for three days spent around our blending table, working to turn the 43 different estate lots we made from our white grapes in 2025 into the blends and varietal bottlings we'll be releasing to you in coming months.
2025 Harvest Recap: the Tortoise Crosses the Finish Line
Last Tuesday, with small clean-up picks of Grenache, Cinsaut, and Counoise and one recalcitrant lot of Bourboulenc (more on that later) we completed the 2025 harvest. This was the 11th week of harvest, which was our longest in more than two decades and our second-longest ever.
Harvest 2025 draws to a close, interrupted but not derailed by rain
Early Tuesday morning, we brought in Mourvedre from our Scruffy Hill block. Ian got up early to document it, and got some dramatic photos that he shared in our social media feeds, including the below cover photo:
With that pick, we have brought in our last substantial block and are
Harvest 2025 at its Midpoint: Hurry Up and Wait
At a time when we're usually at the peak of harvest, we instead spent much of the week in a holding pattern. Early Wednesday morning, a rare thunderstorm rolled through, caused by a cutoff low left behind after the passage of tropical storm Mario last week.
2025 Harvest Update: A warm August gets things going, then a September cooldown pushes pause
Sometimes harvest hits like a ton of bricks. Not this year. We're almost two weeks into the 2025 harvest, and it still feels like things are ramping up. On August 28th, we brought in our first estate lot, off of our oldest Viognier planting.
Introducing the Fenaughty Vineyard, the newest addition to our Lignée de Tablas series... and the Mansfield family responsible for its greatness
By Austin Collins
With the recent release of the 2024 Lignée de Tablas Fenaughty Blanc and the upcoming release of the 2023 Lignée de Tablas Fenaughty (red) we thought it was high time we shared what makes the Fenaughty Vineyard so special. A big part of this is the remarkable
2024 Red Blending: Power, Poise, and Echoes of 2017
Last week we finally got to sit down and taste the nineteen (!) red wines from the 2024 vintage we'd built around the blending table over the few weeks. The tasting highlighted the incredible combination of power and poise that we'd all remarked upon during the blending
Is the biggest story in our 2024 white blending that it's even scarcer than we thought? Or that we made a white version of Panoplie?
We spent three days last week around our blending table, working to turn the 32 different lots we made from our white grapes in 2024 into the blends and varietal bottlings we'll be releasing to you in coming months. There is good news, and bad. The good news