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Winery & Winemaking

A collection of 225 posts

Grapes of the Rhone Valley: Grenache Blanc

This article is the first in what will be an ongoing exploration of the principal varietals of the Rhone Valley. A version of this article first appeared in the Tablas Creek newsletter. Overview Grenache Blanc is the fourth most widely planted white grape in France. It produces rich, full wines

In Search of a Green(er) Wine Bottle

I spent this past week with winemaker Neil Collins up at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento. Unified (as everyone in the industry calls it) is the country's largest wine and grape trade show, with 12,000 attendees visiting booths from about 600 vendors representing the

Note from the Cellar: "We're finished!" (...bringing in the 2009 fruit...)

Considering what a huge deal it is to complete a harvest, the end is shockingly anticlimactic. It's not as though we all watch as the last bin of fruit is unloaded from the truck, smiling proudly as it is poured onto the sorting table. Rather, we meant to

Harvest 2009 Evaluation and Recap

The 2009 harvest is done. In the barn. Finally. At 64 days (beginning September 1st and ending November 3rd) it was our second-longest harvest this decade. The only longer harvest, 2004, also saw the end of the harvest delayed by rain. The weather during harvest was challenging, to say the

Note from the Cellar: Week of October 19th

[Note: We are pleased to welcome Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Magnusson who will be contributing a regular column "Notes from the Cellar" to the Tablas Creek blog. You can follow her posts by selecting the Notes from the Cellar category from left-hand navigation bar.] Since the day the Central

October 13-14 Pacific Storm Recap and Assessment

So, we're picking up the pieces at Tablas Creek after a storm that dropped an amazing 9.6 inches of rain on us in a little more than 24 hours. To try to contextualize how unusual this storm was for us: * This is more than half the rainfall

A truly scary weather forecast

We've been fortunate with our weather during harvest for the last four years. Each year starting with 2005, whatever the conditions during the spring and summer, we've had beautiful autumns, without serious heat spikes and without any significant rain. That's one of the major

Harvest, Week of September 28th: A Change in the Weather and Worries about Yields

If you've been following our 2009 harvest report, you'll know that we'd been hoping that the vintage would turn out to be a little more plentiful than the last two drought-reduced crops. Perhaps this was wishful thinking, given our third-consecutive below-average rainfall winter. But

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

A first look at the 2008 reds

When we have writers come and visit us at the winery, we try when possible to look both at what is current and what is coming up. Some years, we don't have a lot of ability to look forward, because the blends aren't finished, or at