Tablas Creek Vineyard

Tablas Creek is the realization of the combined efforts of two of the international wine community’s leading families, the Perrin family, proprietors of Château de Beaucastel, and Robert Haas, founder of Vineyard Brands. They had since the 1970s believed the California climate to be ideal for planting Rhône varietal grapes. In 1987, they began the lengthy process of creating a Châteauneuf-du-Pape style vineyard from scratch in the New World. The Tablas Creek Vineyard Partnership was born, with the Perrin and Haas families as majority partners, and French and American wine loving friends as minority partners.

We believe strongly in wines of terroir -- the French term best translated as "somewhereness" -- and choose our vineyard and winemaking practices to maximize our chances of expressing our terroir in our wines.

Our goal is to produce wines with a true reflection of their varietal character, of the place where they were grown, and of the vintage that they came from. To produce our wines, we use four core practices:

A Carefully Selected Site with Calcareous Soils

Our location in the foothills of the Santa Lucia Mountains west of Paso Robles, California was chosen after three years of intensive research. Our soils are composed of calcareous clay, similar to those which produce the great wines of the southern Rhone Valley. Our steep slopes offer a variety of microclimates, soil depths and exposures. Our altitude varies between 1400' and 1600', and our proximity to the ocean provides warm to hot summer days and cool to cold summer nights.  The resulting long growing season produces gracefully ripened fruit in nearly every vintage.

Authentic Clones

We imported our vines from Beaucastel, shepherded them through a USDA-mandated 3-year quarantine, and propagated them on our on-site nursery. These clones were hand-selected for intensity of flavor and true varietal character. Some varietals had never been brought into the United States before, and we brought in new clones even of the varietals that existed here previously.

Stressed Grapevines

We densely plant the vines (1600 to 1800 per acre) to create competition, and trellis them low to the ground to take advantage of the radiant heat from the rocky soil. The competition between the plants, as well as the rugged terrain and limited water, creates intense small clusters of grapes with thick skins. Each vine is limited to 8-12 bunches each year.  We dry-farm all of the vineyard most vintages, and many blocks every vintage.  This forces the vines' roots deep into the bedrock and makes sure that they pull the maximum character of place out of their environment.

Organic Vineyards with Hands-On Farming

Our organic vineyard practices following the lead of the Beaucastel estate in Chateauneuf du Pape. Like Beaucastel, we use no herbicides or systemic pesticides in the vineyard. Cover crops minimize erosion, host beneficial insects, and return nitrogen to the soil. We use extensive composting, and use compost tea to control mildew in the vineyard and reduce our need for sulfur. We received our organic certification in January, 2003 and continue to explore how we can better respect our place.  We began farming much of the vineyard Biodynamically in 2010, and brought a mixed herd of grazing sheep, alpacas and donkeys (pictured right) into the vineyard in 2012.

We prune and harvest by hand. The pruning is done both to promote the general health of the vine and to minimize crop load, and we regularly thin our crop to improve the quality of the fruit. All grapes are harvested by hand at optimum ripeness, and most of the vineyard blocks are harvested in multiple passes, ensuring that the grapes that arrive at our winery for vinification are at peak ripeness.

At Tablas Creek, our winemaking is designed to maximize the expression of place we've begun in our vineyard practices.  Our goal is to bring the wine through the fermentation process while preserving the wine’s links to its grape varieties, its vintage and most importantly its terroir.

Our winemaking begins with our selective harvesting.  Most vineyard blocks are picked by hand two, three or even four times to ensure that the grapes that come into the cellar are at ideal ripeness. 

Because we believe that the particular collection of yeasts that exists at our vineyard is unique, we use only native yeasts in fermentation. Native yeast fermentation gives a diversity of flavors, and a character more specific to the site.

Each varietal fermented separately. White grapes are whole-cluster pressed, and the juice is fermented in aged a mix of 1200-gallon foudres (for about a third of the Roussanne and Grenache Blanc), small French oak barrels (for another third of the Roussanne) and stainless steel (for the last third of the Roussanne, as well as two-thirds of the Grenache Blanc, and all our Marsanne and Viognier). This balance gives a hint of the richness from oak fermentation, without heavy oak flavors that overwhelm the fruit or mask the character of place.

Red grapes (Mourvèdre, Syrah, Grenache Noir, and Counoise) are sorted and destemmed after harvest, and the juice and whole berries moved to a mix of open-top stainless steel, closed stainless steel, and 1600-gallon oak upright fermenters. During fermentation, the must is pumped over or punched down, or the cap submerged into the fermenting juice, twice a day. About 10 days after fermentation begins, the red wines are pressed, then moved to barrel to complete their primary and secondary fermentaitons. 

Finally, the spring after harvest, both red and white wines are blended.  White wines are generally returned to stainless steel to settle and integrate briefly, while red wines are moved to 1200-gallon French oak foudres and aged for an additional year. 

Key in our winemaking is our dedication to the art of blending.  As is traditional in Châteauneuf du Pape, we blend our Rhône varietals in an effort to produce wines that are more complex, better balanced, and richer than their components. We believe that having a multitude of flavors allows our wines to pair happily with a wide range of food, and to show appealing character at different ages.