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 We are excited to be opening our tasting room to the public beginning in late August! It's nothing fancy, but we're pleased to finally have a space to receive guests. We're open every day during normal business hours (10AM-5PM) and we're offering tours of the complete operations twice daily, at 10:30 and 2PM. And, as always, we're happy to try to accommodate special groups and requests. Just contact us to let us know.
We were honored to be asked to feature our wines at the KCBX Wine Classic's annual Hearst Castle benefit dinner. Robert Haas, Jason Haas, and Meghan Dunn represented the winery at the event, which introduced the Tablas Creek Esprit de Beaucastel 2000. At the KCBX Event, we poured at several tastings, and were happy to be able to donate a unique lot for their auction: a "Do It Yourself" Cote Rôtie vineyard of 1900 Syrah vines and 100 Viognier vines. In the past few months, we've received press locally (Vintages Magazine and Plus Magazine), regionally (Los Angeles Times Magazine, San Jose Mercury News, Wine Literary Awards) and nationally (Wine Enthusiast, Wine Advocate, Santé). We've revised and updated our "In the News" section to include PDF versions of the print articles and reviews, as well as direct links to some of the online articles that discuss Tablas. You can see this list at our In the News section of the Web site. |
The vines are looking vibrantly healthy, as we wait out the growing season. The fruit set was very good, and verasion began the week of July 15th. The syrah and Viognier, as usual, were the first to enter verasion, and are nearly finished. Other varietals are just beginning or in the middle.
We've already dropped some crop, and we'll certainly make another pass. Even so, we're looking at our greatest production to date, with an estimate in the neighborhood of 12,000 not unrealistic. We are expecting about 5000 or 6000 cases of white, and 6500 to 8000 cases of red. This additional production comes from the vines we planted in 2000, including 8-10 new acres of Roussanne, 4 acres of Grenache, 2 acres of Counoise, 2 acres of Syrah, and other scattered smaller plots. |
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After a moderately cool spring and summer, we saw the year's first truly hot spell in early August. In weather like this, you can see the progress of the grapes by the day. The local bird population has noticed the sugar levels climbing, and we're beginning the process of netting the vineyard to protect the crop. We began with the Viognier the week of July 24th, and are continuing with the rest of the vineyard through the end of July and August. It takes us about a month to net the entire vineyard.
Our efforts to farm organically have met with terrific results so far this year. After the first leafhoppers of the year were sighted early this month, we released 100,000 lacewings (a natural predator for leafhoppers) each of the two middle weeks of July. The leafhoppers are now under control, and the vines look great. We have fertilized exclusively with drips from tea made from our compost pile. We have also experimented with spraying the compost tea on the leaves and bunches instead of sulfur to combat mildew, and those vines have been completely mildew-free. You can read more about compost tea online.
We're also pleased with the success of our owls. We added owlboxes around the vineyard to help combat gophers, which are a challenge to traditional predators as they are primarily nocturnal. While the owls haven't eliminated the gophers, they must be contributing, as one of our winemakers had a gopher skull dropped on him by an owl just last week! |
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 The nursery's grafting year has ended with the successful grafting of over 175,000 vines! A few lots of grafted vines are in the greenhouses awaiting their owners coming to pick them up in the next few weeks. This is a great time to place your orders for next year, while we have full availability of all our TruWood varietals. Please contact Nursery Manager Laura Wulff at (805) 237-1231 or laura@tablascreek.com. |
