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REVIEWS
Int'l Wine Review (June 2008)
Vinography.com (Jan. 2008)
Food&Wine (Dec. 2007)
Gang of Pour (Dec. 2007)
Tanzer's IWC (Nov. 2007)
Wine Advocate (Aug. 2007)

How is it drinking?
Vintage Chart

The Tablas Creek Vineyard Côtes de Tablas is a blend of four estate-grown Rhône varietals: Grenache, Syrah, Counoise and Mourvedre. Like most wines of the Southern Rhône, it is a blend of varietals, featuring the fruitiness of Grenache balanced by the spice and structure of Syrah, with meaty, earthy notes from Mourvedre and Counoise.

As with all our wines, the grapes for our Côtes de Tablas were grown on our 120-acre certified organic estate vineyard.

The 2005 vintage was one of nature's lucky breaks, with excellent quality and higher-than-normal yields. The wet winter of '04-'05 gave the grapevines ample groundwater, and a warm period in March got the vines off to an early May flowering. The summer was uniformly sunny but relatively cool, and harvest began (relatively late for us) in the 3rd week of September. The grapes spent nearly a month longer than normal on the vine, and the resulting wines were intensely mineral, with good structure and powerful aromatics. Our first lots of Syrah came in on September 29th, followed by Grenache on October 5th, Mourvedre on October 11th, and (unusually for us, our last varietal harvested) Counoise on October 28th.

All varietals were fermented in stainless steel with the use of native yeasts: the Syrah in open-top fermenters, punched down manually, and the other varietals in closed fermenters with pump-over aeration. After pressing, the wines were racked, blended, aged for a year in 1200-gallon French oak foudres, and then bottled in April 2007. The wines underwent only a light filtration before bottling.

The 2005 Côtes de Tablas has an intensely Grenache nose of rare steak, pepper and blueberry. It is juicy and rich in the mouth, with ripe tannins and a finish laced with licorice.