The Fizz #75: Jason Haas of Tablas Creek is excited about regenerative viticulture and the diversity of Rhône varieties
I speak with Jason Haas of Tablas Creek about regenerative viticulture, no-till systems, climate change, and the Rhône grapes he can't wait to share
Jason Haas, Partner and General Manager at Tablas Creek Vineyard, is one of the most transparent folks in the wine industry I’ve ever met. He’s meticulous about gathering data and sharing his insights, whether that’s how his no-till vs some-till blocks are doing, how tasting room sales are changing over time, what his yields look like per grape, you name it. His blog has harvest notes going back to 2006. The man is a data-machine, and he uses this power for good, helping spread knowledge to growers, winemakers, scientists, and students in wine.
In this issue, we talk about Jason’s upbringing in wine, the climate and terroir in Paso Robles, how he’s seen his corner of the world grow, and how he approaches regenerative viticulture. We also touch on why Paso Robles is so Rhône-friendly, and the vision he has for Tablas Creek going into 2024. I’m so excited to support Jason and his staff as they keep the heart of the Paso Robles small wine community thriving.
Margot: I would love to go back into your childhood and your upbringing a little bit. Your father was a pillar of the American wine community. What was it like for you growing up and did you engage with wine from an early age?
Jason: I think everybody grows up thinking that whatever their childhood is is normal. As I got older, I realized how unusual it was. When I was growing up, my dad was an importer. He was spending three months of the year in France building and maintaining relationships with the suppliers for Vineyard Brands. Before I was old enough to start school, I got taken along like a difficult piece of baggage. I grew up playing in the courtyards with the kids of the proprietors that he would meet with. Pre-kindergarten, I could babble along in French with the other kids.
My dad was running Vineyard Brands from the barn of the Vermont farmhouse that I grew up in. When he would host sales dinners, my mom would cook and it would be everybody sitting around our big dining room table. I grew up around wine people. My parents would regularly go down into the cellar and pull something out, cover a bottle with foil and try to have the other one guess what it was.
I found the actual flavors of wine kind of mysterious. It wasn't until I got to high school when my dad suggested I spend the summer with the Perrins. Two or three half days a week in the cellar, cleaning barrels, moving bottles around. While I was there, I was relearning my French that I had mostly forgotten. That was a super formative experience for me having because the Perrins, there are two brothers who have run the estate since the 70s and they have seven kids of my generation and all of them are now in the business.
Having this family, all of whom were sure that they were going to be in wine long term, talking about wine, arguing about wine, declaring that this wine was undrinkable and this other wine was amazing—I was sitting there just soaking it all in. That was incredibly cool. I went back and reprised that in between college and grad school. At that point I was pretty sure that in the long run, somehow somewhere I wanted to be involved in wine.
Margot: That's awesome. Was there ever a time in your life where you thought, you know what, I'm going to go into mathematics or something?
Jason: Oh, sure. I spent four years working in tech. I have a master's degree in archaeology. I spent a couple of summers in Greece working on a dig. I thought I was going to teach for a while and ended up getting recruited by a tech company in DC at the height of the tech bubble. I joined a company that taught web programming languages and did that for four years. I was waiting for Tablas Creek to grow enough to need me, and also getting some life experience and business experience in an environment that was not connected to who my family was or what my dad did.
Margot: What was the step between your family being in importing and having wine sales conversations to, hey, let's put some wood in the ground?
Jason: That was all happening very much out of my view. This was when I was really little. My dad started talking with Jean-Pierre Perrin first in the mid 70s. I was a tiny kid at that point. They were traveling around the United States a lot, getting the Perrins’ French wines established and they would go to California regularly. It was also of interest because my dad in that era was representing some of the first generation of Napa and Sonoma wineries to hit the national scene. He represented Kistler and Phelps and Chappellet and Spring Mountain and Clos du Val and he helped launch Sonoma Cutler in the 80s. He was a believer in California. Whenever he had Jean-Pierre Perrin with him, they'd take an extra day in California to go and visit these new wineries and talk about what they thought.
They came to the conclusion that California was a place where you could make world class wines, which is a pretty radical idea for a French winemaking family in that era, but were also convinced that there was a real opportunity around the confluence between the Mediterranean climate that is in California and the grapes that are from the Mediterranean part of France.
People were looking at Burgundy and Bordeaux as their models, not at the Rhone. They thought it would be possible to do something really great in California that’s a riff on Chateneuf-du-Pape that that got them started. It's not an uncommon thing that people who spend their lives buying and selling wines harbor dreams of making it themselves at some point, so I don't think my dad took a lot of convincing, and he may have actually been the one who did the convincing.
Margot: When did you start getting involved at Tablas Creek?
Jason: That same semester that I took off between college and grad school—the fall of ‘95. I did a couple of months at Beaucastel and then came out to California and did a couple of months out here. We didn't even have a winery yet. We were renting space at Adelaida Cellars down the street from us.
I joined that tech company in ‘98 and by ‘01, the tech bubble had burst. I was also getting married that summer and we were ready to be somewhere other than DC. It seemed like the right moment and it was also the right moment as far as Tablas Creek was concerned. It had turned out that the business side of things was a much bigger challenge than my parents thought it would be. They thought that because this was associated with Beaucastel everyone would just buy it. That turned out to be wildly optimistic.
In ‘01, I started working with our distributors on the East Coast, trying to learn what the wine business was all about, but also get a sense of what people in the market were saying about Tablas Creek, which was mostly nothing. I did that for a little more than a year and then moved out here full time in April of ‘02. My dad basically dumped the whole problem of marketing into my lap. That was the year we opened a tasting room and started a wine club, started actually participating in festivals and working with our distributors out in the world, inviting writers to come out and discover what we were doing—all of the marketing we probably should have been doing from the beginning.
Margot: For the grapes that you use for your wines, do 100% of them come from your estate or are you purchasing as well?
Jason: No we, we grow something like 60 to 65% of what we use. Then we have two tiers of wines. One of them is really very new. I'm not used to saying two tiers of wines, but we have two tiers of wines that involve some purchased fruit. Also, there's one that we call Patelin de Tablas. Patelin is French slang for neighborhoods. So that's all grapes that we're buying from Paso Robles that we're making into a Rhone blend. Those are the wines that we make in the largest quantities, for distribution mostly. They've usually got six or eight vineyards in each of those three bottling and are the wines that restaurants can pour by the glass.
We started another tier that we're calling Lignée de Tablas, which is single vineyard wines from vineyards that are planted with Tablas Creek clones around California. We have three new vineyards that we contracted with in 2023, including Shake Ridge up in the Sierra foothills, which is super exciting, as well as three down in Santa Barbara County, all of which have our vines on the ground, all of which are farming organically. We'll do a series of those single vineyard bottlings. Then we've got 20 to 25 different varietal bottlings and blends that come off the estate each year.
Margot: That’s awesome. I imagine your archaeology degree probably helps here, but I'd love to understand a little better the terroir of your area and what those soils look like.
Jason: The biggest reason why we are where we are, there's actually lots of parts of California where the climate is good for Rhone varieties, but the biggest thing that that we were looking for was soils. We were looking for calcareous shales, this old seabed that has what underlies Chateneuf-du-Pape, and it’s what the Perrins felt was really important for providing freshness to Rhone varieties. We're only about ten miles from the Pacific, but we're separated from the ocean by the Santa Lucia mountain range that gets up to about 3000 feet, and it acts as a pretty unbroken barrier to the west of us.
We don't get daily fog the way you would get in the Santa Maria Valley or the Petaluma Gap or Carneros or these places where you have the heat inland that's rising and sucking the cool air off the Pacific. It is dry and hot and sunny during the days because there's no fog cover or cloud cover. It's quite cold at night. There's a huge swing in temperature between day and night. The average swing during the growing season is about 45 degrees. It's much more extreme than what you would find in the Rhone, with the combination of that ocean proximity, but not a lot of direct ocean influence.
We get the indirect influence and enough rain in the winter that we can dry farm most of our vineyard most vintages. We get really significant nighttime cooling. Then we've got this limestoney soil and a super long growing season. This year it's cool, like California was quite chilly this growing season and we didn't finish picking until the 13th of November, and that's not super risky here. It's much less risky than it is in Sonoma or Mendocino, where those storms that come sweeping out of the Pacific Northwest, they likely hit at the end of October. We've got an extra couple of weeks usually before we've got to worry about that.
The way all of that reflects into the wines, is a combination of brighter acids which you get from high calcium soils in general, and then this salty saline minerality component that I think you taste it in everything, but it's most obvious on the whites.
Margot: You posted recently about doing some cover crop testing and how that has affected your soils. Can you talk about that?
Jason: In general, our farming protocols at Tablas Creek were to start with what they do at Beaucastel and then adjust as we realize there's reason. We started up farming organically because Beaucastel has been fully organic since the 1950s. For them it's a baseline for how you show off your terroir, like a terroir amplifier. As we got deeper into this, we realized that more than just replacing chemical inputs with non-chemical inputs, we should really be trying to eliminate any input that was coming from outside of the farm, if we're trying to amplify our terroir as clearly as we can.
We started off instead of bringing in organic fertilizer, we did a composting program with all of our skins, stems, and vine clippings and all of that. Instead of trying to figure out some way of bringing in manure or some sort of amendment, can we get our own flock of sheep to graze our own weeds and turn it into their own manure? We ended up little by little falling into biodynamics. Though I think it's probably fair to say that a lot of the more mystical, philosophical pieces of biodynamics were never all that convincing to us—the whole activating cosmic energies thing. There's usually a scientific explanation for what's going on.
We ended up getting biodynamic certification in 2016. At that point we had a fairly well established protocol. We were planting a cover crop every winter. We had a rotational grazing plan on the flock of sheep. We'd get them through every vineyard block a couple of times every winter. Then in the spring we would disc whatever was left into the soil to stop it growing anymore, and that would decompose and then the sheep would be exiled to the forest lands and the creek bed and places where they could do good by helping reduce our fire risk, but not eat the growing vines. We would seed cover crop in November and the whole cycle would start again.
But in 2018, we made a couple of changes. We hired a new viticulturist. He didn’t think we needed to be tilling as much. Why are we going through and tilling the area in the middle of our vine rows? Those weeds aren't causing any problems. Can't we just leave that there? It'll be better against erosion. Then in 2018, we got an invitation to be a part of the pilot program for the regenerative organic certification.
One of the big tenants of regenerative is reducing tillage as much as you can, because it breaks up all of the soil networks. Over the last six years, we’ve been trying to figure out what blocks we can safely stop tilling entirely, what blocks we need to make some sort of a transition in. If there are new blocks that we're developing, can we develop them no-till, dry farmed from the beginning? We're basically taking 120 acres of vines and going block by block deciding to what degree we can we can move away from tilling.
The Holy Grail is these established 20+ year old dry farm blocks that have been basically disced every spring, disced or spaded every spring. In this pretty rugged challenging Paso Robles climate, they have spent 20 years of their life not being competed with by grasses and other surface plants. We have neighbors who went no-till and lost like 50% of the vines in their vineyard blocks where they did that for various reasons, either by increasing competition or by creating this environment where gophers and ground squirrels become invisible because they're hiding underneath all of this dried grass. All of a sudden their population explodes and you end up losing a lot of vines.
If you didn’t till the year before, you probably don't need to plant a cover crop. There's already seeds from the previous year's growth that are there waiting to germinate. Particularly after you grazed it, it doesn't necessarily have the mix of plants that you want because the sheep love certain things more than other things. They tend to eat the things that they love, which is often a lot of the flowering stuff that has a more attraction to bees and other sorts of beneficials. This year we bought a seeder that actually punctures through the existing mat and seeds without having it be tilled first. Those are some of the experiments we're working on now is increasing the biodiversity of what have growing amongst the rows without having to till.
Margot: That is so interesting. The gopher thing is really surprising for me. We don’t really have too much of a gopher issue here in Maine, but we do have voles.
Jason: Oh, they're awful. They're absolutely awful. That's harder in an organic vineyard. I mean, there are people who say yeah we don't have problems with gophers. We just poison every hole that we see. Okay well, I’m not super tempted by that option, but we probably have lost 10 or 15% of the vines that we've planted in our history to gophers. The established vineyard at this point is pretty safe because the roots are down through the topsoil to the deeper layers. At that point, the gophers aren't really interested.
We have 43 owl boxes that we've built around the property and they have nesting pairs of owls on them every year. Nesting pair of owls eats something like 500 rodents in a nesting season. We have a couple of guys on our crew who, in the summer, are detailed to setting and emptying gopher traps and they'll catch 60 or 70 gophers a day, and you still barely keep up. They have four litters a year. They reach sexual maturity at 45 days. They have a dozen babies in a litter. It’s a lot. Younger vineyards really get it.
Margot: Wow, I did not know that. That’s wild. When you’re thinking about regenerative viticulture and not bringing in anything to the property, do you have a need for any Bordeaux solution or lime sulfur in the vineyard?
Jason: We do a sulfur spray. We do. We have a regular plan of sulfur sprays. We haven't had to put copper on the vineyard in a really long time, 20 plus years. Mildew pressures here are not high. Humidity here in the summer is usually 15%. It generally stops raining in April and doesn't rain again until November. Once you get rid of those surface weeds, you don't have to worry a ton about mildew unless you have a really unusual weather pattern.
We've been able to replace a big chunk of the sulfur that we would have used two decades ago with compost tea because you can spray it on the leaves of the vines and it doesn't act as an anti-fungal. It's not a curative thing the way that sulfur can be or copper is even even stronger. It's preventative because all of the organic stuff in the compost tea helps out-compete mildew spores for the available resources. The combination alternating of sulfur and compost tea means that we're using relatively little sulfur than you would think of as normal.
Margot: Awesome. I know you have your own nursery at Tablas as well. How do you interact and engage with that?
Jason: One of the first things that we did when we bought this property in 1989 was go out and look at what was available for Rhone varieties in California. There were some grapes that were here and were good. There was Syrah, there was Marsanne. But there were some grapes that we wanted to work with that just didn't exist in California. Nobody had ever planted Picpoul or Grenache Blanc. The three grapes that we thought we were going to center our own production around, Roussane, Grenache, and Mourvedre, they didn't have a good reputation in California.
The more research we did, the more convinced we became that clonally, what was in California had been selected for high productivity rather than high quality. We decided we didn't want to handcuff ourselves to the clones that happened to be in California when we started, so we decided we would take cuttings of all the principal varieties from Beaucastel, bring them into the country, live with the fact that that would cost us five years because it's a three year quarantine, and you're only allowed to bring in six cuttings of each type. So once you get the vines out of the quarantine, you've got to propagate those six vines into enough to start planting a vineyard.
It was five years between when we brought the vines into quarantine to when we actually had enough to plant one hillside. It was like five rows of each variety up the side of one hill. In order to do that propagation work, we built a series of greenhouses. We planted rootstock fields. We learned how to do our own grafting and all of that. In the early years, it was actually a sort of a second business for us. We realized we weren't the only ones who were interested in these Rhone varieties. As soon as we had enough surplus that we could sell without hamstringing our own efforts, we did.
As early as 1996, we were selling vine cuttings. Between like 96 and 03, we sold something like a million grapevine cuttings to 400 vineyards up and down the West Coast. Then in ‘03, we did an internal audit and realized that we'd lost a lot of money over those seven years selling grapevine cuttings—that our cost of producing the vines was higher than what we were selling them for.
In ‘04, we worked out an agreement with a nursery in Sonoma called Novavine where they would come down and take the prunings that we would take off the vineyard every year, bring them back up to their facility, graft them onto rootstocks that they grow and they'd market them as Tablas Creek cuttings and pay us a royalty on the vines that they sold. That's a much better business model.
Over the next 15 years, they sold another 4 million grapevine cuttings of Tablas Creek material, and we have a little demonstration area down in our old nursery, but it's not really a production nursery at this point and we've been repurposing a lot of those buildings for other other things in recent years.
Margot: That is so cool. I didn't know that there were companies out there that did that would come down to your vineyard to take your cuttings and then market them under a royalty program.
Jason: Well, they don't do it anymore. As people have become much more conscious of viruses, particularly Red Blotch has become an issue around California, everybody wants to know that their cuttings, the vines that they're planting are coming from certified virus free sources, which is harder and harder to find and certainly is not a vineyard that's been around for 30 years. I mean, we know we've got a bunch of viruses here, so they haven't actually come down and taken cuttings off of what we're doing here for more than a decade. We’ve sent cuttings off of the vineyard to get cleaned up up at UC Davis. Then they went into blocks there at the nursery.
Margot: I'm curious about climate change and whether you've seen any patterns in your area. We are certainly experiencing it here in New England. How is climate change presenting in your region?
Jason: It's always so hard to know what's a short wave pattern? What's a climate change issue? We are coming off of the coldest year that we've had since 2011. If you go back before that, between 2012 and 2022, those were 10 of the 11 warmest years in Paso Robles in the last 50 years.
It used to be a coin toss when we started whether or not we'd still be harvesting in November about half the vintages. 2023 was the first time we'd harvested in November since 2011. Based on what I'm reading, the model suggests that a lot of the storm patterns are shifting north by a little bit. Since we get most of our rain in five or six big pacific storms every year, if it shifts north enough that the storm hits the bay area instead of the central coast, that can be 20% less rain for the year.
We had this brutal drought between ‘12 and ‘16 and then wet year in ‘17, dry year in ‘18, wet year in ‘19 and then another really brutal drought between ‘20 and ‘22 that coincided with three really hot years in a row. Drought is not a stranger to California anyway, but it's something that we need to get used to dealing with regularly. We’re getting extended heat spikes. We had a 10 day stretch in the very beginning of September of 2022, where it was 104 or hotter every day, ten days in a row. That was the longest stretch of that level of heat that we've ever seen during harvest season.
Then we also had the latest frost that we've ever had on May 11th of 2022. We had an early warm winter and early bud break—everything was out by two feet, including the late sprouting varieties that normally dodge that for the frost in that one low lying area that got hit. We lost a dozen acres of of our whites, lost 75% or 80% of the crop in that block due to a late frost made worse by the fact that generally bud break has come earlier. It seems like it's more chaotic where we are, but we're doing everything we can to try to build soils that are resilient enough that they hold more moisture, and therefore are less prone to or less susceptible to drought. We try to build and encourage deeper root systems so that the roots are not sitting at the surface where during a heat spike they're going to be badly impacted.
A lot of the stuff we've been doing has been moving towards less density, deep rooting root stocks and encouraging their growth in a way that gets those roots down ten and twenty feet where they don't even notice what's going on at the surface. The regenerative farming piece plays into that in two ways. How do you mitigate the impacts of what you know is going to become more common with climate change, but also how do your soils act as a carbon sink so that you can be doing your part to get at the root cause of climate change.
When we first applied for the ROC, we had not been doing much in the way of soil testing. We were looking at the health of the vines and the health of the cover crops and being like, yeah, this looks like it's working, but the ROC protocols require you to be doing soil tests. We sent our soils into a lab associated with Cornell and we got a call from them saying they typically expect 1.5% to 2% organic matter in California ag land, and the samples that we were sending were 6 to 6.5% organic matter. That's pretty cool. You can make a measurable difference in the carbon content of your soil.
Margot: That's amazing. As you move through time at Tablas Creek, what are some of the changes that you've been noticing in your region?
Jason: The biggest change in Paso over the last year or two is all of the big international companies have suddenly realized, hey, wait a second, Paso is kind of hot right now. We got to buy some piece of it. The sale of Daou for a billion dollars this year, Constellation buying into Booker, you have Gallo buying Denner.
We had a surprisingly long period where just about all of the important players in Paso were family owned wineries whose owners lived in Paso Robles. Now you're starting to see that change. I served several terms on the board of directors of the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance before this happened. One of the things that I was really worried about was the incredible cohesion of this community, its ability and willingness and desire to work together to put the region first. That's a rare and valuable thing, and it's something that needs to be cultivated as a region grows.
There was a really explosive period of growth in the 2000s where new vineyards are getting founded, so many new acres being planted, people experimenting in every possible direction with Rhone varieties and Italian varieties and Spanish varieties and Bordeaux varieties and those people over there still planting Pinot Noir, like who knows why? [laughs] That period of really wild creativity in the 2000s, the rise of Paso as the epicenter of the California Rhone movement in that same period, then over the last decade, a real push by the bigger Cab and Bordeaux producers to try to brand Paso Cab as a thing.
It's still a young enough region that its identity is fluid and there are multiple facets of it coexisting in a good way and a healthy way. It does have a reputation as a place where you can go and find that like maverick winemaker blending Petit Syrah and Zinfandel and Mourvedre and Malbec. You can do almost anything you want in Paso, which is one of its strengths and also a challenge when you're trying to market the region.
Margot: Absolutely. I’m curious as we come into the new year, whether you've done any vision planning for 2024 for Tablas Creek and what 2024 is going to look like for you.
Jason: I haven't done formal vision planning for 2024. This year is about getting back to where we were—recovered in actually having enough wine that we can go out and promote it. We had short crop in ‘20, a very short crop in ‘21, even shorter crop in ‘22 that coincided with this huge boom in pandemic era people ordering online. We were spending '21 and ‘22 sprinting to try to keep up with the people who were landing on our doorstep and wanting to order wine from us and trying to deal with that with short crops.
Then last year we realized that we were having to turn down opportunities all over the place around the country because we just didn't have enough wine that we could supply. Last year I was like, okay, we are going to have enough wine in 2024 that I can say yes to these things. We're going to increase our production and we're going to go find that business. That’s my big goal in 2024.
Finally, we got good rain for the vineyard. Yes, we have a little bit of residual weakness from the frost the year before, but still we got an average crop off of our estate last year. Plus we bought more grapes for Patelin and we're coming off of two years where we didn't have anything close to an average crop. So it feels like we've suddenly had this windfall of grapes where we're able to launch into these projects that we haven't done.
A couple of years ago we started doing small runs of the three Patelin wine in three liter boxes in the bag and box because the carbon footprint is so much better than glass bottles. We limited it to a small program. This year we're actually making enough that we can release it to a handful of our wholesalers around the country. We're working with an export partner to do this. There are a lot of things that I've wanted to do the last couple of years that we just haven't had the supply to be able to do.
We have 30 acres that are planted but not yet in production which is super exciting. So that'll increase what's coming off of this vineyard by another 15%. We’ll be diving a little deeper into some of the new varieties that we brought over in a second round of imports. I want to have the ability to vinify and bottle grapes like Muscardin and Picardan and Vaccarèse on their own and and share those with people. There's a whole other range of these floral high acid herbal tannic Rhone varieties on the red side, these bright minerally varieties on the white side that I think are incredibly exciting. I think that’s something that has all of us here excited.
Margot: That's awesome. I can't wait to hear more about that project. Thanks so much for your time, and I’m excited to taste some of these new wines soon!
You can support Jason and his team at Tablas Creek by buying their wines on their website and signing up for their wine club. Stay up to date with what they’re up to on Instagram—they’re an amazing follow and Jason often shares insight into viticulture and vinification.
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