Tablas Creek Vineyard Becomes First U.S. Winery to Bottle All 14 Châteauneuf-du-Pape Grapes as Single-Varietal Wines
Tablas Creek Vineyard has announced the completion of a decades-long project: bottling all 14 traditional Châteauneuf-du-Pape grape varieties from the Château de Beaucastel collection as single-varietal wines. The final piece came this year with the debut of a varietal Muscardin, an extremely limited 25-case bottling that marks a first for any American winery.
This is an important milestone in the journey that began with the founding of Tablas Creek in 1989 as a partnership between the Perrin family of Château de Beaucastel and American importer Robert Haas. Over the next three decades, Tablas Creek imported, propagated, and planted the grapes grown at Beaucastel, including nine new to the United States. The grapes, and the year in which they were first planted, are: Mourvedre (1994), Grenache (1994), Syrah (1994), Counoise (1994), Grenache Blanc (1994), Roussanne (1994), Picpoul Blanc (2000), Terret Noir (2010), Clairette Blanche (2010), Picardan (2013), Vaccarese (2016), Cinsaut (2016), Bourboulenc (2016) and Muscardin (2019).
Tablas Creek’s second-generation Proprietor, Jason Haas, had this to say about the accomplishment, “I can feel my dad smiling down at this landmark. People so often think of the Rhone grape varieties as ‘just blending grapes.’ But tasting them on their own, it’s clear that they’re more than that. Each one has its own distinctive personality. We are proud to have introduced so many of them to California viticulture, and to see millions of cuttings from those original mother vines in hundreds of vineyards up and down the West Coast.”
Tablas Creek Vineyard, founded in the limestone hills of western Paso Robles in 1989 by the Perrin Family of Château de Beaucastel and Robert Haas of Vineyard Brands, is dedicated to regenerative organic and biodynamically farmed wines from grape varieties traditional to France’s Rhône Valley. Tablas Creek’s pioneering innovations have included introducing nine new grape varieties to American grapegrowing through its nursery program; pioneering lightweight and low-carbon packaging including reusable stainless steel kegs, lightweight glass bottles, and boxes; and in 2020, becoming the first winery in the world to achieve the industry’s most rigorous farming certification: Regenerative Organic Certified ®.
