How one of France’s famous wine families forged a powerful alliance in California
From the Judgement of Paris and its sequel to recently imposed tariffs, numerous wine tales attest to strained Franco-American relations. Tablas Creek Vineyard offers a welcome counter-example of what can be achieved through friendship and collaboration. The story begins after WWII, with Jacques Perrin of Château de Beaucastel travelling through France in search of lost Rhône grape varieties. Some of the grapes historically used in a Châteauneuf-du-Pape blend had been abandoned or pulled out due to phylloxera, but Perrin found them and brought them back to plant in his vineyards. Today Beaucastel is one of the few wineries that continues to use all thirteen of the traditional varieties in its red blend. Jacques Perrin was also one of the first French producers to become organic, completing the conversion to biodynamic viticulture in 1989.
In the 1950s Sidney Haas ran a retail shop in New York, and his son Robert became Beaucastel’s American importer in the late 1960s. What started as a business relationship soon blossomed into a friendship. Robert’s son Jason has a 1973 picture of himself as a newborn seated on Jacques Perrin’s lap at Beaucastel. During Jason’s childhood, Jacques Perrin’s two sons, Jean-Pierre and Francois, often visited California to promote their wines. While the Perrins were impressed by the quality of the wine, they found the absence of Rhône varieties puzzling.
'They saw lots of people focusing on Burgundy and Bordeaux,' said Jason, 'but they thought the climate was a lot more like the south of France, so why was nobody planting Grenache, Syrah or Roussanne?'
To fill the void, the families agreed to join forces and open their own winery. After a four-year search for a site favorable to the Rhône varieties, they purchased land in Paso Robles, two hours north of Santa Barbara, launching Tablas Creek Vineyard in 1989. Once vine cuttings imported from Beaucastel had passed through quarantine, the vineyards were planted and the first vintage was bottled in 1997. As the original name of the flagship red wine suggests, Esprit de Beaucastel was created in the Perrin spirit with 30-50% Mourvèdre and smaller contributions from Syrah and Grenache.
Tablas Creek tasting room manager John Morris remembered that the team started to harvest earlier from 2010. Since the vines had reached a satisfactory level of maturity, the idea was to get more freshness in the blend. In the same year, eyeing future benefits such as improved soil health, increased organic matter and the ability to combat stress spikes, Tablas Creek also tried farming 8 hectares biodynamically. To everyone’s amazement, there were immediate dividends: the biodynamic sections received top grades in spring blind tastings of the various blocks to be used in the Esprit blend.
'We thought it was interesting,' recalled Jason, 'and were looking for it the next year and found the same thing. We weren’t sure what to attribute it to but thought we should see what happened if we increased the biodynamic section. We doubled it and saw the same leap in our grades in that new block in 2012. We were farming the whole vineyard biodynamically by 2016, got our certification in 2017, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that we are on the best run of quality that we have ever seen since 2016.'
Along with Bandol’s Domaine Tempier, Esprit de Tablas is one of the finest expressions of Mourvèdre I have encountered, which makes perfect sense since the vines came from Tempier cuttings via Beaucastel. But how does Paso Robles differ from the southern Rhône? Jason Haas noted the diurnal variation – when I visited in June the temperatures dropped to 10-12 degrees Celsius at night – and the extreme pattern of precipitation. This part of southern California receives more annual rainfall than Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but almost all of it comes in a six-month period. Clearly, the wines from Tablas Creek can never be reproductions of Beaucastel blends. As the current name of the top wine suggests, the winery has developed its own spirit. In 2020 it became the world’s first Regenerative Organic Certified vineyard. Over the years the Perrins have been keen to learn about aspects of American wine marketing through Tablas Creek’s wine club. More recently they have incorporated aspects of regenerative farming in their own vineyards.
'In France,' said Jason, 'so much is dictated by tradition. When [the Perrins] first started letting their cover crops grow as opposed to tilling everything under in the spring, they had people calling to ask if they were in financial difficulty and couldn’t pay for their tractors. They got their first flock of sheep for their vineyard in Gigondas 6 or 7 years after us. We’ve seen them do interplanting of fruit trees and hedgerows that you have in regenerative farming that we started in 2010. They’ve been doing that over the last couple of years because it’s getting hotter fast in the southern Rhone. They are very experimental and outward-looking, but still creations of their appellation and tradition, with 5 generations looking over the shoulders. I think they see Tablas Creek as a place where we do experiments and, if they work, they will bring them back to use at Beaucastel.'
To see how Tablas Creek Vineyard and their top cuvée have evolved, I compared three vintages separated by 15 years.
Tablas Creek Vineyard Esprit de Beaucastel 2006: sold in a larger bottle subsequently phased out for environmental reasons, with proportions of 45% Mourvèdre, 28% Grenache, 22% Syrah and 5% Counoise. Cherry and raspberry liqueur, fresh cut hay and California sunshine in a wine full of spice, vitality and pleasure.
Tablas Creek Vineyard Esprit de Tablas 2014: 40% Mourvèdre, 35% Grenache, 20% Syrah, 5% Counoise. Raspberry confit, tar, leather and licorice notes give way to a streak of spearmint and superior acidity. Fresh, expansive and very long, this is just coming into its own.
Tablas Creek Vineyard Esprit de Tablas 2021: 35% Mourvèdre, 26% Grenache, 23% Syrah, 7% Vaccarese, 5% Cinsaut, 5% Counoise. Two more of the quarantined grapes have joined the party in a wine that is a notch lighter than many of its predecessors. Blueberry, pipe tobacco, anise and tar in a spry and spicy, structured yet weightless creation. With admirable precision of fruit and marked minerality, the 2021’s nuances will surely reward patient drinkers for years to come.
These wines are available in the UK through Liberty Wines.
Andy James is a professor in the School of Commerce at Meiji University in Tokyo. His book Bandol Wine and the Magic of Mourvèdre was published in 2023. In addition to teaching English and wine business classes at Meiji he has established a summer study wine program at Curtin University in Perth.
