2013 Panoplie

There’s a new varietal wine at Tablas Creek this year, the rare Terret Noir, one of the thirteen permitted grapes for Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which pushes the number of those varieties bottled from this iconic producer’s 120 acres of vineyards to nine. The style continues to push toward greater finesse, which is no easy feat in this hot region, but winemaker Neil Collins and his team have proven more than able to pull it off with impressive consistency. The oak presence in the wines is restrained and tannins are always well-managed, which makes for ease of drinking on the young side but these bottlings possess the depth and balance to reward patience.

I tasted through this year's new and upcoming releases with long-time winemaker and vineyard manager Neil Collins and assistant winemaker Chelsea Franchi, who has been at Tablas Creek since graduating from Cal Poly in 2008. Franchi has become more deeply involved in the winemaking here in recent years, a time when, as Collins said, "the vines are really coming into maturity and showing what the vineyards can deliver." There's a serious dedication to bush vine-planting (en gobelet) and dry farming at the estate, a process that requires considerable extra labor and raises the risk of decreased yields, but which most winemakers, including Collins, Franchi and the Haas and Perrin families, are convinced allows for maximum site expression and wine concentration.

The Tablas Creek wines have an admirable track record for rewarding cellaring, all the way down to the entry-level bottlings, so readers are well-advised to stash a few bottles away, assuming they have patience and storage space. Please note that the flagship Esprit de Beaucastel bottling is now called Esprit de Tablas because, as Collins and Jason Haas have pointed out, "Tablas Creek stands on its own now and shouldn't have to lean on the Beaucastel name any more."

Once again, Tablas Creek has turned out a mind-bending number of fabulous wines, from delicious entry-level whites and reds all they way up to the top selections, which remain very reasonably priced considering the quality. General Manager Jason Haas describes 2012 as a vintage with generous yields. Haas adds that 2013 followed a similar ripening curve, but the vines were into the second year of a drought cycle, so yields were lower than 2012 by about 20-25%. In addition to these current and future releases I also tasted a handful of library wines, which I include here for further context and ease of reference.