Press Release: 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).
In celebration of the community that made this achievement possible, Tablas Creek will debut the Muscardin at an industry event for wine and hospitality professionals from across San Luis Obispo County. Attendees will have the opportunity to taste all 14 single-varietal wines side by side in a first-of-its-kind experience designed to highlight the diversity and potential of Rhône varieties in California.
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."
