The team of editors at Wine Enthusiast compiled their 2022 guide to Christmas pairings, and our 2021 Patelin de Tablas made the list. The category was turkey, which they said "pairs perfectly with this easy-to-enjoy, but complex Rhône-style red blend featuring crisp plum-fruit flavors."
In their annual roundup of the best wines to pair with this quintessentially American holiday, the venerable Gayot.com's Dirk Smits includes our newly-released 2020 Esprit de Tablas Blanc. From the article:
Roussanne provides the core richness, minerality and flavors of honey and spice, while Grenache Blanc adds green apple and anise flavors, a lush mouth feel and bright acidity. Picpoul Blanc brings pineapple aromas and saline minerality. Picardan adds elegance while Clairette Blanche is crisp and gently citrusy. Bourboulenc provides a limestone, citrusy lift. All are the right attributes to be enjoyed in a Thanksgiving wine.
In a new piece for VinePair, Stephanie Cain highlights one of the things we love best about Paso Robles: its diversity. In her piece, she includes what may be the first sentences ever written in a national publication about Terret Noir, one of our weirdest and most interesting grapes:
Terret Noir is a barely known grape, one of the 18 permitted in France’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape appellation. Even there, it’s not widely used, so it’s very surprising to see it pop up in Paso. Here, it thrives. Paso’s Tablas Creek Vineyard propagated theirs from cuttings originating at Château de Beaucastel, and they add it to their own red blends as well as a varietal bottling that they have produced for the past five vintages. The garnet-hued wine offers aromatics of watermelon rind, juniper berry, and rose petal, with salty and tangy flavors that finish with grippy tannins and peppery spice. It’s like a meal in and of itself but goes particularly well with Mediterranean dishes like Lebanese lamb meatballs, where the spice and high acid of the wine stand up to the rich meat dish.
In a new article in Forbes, Lana Bortolot presents a selection of American roses for the Thanksgiving feast, including our Dianthus. Why rosé?
It’s a thoroughly democratic style of wine that deftly dances with most of what’s on the Thanksgiving table, from turkey to cranberry sauce. Here are a few easy picks that will please any palate that comes to your table. For this celebration of the American feast, I stayed stateside.
In a new article for Bloomberg, critic Elin McCoy chooses nine wines for "a planet-friendly version of the feast". From her article:
My nine picks are food-friendly crowd pleasers. One key to their versatility is juicy acidity, that lively zing that gives a wine energy, cuts through heavy, richly textured, snooze-inducing dishes, and refreshes your taste buds so you can go back for seconds and keep talking. They brim with fruit and are low in tannin, alcohol, and oaky flavors from barrel aging. All come from eco-conscious wineries committed to preserving the planet, whether by farming organically and biodynamically, conserving and recycling water, encouraging biodiversity, using solar power, cutting their carbon emissions, or, often, a combination of them all.
In an article for her blog, veteran wine columnist Laurie Daniel offers some good advice for pairing wines with the Thanksgiving meal:
"No wine is the perfect match for Thanksgiving dinner. There are simply too many flavors in the meal to account for: earthy, savory, salty, tangy, even sweet. So I usually try to find a wine that does a reasonably good job at complementing all those flavors.
For my palate, the best choices are red. But nothing too oaky, tannic or alcoholic. Nor do I open anything too delicate, which would probably be overwhelmed by the food. The wine needs to have plenty of fruit and enough acidity to cut through the richness of the meal."
She then recommends five wines to try with Thanksgiving this year, including our 2019 Esprit de Tablas!
From red to white to rose we've always held that Rhone blends make amazing pairings for Thanksgiving dinners. Their diversity of flavors, their balance of sweeter and more savory notes, and their rich textures but (usually) unoaked profile all lend themselves to this most American of meals.
So it was with excitement that we read VinePair's Thanksgiving recommendations for 2021 and found three Tablas Creek wines included!
In a new article for VinePair, Edward Deitch showcases our 2020 Cotes de Tablas Blanc, which he calls "an outstanding white blend that shows off the quality and the value of the wines produced by Tablas Creek." He also recommends it for Thanksgiving dinner, because it "would be a superb match for all the diverse flavors on your holiday table."
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