2019 Counoise
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The 2019 Tablas Creek Vineyard Counoise is Tablas Creek’s tenth varietal bottling of this traditional blending grape from the Southern Rhone. The Counoise grape has an unusual combination of vibrant blue and purple fruit (blueberries and cranberries), sweet spice (nutmeg and cinnamon), light-to-medium body, bright acidity, ruby color, and soft tannin.
Tasting Notes
Darker than many vintages of Counoise, the wine shows a nose of cranberry and clove-studded orange, spicy and lifted. The mouth is lively with flavors of raspberry and cherry, a sweet wintergreen note, and bright acids that smooth out into a spicy wild strawberry and red licorice finish. A pretty and intriguing wine that should be endlessly flexible with food. Enjoy it any time in the next six to eight years.
Technical Details
Appellation
- Adelaida District Paso Robles
Technical Notes
- 13.0% Alcohol by Volume
- 460 Cases Produced
Blend
- 100% Counoise
Recipes & Pairings
Recipe Suggestions
Food Pairings
- Roast pork loin
- Veal
- Roasted Chicken
- Spicy sausages
Production Notes
Our Counoise grapes were grown on our Regenertative Organic Certified™ and biodynamic estate vineyard. We typically use most of this Counoise in our Esprit de Tablas and Côtes de Tablas wines. However, in years when Counoise spends an unusually long time on the vine, it achieves enough concentration to balance its exuberant fruit, spice and acidity and we bottle it on its own.
The 2019 vintage began with ample rainfall the preceding winter. The wet soils delayed budbreak to a little after normal, and a cool first half of the summer delayed flowering and the ripening of our earlier varieties. Beginning the second week of July, the weather turned warm but never so warm to engage the vines' self-defense mechanism of shutting down, accelerating ripening of our later varieties and producing intense flavors. The resulting compressed harvest was completed under ideal conditions and the vintage shows both concentration and freshness, with bright acids framing ample fruit.
We tend to ferment our Counoise lots in stainless steel to protect it from oxidation, and to age it in neutral oak to avoid weighing down its bright fruit flavors. The lots that we chose for our varietal Counoise were selected and blended in June 2020 and bottled in February 2021, under screwcap to preserve its freshness.