Tablas Creek Rouge 2015

There is a community of Californian growers that go by the collective moniker the 'Rhone Rangers.' Depending on your outlook this will either strike you as awesome or provoke a tut and a muttered 'wine people!' Regardless of whether you approve of the name or not (we love it), the Rhone Rangers are becoming as much of an American institution as their namesake. In fact, the Rhone Rangers have the advantage of not having their franchise ruined by Disney and Jonny Depp with a dead crow on his head.

The group of growers hold very little interest in solving crimes in frontier towns and are much more focused on raising the prestige of Rhone varietals in California. Bottlings such as Tablas Creek Rouge from Paso Robles, have demonstrated Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre perform just as well in California as they do in Chateauneuf du Pape. Unrelenting aromas of wild strawberry, mint, fresh figs, and an undertone of chorizo-like meatiness are pervasive in this wine with a tight structure and an astonishingly long length. Better lasso a bottle of this before it gets away (that was poor, sorry Tonto.)

Tablas Creek is the realization of the combined efforts of two of the international wine community’s leading families: the Perrin family, proprietors of Château de Beaucastel, and the Haas family of Vineyard Brands. Robert Haas has played a leading role in the American wine industry for over half a century. As a buyer for his family's New York retailer M. Lehman starting in the 1950s, Haas travelled through the cellars of France, establishing a formidable reputation as a wine taster while forging lifelong relationships with premier wine producers.

In the mid-1960s he set out on his own to import fine estate wines from Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Loire, Alsace and the Rhône Valley, where he met the Perrins of Château de Beaucastel and convinced family patriarch Jacques Perrin to appoint him the Perrins' exclusive American importer. Through his importing business Vineyard Brands, he worked closely with Jacques' sons Jean-Pierre and Francois Perrin, establishing Beaucastel as one of the international wine community's leading estates.

Over the course of two decades traveling around the United States together to promote their French wines, Haas and the Perrins became friends, and emerged convinced that the Rhone grape varieties so well suited to the sunny south of France would thrive in California's Mediterranean climate. In 1985, the families began looking for property. Grown on limestone soils in the hilly Adelaida District of west Paso Robles, chosen for its similarity to Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Organically farmed vineyard. Estate grown and bottled. Fermented in classic style using native
yeasts.

Robert Haas was recognized by the Paso Robles Wine Community as 2007 Wine Industry Person of the Year, and in 2014 he received a lifetime achievement award from Rhone Rangers for his contributions to the American Rhone movement. Haas passed away in March 2018. Tributes to his remarkable career appeared in Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times. His son Jason, who has run the estate since the mid-2000's, was voted by his peers 2015 Paso Robles Wine Country Wine Industry Person of the Year and 2017 San Luis Obispo County Wine Industry Person of the Year.

The Perrin family has received numerous international awards, including the prestigious 2018 Meininger Award for Wine Family of the Year. In addition, Jean-Pierre and Francois Perrin were named Men of the Year by Decanter Magazine in 2014.