Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020 - 38

Top 100 Wineries

Stags' Leap Winery

Tablas Creek

CALIFORNIA | NAPA VALLEY
A French perspective on blending brings out the distinctive
character of the Stags' Leap Estate Vineyard.

CALIFORNIA | PASO ROBLES
Tablas Creek shines a spotlight on Rhône varieties through the
unique terroir of the Adelaida Hills in Paso Robles.

CHRISTOPHE
PAUBERT

IN 2011, CHRISTOPHE PAUBERT WAS WORKING on
a barrel-auction lot for the Napa Valley Vintners. "We were trying different ideas and playing around, and we discovered we really liked
a cabernet-petite sirah blend," he recalls. The
Bordeaux-trained Frenchman hadn't worked
with petite sirah before joining Stags' Leap Winery two years earlier. He found that cabernet
responded best to petite from Block 9, a 38-yearold planting that gives a fruitier wine than his
other parcels. That led to his ﬁrst release of
Audentia, a cabernet enhanced with petite sirah
in the blend. He has since developed a portfolio
around the two varieties: Cabernet sauvignon
makes up half of the estate vineyard, while petite
sirah is at the heart of Ne Cede Malis, a ﬁve-acre
block that dates to 1929, just below the stone
manor house built in the early 1890s at the base
of the Stags Leap escarpment. Paubert makes a
range of Napa Valley bottlings from purchased
fruit, but it is his estate-grown wines that show
the elegance Stags Leap District fruit can deliver.
-J.G.

NEIL COLLINS

2018 Adelaida District Esprit Blanc de Tablas
($45, 93 points) Tablas Creek's top white wine
has been roussanne-dominant for several vintages
now, just like the ﬂagship white at its partner winery,
Beaucastel. The team has learned how to capture
the grape's elegant ﬂeshiness without letting it get
blowsy, enlivening the blend with grenache blanc,
picpoul, clairette blanche and the high-acid newcomer picardin. This vintage smells of apple pulp and
honey, becoming grand with air, the powerful weight
and contour of roussanne gaining deﬁnition from the
blend's higher-acid components.

2016 Stags Leap District Napa Valley Audentia
Cabernet Sauvignon ($200, 95 points) Paubert
ﬁnds the petite sirah from Block 9 at his estate vineyard is less about spice than it is about blueberry and
blackberry ﬂavors and velvet tannins that complement cabernet. Here it combines with some ﬂoral
petit verdot to ﬁll cabernet's own dark-chocolate
tannins with layers of earth tones and spice. It's
polished, lasting on fragrant complexity, with a tartcherry focus that rings clean and as clear as a bell.

FOUNDED:

1893
OWNER:

Treasury Wine
Estates
WINEMAKER:

Christophe
Paubert
VITICULTURIST:

2016 Stags Leap District Napa Valley The Leap
Cabernet Sauvignon ($110, 93 points) Christophe
Paubert blends this wine from a range of estate
blocks, making each separately, then deciding on this
barrel selection, his top cabernet, just before bottling.
It's fresh and fragrant in 2016, with youthful energy
to its plump black fruit and the espresso richness of
Stags Leap District cabernet. Powerful and reﬁned,
the wine seems to draw the vineyard's volcanic rock
into its lasting tannins.

Jim Burgess
ACRES OWNED:

240 (80 planted)
ANNUAL
PRODUCTION:

N/A
ESTATE GROWN:

10%
38

FOUNDED:

1989
OWNERS:

The Perrin and
Haas families
WINEMAKER:

Neil Collins

WINE & SPIRITS

BUYING GUIDE 2021

2019 Paso Robles Patelin de Tablas Rosé ($25,
93 points) Drawn from non-estate fruit sources,
this blend of grenache (76 percent), mourvedre and
counoise is pale in color, its peach and wild strawberry scents buoyed by an oceanic sea-spray lift.
Its ﬂavors are just as fresh and mouthwatering, the
grenache providing delicacy, the mourvedre giving it
a foundation.

VITICULTURIST:

Jordan Lonborg
2016 Stags Leap District Napa Valley Ne Cede
Malis Petite Sirah ($125, 91 points) From a mixed
planting of 16 varieties, this shows its old-vine complexity in shades of black, from earth to rose to midnight purple fruit. It's savory, with a formal structure,
before the layers of fruit sweetness begins to develop
with air.

IN 1988, THE PERRIN FAMILY OF Château de Beaucastel joined forces with Robert Haas of Vineyard Brands, their American importer, to create
the Franco-American collaboration that is Tablas
Creek. The partners found the limestone soils
they sought in western Paso Robles, and planted
exclusively Rhône varieties. The plan, from its
inception, was to import and grow all thirteen
varieties used in Châteauneuf. That project is
ﬁnally complete-the last variety, muscardin,
saw its ﬁrst American harvest in 2020; and, in
another ﬁrst for the US, general manager Jason
Haas announced that the winery has earned
Regenerative Organic Certiﬁcation, over and
above their organic and biodynamic credentials. Many of the oldest vines are now 30 years
old, and the vineyard is showing the consistency
and maturity of middle age-to say nothing of
the consistency coming from its winemaker,
Neil Collins, now in his twenty-third year. Paso
Robles is mostly red wine country, but the cool
nights of the Adelaida District in western Paso
can foster impressive white wines as well-such
as the property's ﬂagship white, Esprit Blanc de
Tablas. -P.J.C.

ACRES OWNED:

270 (115 planted)
ANNUAL
PRODUCTION:

32,000 cases
ESTATE GROWN:

70%

2018 Adelaida District Grenache ($40, 92 points)
The estate grenache block is one of several that's dry
farmed. The wine it produces has a distinctly French
feel, leading with vibrant red-cherry fruit grounded by
a dusty aromatic foundation of leather and turf reminiscent of Gigondas. With air, the red fruit brightens
into raspberry sweetness, tethered by the savory elements, bright, lively and lasting.

Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020

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