Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
-
Wine & Spirits
This grows at the Haas family’s Rhône refuge in western Paso Robles, where they partnered with the Perrins of Château Beaucastel to import and plant a range of Rhône varieties, helping to populate California’s vineyards with well-bred vines. This rosé is mostly grenache and mourvedre; it captures the cool side of Paso in its freshness, with bright flavors that could substitute for strawberries and cream at a Sunday morning tennis final. Fragrant, smooth and gracious, it’s a rosé that feels complete on its own, and completely integrated.
-
Jeb Dunnuck
Smelling like summer in a bottle, the 2017 Patelin de Tablas Rosé is a lighter colored, perfumed, Provencal style beauty that gives up lovely peach, orange rind, and citrus aromas and flavors. It’s clean, impeccably balanced, has good acidity, and great, classically dry finish. Year in, year out, it’s one of the best roses coming out of California.
-
Wine Spectator
Floral and distinctive for the savory spice, raspberry and watermelon flavors. Grenache, Mourvèdre, Syrah and Counoise. Drink now.
Whether it’s playful and fun or savory and serious, most rosé today is not your grandmother’s White Zinfandel, though that category remains strong. Pink wine has recently become quite trendy, and this time around it’s commonly quite dry. Since the pigment in red wines comes from keeping fermenting juice in contact with the grape skins for an extended period, it follows that a pink wine can be made using just a brief period of skin contact—usually just a couple of days. The resulting color depends on grape variety and winemaking style, ranging from pale salmon to deep magenta.
Paso Robles has made a name for itself as a source of supple, powerful, fruit-driven Central Coast wines. But with eleven smaller sub-AVAs, there is actually quite a bit of diversity to be found in this inland portion of California’s Central Coast.
Just east over the Santa Lucia Mountains from the chilly Pacific Ocean, lie the coolest in the region: Adelaida, Templeton Gap and (Paso Robles) Willow Creek Districts, as well as York Mountain AVA and Santa Margarita Ranch. These all experience more ocean fog, wind and precipitation compared to the rest of the Paso sub-appellations. The San Miguel, (Paso Robles) Estrella, (Paso Robles) Geneso, (Paso Robles) Highlands, El Pomar and Creston Districts, along with San Juan Creek, are the hotter, more western appellations of the greater Paso Robles AVA.
This is mostly red wine country, with Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel standing out as the star performers. Other popular varieties include Merlot, Petite Sirah, Petit Verdot, Syrah, Grenache and Rhône blends, both red and white. There is a fairly uniform tendency here towards wines that are unapologetically bold and opulently fruit-driven, albeit with a surprising amount of acidity thanks to the region’s chilly nighttime temperatures.