Jason Haas
Tablas Creek Vineyard - The World’s First Regenerative Organic Certified
This episode is sponsored by Stoke Wines.
My guest for this episode is Jason Haas. Jason is the partner and general manager of Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles California. I hope that you’ve heard of Tablas Creek, but if not, let me give you a short list of their environmental leadership in the wine industry. Tablas Creek was the first Regenerative Organic Certified winery in the world. They’ve been farming organically since their start in 1989, certified organic since 2005, and certified biodynamic since 2015. They employ a full-time shepherd to manage a year-round flock of over 250 sheep that rotationally graze their 270 acres of vineyards, as well as the woodlands around them. Their winery is 100% solar powered, and they use their wastewater to feed a native species wetland. They are leaders in reducing glass bottle weights and bringing awareness to the many downsides of heavy glass bottles, and they are pioneering alternative packaging for ultra-premium wine. And this is just a short list. We talk about all of this, as well as get into the technicalities of no-till and low-till considerations in regenerative viticulture. We talk about how Tablas Creek has brought every grape from Chateauneuf du Pape to the US through the rigorous and time consuming process of quarantining that can take over a decade… and it’s likely if you’ve drunk a wine from the US made with a Rhone variety of grape, you can thank Tablas Creek.
Behind all of this, I hope you get a sense of the timeline of the vision for this winery. It extends beyond Jason’s, or any single person’s lifetime. It’s a vision of continual, incremental improvement, of regeneration, over centuries. It’s a vision that I hope inspires the way we think about wine.
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Sponsors:
We at the Stoke wanted to sponsor the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast because of the importance of the message that so many of these conversations bring. Our future generations depend on us, and education is the key to a change in our concepts of how we could and should be farming and treating our soils. It doesn’t matter your level of education with these topics, as long and you are willing to learn and your heart is in the right place, YOU will make a difference and it doesn’t matter the size as it all adds up. Keep pushing and please keep chatting. Let’s do this.