What they gave away

More than five million vine cuttings over thirty years, the vast majority handed to growers in California, Washington, Oregon, Texas and Virginia rather than sold.

What they kept

Organic since inception, biodynamic since 2010, and in 2020 the first Regenerative Organic Certified vineyard on earth. Sheep, alpacas and guard donkeys graze the rows.

Read the case · 8 min

Here's a fact that explains most of what follows. Over the last thirty years, Tablas Creek has propagated more than five million grapevine cuttings, and given the vast majority of them away — to growers in California, Washington, Oregon, Texas and Virginia. To see how odd that is, you need to know what vine material is worth. Getting authenticated, disease-free cuttings of a specific variety is slow, expensive and, historically, a competitive advantage worth protecting.

The Vineyard that gave itself away

(5m)Five million cuttings propagated.
Most of them given away.

Free Bacchus JournalProducer Spotlight · 10 July 2026

Most estates treat their plant stock accordingly. Tablas Creek treated theirs as a public good, with the result that a meaningful share of the Rhône-variety wine made in America today can trace its genetics to a single limestone hill twelve miles from the Pacific.

Build something good, then hand out the blueprint. That instinct runs through the whole story.

Most estates guard their vine stock. This one gave away five million cuttings and let its competitors plant them.

Two families and a four-year search

The origin reads like a wine fable, except it happened. On one side, the Perrin family of Château de Beaucastel, proprietors since 1909 of one of Châteauneuf-du-Pape’s great estates and pioneers of organic farming in France decades before it was fashionable. On the other, Robert Haas, an American importer who had spent a career in French cellars and who became the Perrins’ man in the United States.

Travelling the country together over twenty years, the two families became convinced of a then-heretical idea: that the native grapes of the southern Rhône — Mourvèdre, Grenache, Roussanne. Might find a second home in California.

They spent four years looking, from the Sierra foothills to coastal Ventura County, for a place matching the Mediterranean climate and high-pH limestone soils of Beaucastel. In 1989 they found a former alfalfa farm in the Adelaida hills west of Paso Robles, sitting on an ancient Late Cretaceous seabed — shallow, rocky, calcareous, geologically related to the soils of home.

Then they did the slow thing. Rather than plant available nursery stock, they imported cuttings from Beaucastel and shepherded them through a three-year USDA quarantine to guarantee authenticity. That decision looked eccentric until 1998, when the California wine world discovered much of the state’s supposed Roussanne was in fact Viognier. Tablas Creek’s vines were what they claimed to be. Pierre Perrin has described it as probably one of the most expensive vineyards in the world to develop. They were building for a century rather than a vintage.

Three years in quarantine to be certain the vines were what they said they were. In 1998 that patience turned out to matter.

Farmed as though the land had to last

Tablas Creek has been organic since inception, certified in 2003, and biodynamic since 2010, certified in 2017. The milestone that draws most attention came in 2020, when it became the first Regenerative Organic Certified vineyard in the world — the wine industry’s debut under a standard built on three pillars: soil health, animal welfare and farmworker fairness.

The distinction is worth stating plainly. Organic tells you what a farm refuses to use. Regenerative organic asks a harder question: is the land leaving each season in better condition than it arrived?

At Tablas Creek the answer largely walks on four legs. A mobile flock of sheep, a herd of alpacas and a few guard donkeys move through the rows from harvest to bud break, mowing weeds and fertilising as they go. The animals are certified too — not only organic but Animal Welfare Approved. Cover crops and compost do the rest. In one detail we've never forgotten, the team plants daikon radish between vines: as the root swells and then decomposes underground it fractures compacted soil and leaves air pockets behind. A plough made of vegetable rather than steel.

Much of the estate is also dry-farmed, with no irrigation, which forces the vines to root deep, limits yields and concentrates character. In a state with a drought problem, a vineyard that captures and holds winter moisture in living soil is less a marketing position than a survival strategy that happens to make better wine.

Organic tells you what a farm refuses to use. Regenerative organic asks whether the land is leaving each season better than it arrived.

What the certification does and does not settle

We should be careful here, because it would be easy to treat that 2020 milestone as the end of an argument rather than a point in one.

Regenerative Organic Certification is demanding and independently audited, and being first to hold it in an entire industry is a real achievement. It's also young — a standard in its early years, still developing, and held so far by a small number of farms. Its long-term significance depends on how widely it is adopted and how rigorously it's maintained, neither of which is settled yet.

And no certification, however strict, tells you whether a wine is worth drinking. That remains a separate question requiring separate evidence, which is why we keep the two tests apart in our own standard rather than letting a farming credential vouch for quality.

Why drinkers actually fell for it

Which is convenient, because the wine holds up on its own terms.

The flagship bottlings are the two Esprit de Tablas wines — a Mourvèdre-led red and a Roussanne-led white, both rich, balanced and built to age a decade or more. The red has drawn scores in the mid-nineties and stands as a benchmark for American Rhône blends.

But the reason the estate became genuinely liked rather than merely respected is that it never pulled up the ladder behind itself. Alongside the Esprit sit the Côtes de Tablas wines, lusher and more immediate, and the Patelin de Tablas range — the name is French slang for neighbourhood. Blended from a dozen nearby vineyards mostly planted with Tablas Creek’s own nursery cuttings. The Patelin wines deliver the house character at everyday prices.

That structure is unusually useful if you're curious. You can start at the neighbourhood level for the price of an ordinary bottle, decide whether the style is for you, and climb over years toward the flagship. The whole philosophy of the estate is available at every rung, which is not true of most producers with this level of ambition.

The people helped too. Jason Haas, Robert’s son, took over in the mid-2000s and became one of the more generous public voices in American wine — writing openly about regenerative farming, walking visitors through the vineyard root by root, and earning a Food & Wine Drinks Innovator of the Year nod in 2022. Where many estates sell mystique, this one sells understanding, and assumes its drinkers are curious enough to want it.

You can start at the neighbourhood level for the price of an ordinary bottle. The whole philosophy is available at every rung of the ladder.

Why this belongs on Free Bacchus

Tablas Creek is what our Reserve tier was written to recognise. It holds CCOF organic certification, Demeter biodynamic certification and the wine world’s first Regenerative Organic Certification, each independently audited. And its quality is corroborated by outside critics rather than asserted by the estate. The two promises we insist on keeping separate — clean farming and good wine. Happen here to be the same act.

What we find most instructive, though, is the giving away. Five million cuttings, a published blog, a vineyard walked with anyone who asks. It would have been entirely rational to keep the head start. Instead the estate spent thirty years making it easier for other people to do the same thing, which is a strange and admirable way to run a business and the reason its influence far exceeds its size.

If you want one thing to take from this, take the Patelin. Start at the bottom of a serious producer’s range rather than the top. It's the cheapest way to find out whether you actually like what a great estate is doing, and the growers who make their philosophy available at that price are usually the ones most confident it will hold up.

Start at the bottom of a serious producer’s range. The growers confident enough to sell their philosophy cheaply are usually right to be.