Saturday was to be our last day hanging out at the west-side Paso wineries.  It was only my 2nd trip to the region, and I already knew to be picky about my wines being from THAT side of 101.

Our first appointment was bright and early at 10 AM.  The last time we were in Paso, almost every winery we went to spoke of Tablas Creek.  The wine industry in Paso is relatively new.  Most of the wineries have only been around for about 10-20 years.  It was just your average farming community before that. Like most regions that try to grow wine in America, Paso began by planting the varietals that thrive in Napa/Sonoma like chardonnay, pinot noir, and cabernet.  The climate in Paso is MUCH different.  It is far more similar to the climate in the Rhone valley of France.  So began the Rhone Rangers.

Tablas Creek was the first to bring grapevine cuttings back from Rhone itself.  They took these cuttings to Cornell first and to UC Davis later where they were kept in quarantine for a decade before they could be released and used in vineyards.  Chateau de Beaucastel entered in a partnership with one of the founders of Tablas Creek, Robert Haas, to begin the vineyard in Paso.  Now Paso focuses most of their grapes on those Rhone varietals known as Chatauneuf du Pape or GSM (grenache/syrah/mouvedre).

I’m actually more an MGS drinker.   I like my wines heavy on the mouvedre.  Last year in Paso, I learned this was my favorite varietal, and it stayed the same this year.

At Tablas, we decided to go with the Collector’s Tasting to try some of the earlier Paso vintages.  It was fantastic.  We were seated in a private room with Leslie, the sheep lady.  Tablas Creek is an organic and biodynamic certified ranch.  Sheep, apparently, provide a lot of excellent fertilizer in the vineyards. Biodynamic wines involve all kinds of interesting/controversial methods like burying fertilizer in cow horns, looking at moon charts for picking, etc. etc.  It’s interesting, but the controversy involves  whether it truly makes a difference in the tastes of the wine.

This tasting lasted about an hour.  I learned all of the Tablas history, and I also got to learn about the Coriolis effect and its impact on wine.  I’m not as good of a sniffer as some, but apparently the wine releases different phenolics depending on which direction you swirl.  The bear and I were thrilled to see that a 2007 wine was on our tasting menu.  That’s the year we got married!   About 6 years ago we went out to Dunn in Napa and bought a 2007 which we opened on our 10th anniversary.  We’re hoping to open the Tablas Creek that we bought for our 20th.  (Richard said we need to keep an eye on their handy dandy tasting charts, and we might drink it on our 15th instead.)

From Tablas, we went to Daou.  This could just be my perception, but it seems to me that the Daou brothers are something of outsiders in the close knit community of Paso Robles.  Richard and I joked about Paso having a family bush as opposed to a family tree.  Everyone has worked for everyone else at different wineries and different collaborations.  Daou seemed to be the exception.  George and Daniel Daou are brothers who are engineers.  When they were in their 30s they sold their company for $700 million.  They used it to buy one of the most gorgeous wineries I have EVER seen in Paso Robles.

It is HUGE and ostentatious and gorgeous.  The 360 view from the tasting room is unreal.  Normally, you have to park at the bottom of the hill and take a shuttle up.  As it was raining, and somewhat early in the day, we were able to park at the top of the hill.

Unlike most of the other wineries in Paso, Daou focuses on cabernet, and they do a really darned good job of it.

For whatever reason, this was a “blurry” day to me.  :-).  I warned Richard when we left Tablas creek after having only one tasting that I was feeling a little fuzzy.  This continued for the rest of the day.  I tell my students that I don’t taste wine to get drunk, which is true.  Sometimes, however, it’s a side effect!

I was starting to get hungry, and it was beginning to rain.  I suggested we try to find somewhere to picnic, so we made a quick stop at Halter Ranch.  This is a relatively widely distributed wine and the only winery of the trip that ended up being like a “cattle call” tasting where you belly up to the bar and stand in a crowd of people thrusting their glasses forward.

There were plenty of inside picnickers, but not a whole lot of space for us.  We decided to take our chances and go down the road to a winery that had only been open for two weeks:  Paix sur terre.  Quite literally, they weren’t even finished with the tile on the floor.  This or Thacher (from day 2) was likely my favorite wine on the trip.  No surprise since the wine here was all mouvedre. Ryan and Nicole Pease are the winemakers.  Again, as part of the family wine bush, Ryan had worked with Linne Calodo and Epoch, both of which we visited and loved on our first trip.

Here we got to play with Kina, the wine dog, admire the art and sip the fine wine!   It was pouring outside at this point, so we ate in the car at the winery.  We bought two bottles of their wonderful mouvedre and will likely make it the second wine club we join since they don’t distribute their wines, and we want more.

From there, we went to the “happy coincidence” of the trip.  Last spring when we were visiting, we joined the Linne Calodo wine club, as it was our favorite winery of the trip.  We got an email from them a few weeks before which invited us to their release party.  We had booked the trip months in advance, but it just so happened we’d be in town on their release day, so we got a chance to go to our first California wine release party.

Because of the rain, they had to push the whole party into their barrel room — it was a great space for it.

I loved the treat of having passed appetizers during the tasting, and the food was MARVELOUS… really!   It was a fun time.  As you walked around, if you could find Matt Trevisan, the wine maker, you could taste some of the older vintages of wine that he kept popping open.  I hope we have a chance to go to another release party sometime.

From there, it was time to go back to the apartment and get cleaned up for our second fancy dinner of the trip.

Before dinner, we braved the rain to walk across the street from our apartment to Paso Underground.   It’s only open for limited hours on the weekends and rotates 4 different wine makers that don’t have their own tasting rooms.  We tried Copia.  They produce less than 200 cases of wine.  At this point in time, his vineyard isn’t producing grapes, yet.  He uses grapes from L’Aventure, one of the best wineries in Paso, which we visited last trip. We also tried Edumund August which I loved! Ed Sauret is a former teacher and all around wine and restaurant guy.  He started his winery in 2008.  His winemaker is Jacob Toft, whom we learned about LAST year and tasted with on day 4.

From there, we went to Il Cortile where we had eaten last year as well. It’s an Italian restaurant with an extensive wine list.  It’s generally regarded as the best fine dining in Paso.  It did not disappoint this year either.  My favorite, as it was last year, was the appetizers.

This year we had fantastic octopus and risotto with shaved black truffles.  The taste of those truffles… mmmmmmmm….

I had agnolotti and Richard had pork shank for our main courses.  Both were rich, decadent, and wonderful.

Because it is our tradition, from there we wandered back to Taste in the Alley to have our last drink of the night.  Our final day of big west side wines behind us, we went to bed ready to traverse Tin City for day 4.