Jason Haas is the second-generation proprietor of Tablas Creek in Paso Robles, serving as Partner and General Manager. In his two decades at the winery his family founded in partnership with the Perrins of Chateau de Beaucastel, Jason has overseen the business, production, sales, and marketing.
In addition to his work at Tablas Creek, Jason has led the boards of directors of both the Rhone Rangers and the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance and is a board member of Free the Grapes and WineAmerica. His writing has been published in Wine Business Monthly, Wines & Vines, Decanter, Wine Industry Network, and Wine-Searcher. His photography has appeared in Wine Spectator, Forbes, the Washington Post, and Wine Enthusiast. He is the principal author of the Tablas Creek blog, an eight-time finalist, and a two-time winner of the Wine Blog Award’s “Best Wine Blog”.
In recognition of his contributions to the Paso Robles wine community, he was voted by his peers as the Person of the Year in 2015 for the Paso Robles Wine Country Wine Industry and as the Person of the Year in 2017 for the San Luis Obispo County Wine Industry. In 2022 he was named a Food & Wine Magazine Drinks Innovator of the Year and in 2024 he was nominated by the Wine Enthusiast for the “Wine Person of the Year” Wine Star Award. Media Inquiries: Jason Haas jhaas@tablascreek.com | https://tablascreek.com/
What’s the ONE THING most unique, authentic, & memorable about your brand?
I made my first visit to Beaucastel when I was 5 months old. There’s a great photo that my dad saved of me, a fat little redheaded baby, sitting on Jacques Perrin’s lap in the living room of the old Beaucastel chateau in November of 1973. So I’ve been working toward this quite literally my whole life. And though Jacques died in 1978, a decade before my dad started Tablas Creek with his sons Jean-Pierre and Francois, we keenly feel Jacques’ presence and legacy here. This is true in two ways. First, Jacques was key in restoring diversity in grapes to Chateauneuf du Pape. In the replanting that followed the devastation of phylloxera in the late 19th Century, what had been a region with a ton of varietal diversity became dominated by Grenache. Several of the traditional grape varieties were entirely lost there.
It was Jacques who made it a personal quest to find where they’d survived and bring them back to Beaucastel in the years immediately after World War II. In this quest he rediscovered and fell in love with Mourvedre, setting Beaucastel on a different path from most of the rest of Chateauneuf du Pape. At Tablas Creek, we chose our location to be a place where Mourvedre would thrive. We have also imported all 16 of the grape varieties planted at Beaucastel and founded a grapevine nursery to propagate and share those clones with other American vintners. Eleven of the 348 grapes on the TTB’s official grapes list are only there because we brought them into the country, and only available to the public because we chose not to keep them proprietary and instead made them available to anyone who wanted to plant them. So we feel we’re continuing Jacques’ legacy in this way. Second, Jacques was a pioneer in sustainability, converting his vineyards to organic viticulture back in the 1950s, when every government agency, every farm bureau, and his neighbors were urging the exact opposite. Of course, he’s been proven prophetic since.
When we founded Tablas Creek, we did so knowing that organic farming would be the baseline. We have maintained that commitment, adding Biodynamic certification in the 2010s and becoming the first Regenerative Organic Certified winery in the world in 2020. Three generations later on the Perrin side and two on the Haas side, we’re convinced, as was Jacques, that natural farming helps make a healthier vineyard and a better environment, but just as critically allows you to make wines that taste intensely of the place in which they’re grown.
Describe how and what you’d do with your winemaking career or winery business if you were not constrained.
You know, I feel like I’m speaking from a position of enormous privilege, but I feel like we’ve dreamed awfully big already at Tablas Creek. Defining a new category of wine? Sure. Popularizing blends? Done. Pioneering a new form of farming that could change the world? In process. Helping bring a region to prominence? Check. Now we’re trying to push the boundaries of sustainability, rethinking packaging, and trying to lift the communities we’re a part of. It’s not easy; we’re still in what is just a small slice of the overall pie, and we’re executing all this complicated stuff in an environment where there are headwinds unlike any we’ve seen in our 35-year history. But I feel like we’ve dreamed big from the beginning, and have been able to achieve pretty much all of those dreams.
What is the One Wine most emblematic of your brand and/or winemaking style? Tell us its story.
For me this is easy. It would be our En Gobelet. Back in 2007, we noticed that the lots that came from our head-trained, dry-farmed vineyard blocks had a distinctiveness compared to the lots that came from our trellised, irrigated blocks. You might have expected them to be richer or more powerful, but they weren’t. Instead, they were more elegant, with this lovely lift and saltiness that we felt was the ultimate expression of our terroir. So that year, and each year since then, we’ve made this wine exclusively from those head-trained, dry-farmed blocks. It’s a red Rhone-style blend based on Grenache and Mourvedre.
In the early years, we didn’t have any head-trained Syrah, so we gave those red-fruited grapes darkness and tannic structure with Tannat, a Basque grape that ended up at Tablas Creek as a side-project from our grapevine nursery. We’ve been so convinced that these wide-spaced dry-farmed blocks are the way we should be moving overall that most of the new vineyards we’ve planted since 2005 have been developed this way. That has given us more and more blocks to choose from to make the En Gobelet each year, and now many of those lots are being chosen for the Esprit de Tablas and Panoplie. In more recent vintages we’ve also added Syrah and Counoise, but have kept at least a little Tannat in the wine as a link with its beginnings. So, En Gobelet reflects our heritage while also being a look into our future, and (we think) the future of California wine. Read my review of the En Gobelet wine.
Bonus Question – What are your wholehearted convictions related to the wine business? Not about your wines!
Wine is not a zero sum game. It’s not like buying a car, where if someone buys a Volkswagen they’re not also buying a Subaru. Instead, if someone buys a bottle of Syrah from a winery in Sonoma, or a bottle of Cabernet from a winery down the road in Paso Robles, that makes them more likely to buy our wine. That encourages cooperation, and is one of the things that I enjoy most about the world of wine. It’s in our interest to work with other wineries who make the kinds of wines we do, or who share our region, or who farm in a similar way to us, and market our categories collaboratively. People ask me who our competitors are and look disbelieving when I say we don’t. But it’s true.