Paso Robles, California (full episode) - "V is for Vino" wine show

I'm here at Hearst Castle in San Luis Obispo County. Hearst Castle was made for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Have you seen Citizen Kane? This was the inspiration. Over 80,000 square feet, 90 bedrooms, 90 bathrooms, and did I mention a 100 foot Neptune pool? Pretty amazing. But if you drive 40 miles inland from here, you're going to find the real treasure of San Luis Obispo, some killer Rhone-style wines. We're going to Paso Robles, and welcome to Villa Trevino. We're hanging out in downtown Paso Robles. Paso Robles is part of San Luis Obispo County, which is part of the Central Coast Appalachian of California. The Central Coast is actually really big, and encompasses everything from San Francisco down to Santa Barbara. But Paso Robles AVA is smack dab in the middle of it all. While most of the wine regions in the Central Coast tend to be fairly cool, Paso Robles is the exception. It's hot here, mostly because the Santa Lucia Mountains shield the region from the cool Pacific Ocean breeze. The heat means that big, heat-loving grapefruits like Syrah, Grenache, and Zinfandel do great here. But it's only been recently that Paso has exploded as a wine growing region. It went from 20 wineries in 1990 to over 200 today. So how do you pronounce it? Robles? Well, the city was actually named in Spanish, El Paso de Robles, which meant the Pass of the Oaks, and eventually just got shortened to Paso Robles. So if you were saying it in Spanish, you'd say Robles. But by that logic, you'd say Los Angeles instead of Los Angeles. So most people here call it Paso Robles, or you could just call it Paso and save yourself the headache. So why does this place make such fantastic terroir-driven, Rhone-style wines? We're going to find out. But first, what the hell is terroir? So what's with all these fancy, expensive vineyards? Why can't you just try and grow wine in your own backyard? Well, you could give it a shot. Technically, all the great wine growing regions are grown between these lines of latitude. Anything in the middle is too hot, and everything on the top and bottom is too cold. So you're thinking, all right, I live in America, I should be able to get it done. Well, you don't have what the French call terroir. Now, terroir is this combination of elements—the sunlight, the soil, the slope, the drainage, the average rainfall, the irrigation, and the million and one other factors that make a wine region a great wine region. But most wine regions also have one other thing that I call the X Factor, and it's that one thing that without it, it couldn't make good grapes. Take Napa. Napa has the Vaca Mountains to the east that protect from the hot central California, and the Mayacamas to the west that protect from the cool ocean breezes, and you're left with this nice, regulated temperature in the Napa Valley. What about Mosel, Germany? Now, Mosel, Germany is one of my favorites because it's way too cold to grow grapes, but it's very famous for its Riesling. This is because the Mosel River that runs through it reflects sunlight off of the river and onto the vines that are on the slopes of the river. Otherwise, the grapes would never ripen. So the next time you're thinking about trying to make wine in your backyard, it's probably best to leave it to the pros. So what about Paso Robles? What is its X Factor? Well, remember how I told you how hot it is here? It's literally 100 degrees today. We're baking. It would normally be way too hot for wine growth, but there's wild temperature fluctuations called diurnal shifts that allow wine grapes to grow here. Maybe 100 now, but it'll be 40 to 50 degrees cooler at night. And what that does is allows the grapes to ripen all day and then stop ripening in the evening and still have a nice long hang time until September or October. Now, Cabernet Sauvignon is still the number one grape by the numbers grown in Paso, but nobody grows more Rhone varietals in the New World than Paso Robles. And this is because the climate here is very similar to the Rhone Valley in the southeast of France. Well, what exactly is a Rhone blend? Let's find out. Today, we're going to focus on Southern Rhone style blends. Now, the term Rhone blend is used to describe a wine that's made in similar style to the wines they make in a place in the southeast of France called the Rhone Valley. And unlike most places in the planet that focus on one grape, maybe 100 percent Pinot Noir or 100 percent Chardonnay, the Rhone Valley is all about blending. Why use one grape when you can use three or five or even 10? You're actually allowed to use up to 22 grapes in the Rhone Valley itself. White Rhone blends are full of grapes you may not be too familiar with. Grenache Blanc, Marsan, Roussan, Viognier, Pickpool, and some other grapes thrown in for good measure. They're usually apricotty and peachy, perfumey and aromatic and floral. And if they have any oak on them, maybe some lemon curd or some vanilla. But winemakers have to be careful when they harvest and how much oak they use because they don't have a lot of natural acidity. So they need to be careful to preserve the acidity they do have. When they're done right, they're similar to a lush tropical Chardonnay. GSM, it's the common abbreviation for Red Rhone blends, and it stands for Grenache, Syrah, Mouvedre. These wines take full advantage of the heat that Paso and Rhone tend to offer. Big, bold, high alcohol wines. Think cherry and cassis flavors, maybe lavender, floral and herbs, but also some spice notes and some gamey notes from the Syrah. You can think of it like a three piece band. Grenache is the lead singer and guitarist and contributes most of the alcohol and red fruit flavors. Syrah is the base, contributes lower fruit flavors like blackberry and maybe some gamey notes and some spice notes. And then the Mouvedre hangs in the back. It's the drums. It contributes to the finish and the tannin structure. Now, blending is great for a winemaker because it allows you to not only have some say in the wine, but to take advantage of the different grapes in different years. If it's a warm year, you might use more Grenache, which loves the heat. If it's a cooler year, maybe a little more Syrah. But all this means you better have a winemaker who knows what he's doing. And I think I got just the one. Thanks for having us out. You're welcome. So tell us a little bit about about the story of Tablas and these these vineyards. Two families, the Perrin family, the other family being an American family, the Haas family, Robert Haas. And they were just in California selling wine and asking the question, everything here is Cabernet and Chardonnay. Why is there no Rome varietals here? This is perfect for that. The weather, the climate is so much similar to where we are. We should do something. And they searched California up and down West Coast, really up and down, looking for the ultimate spot to do this product. So they were looking for limestone soils. They were looking for enough sunshine to ripen Mouvedre and they found it here. Can you tell me a little bit about your story, how you got into winemaking? Yeah, I was in the restaurant industry and while I was working in that business, just grew a passion for wine and read a lot about wine and decided I wanted to do a year in a small winery. I can read, but I don't understand it so well as anything as well as actually physically get my hands in it. Got a job at a winery down the street, started doing that in in 91 and just loved it. And then you came over here and you've been here pretty much since the beginning. Yeah, I did a year in France working in the vineyards and winery at Bocastelle and then moved back here in July of 98 and I've been here ever since. Do you have a nickname around here, like Father of Tablas or something along that? Yeah, I haven't heard it, but I'm sure there is one. Weird guy that wanders around. What is your philosophy behind the style of wines that you make here at Tablas? It's really simple, that question. I mean, how I see it was I was tasked when I got here with the job of growing grapes and making wines that best demonstrate a sense of place. They bought this property specifically because they felt it was unique. The limestone soil particularly is incredibly unique within California. It's rare. It's hard to find. And so the goal is let's produce wines that are as clear a reflection of this place as we can possibly make. So farming organically now we're moving into biodynamics, an introduction of animals in the vineyard, more diversity, just trying to leave this place in a better state than we found it. And then when we get to the winery, again, it's it's very it's very traditional. We don't use much new oak. Everything is fermented on native yeast. We don't inoculate anything. And that's all in a an attempt to display this beautiful, incredible piece of land that we have here. For and for a winemaker who sounds like you want to be very hands off, you have a lot of decisions to make when it comes to the blending process. So what happens is that we sit down at a table and we'll sit and we'll taste every single lot that we have in our cellar blind and we'll make ratings on the individual lots of individual varietals from individual blocks, et cetera, et cetera. And from those tastings, we'll go back and we'll put together some potential blends of, you know, OK, and then we taste three or four versions of those blind. And then we're saying, OK, order of preference, which ones you like. And we keep going until we all agree that this is the one. So sometimes it can be a couple of days. Sometimes it can be a couple of weeks. There have been times when we've just packed it up and gone home and come back to it a month later. And you live on property, right? I do. My family, my kids grew up here. It's home for us. I was here the day the first wine went in the ground just as a nosy neighbor, not as an employee. Yeah, we'll be harvesting this stuff in late September, early October. Clusters are going to tighten up and then we'll start seeing the turn of color. And this this time here is nerve wracking because you're hoping everything keeps going in the right direction. And and you get to the end of it and you're tired of getting up at four in the morning and staying up till eight at night and in the winery and want it to be over. But it's always the most exciting thing because that's where that's where the season is. I wanted to get to know more about the biodynamic farming and the use of the animals in the vineyard. So for that, I went to Nathan, Toddless Creek's own personal shepherd. This is a herd of sheep, Toddless Creek. There's about 200 of them right now. The guardian animals, Fiona and Dottie, the donkeys. Fiona doesn't like me. I don't like you either, Fiona. And then if you look in the back, you can see the alpacas with the funny looking necks. I see them. They just got sheared, so don't be too hard on them. They don't always look that bad. So the herd started as kind of a novelty. But now that we've gone into biodynamics and we're becoming certified biodynamics, it's going to be a big part of building soil in the vineyard. And they'll graze in between the vines all winter long, keeping the weeds down, cutting back mow passes, fertilizing. There's that 240 cubic feet of manure that we didn't buy, that we didn't truck here using fuel and all the other costs of running equipment. They're putting compost on the ground for us without us having to spread it with tractors and trucks. The final byproduct is we have lamb for sale. We'll be harvesting 20, 30, 40 lambs, and then we distribute them out to the local restaurants. But they're getting organic, biodynamic, no hormones, no antibiotics. My big argument, not everybody's, but my big argument is the more animals we can get back on the land, properly managed, properly managed. That's not the valley. I'm not talking about like feedlots and creating methane and all that, but properly managed animals on the livestock can put carbon back in the soil and keep it there forever. That's kind of what I'm passionate about is using them to save the planet in a small way. This is like a pig's version of Baywatch. Tobless Creek is equally owned and run by two families. One of the families is my family. My dad is Robert Haas. He was an importer who started the company Vineyard Brands. He's been importing wine since the 1950s. The other family is the Perrin family from Chateau de Beaucastel in Chateau Neuf-du-Pap in the south of France, whose wines my dad introduced into the U.S. market in the 1960s and with whom he became friends. There were three things that they were looking for that led them to Paso. So the first thing they were looking for was the right kind of climate, which meant hot enough and sunny enough to ripen some of the latest ripening grapes in France, but moderated enough so that the earlier own varieties like Syrah and Vionier didn't go flabby. Second thing we were looking for was enough rainfall to dry farm. And then the third thing that we were looking for was limestone. Wow. And so between those three, you're left with a perfect place to recreate Chateau Neuf-du-Pap. And yeah, at least I mean, at least try. And our goal isn't to recreate it exactly, but our goal is to use kind of the same palette of flavors and then have those flavors express this particular place. So the Cotes-de-Tables Blancs is our chance to show off Vionier. So Vionier is one of the classic grapes of the Rhône Valley, but in a warm climate like in the southern Rhône or like in Paso Robles, it's usually used as a blending grape, but in a lead role. So the Vionier is that floral juiciness. The Grenache Blanc is citrusy, bright, minerally. Marsan is restraint, kind of melon, a little bit of honey, pretty. And then Roussan is structure. Yeah, right away, it's that that floral, perfumey. The nice thing about working with with Rhône grapes is that they're meant to be blended with one another. Each of them brings a different strength to the table. And so you can allow a grape like Vionier to show off what it's great at without having to live with its weaknesses. Vionier is one of my favorite grapes that I feel like nobody does right. And I don't say that about you guys. Cheers to that. So the Cotes-de-Tables is our chance to lead with Grenache. So Grenache is another of the classic grape of the Southern Rhône. It accounts for something like 60 percent of the acreage in the Southern Rhône Valley. And you can understand why it's a grape which is juicy. It's got good acids to balance that juiciness. It's it shows off herbs and spice in a really nice way. If it has a weakness, it's that it can be a little simple on its own. It's not very dark in color. And so the classic blending partner for Grenache is Syrah. It's a dark, savory, spicy, tannic, but usually not very friendly. So you can think of Grenache as providing friendliness for Syrah and Syrah as providing seriousness for Grenache. So the Cotes-de-Tables is always led by Grenache with Syrah as the number two. And then smaller amounts of Cunoise, which has great acidity and just brings everything into focus. And more Vedra for this little bit of wild, earthy darkness. The thing that I like about Rhône blends in general is that they're not only one thing. It's not a wine which is one dimensional at all. It's a wine that has fruit and it has earth and it has spice and it has meat and it has herbs and flowers. You can keep digging. You can keep digging. Makes you want to keep coming back for a second sip. Even in a climate as warm as here, this feels fresh. People often pay more attention to how hot the days get in Paso Robles than they do to how cold the nights are. And the fact that you can pick the same grapes at the same sugar levels that you get in the Rhône Valley with higher acids in Paso Robles because the nights are so cold. Well, thank you so much for taking us on this tour. You are welcome. Absolutely. Cheers. Welcome to the V is for Vino Nerd Lab. We take complicated wine topics and make them simple. Today we're talking about acid. So what is acid? Well, it's one of the five major components of wine. It's a compound in the grapes, tartaric, malic and citric acid that gives wine a sourness or tartness. But it's really important to wine, too. It also gives wine a liveliness, a pizzazz or a pop. Some things that have acid naturally, lemons, vinegar has a lot of acid. Some things that have very low acid, milk, avocados. Now, acid is a direct consequence of climate. Cooler climate grapes tend to have more acid than warm climate. And this is because it has an inverse relationship with ripeness. The riper a grape gets, the more acid goes down. So as the sugar goes up, the acid goes down. You can think of it like a banana. This green banana is going to have more acid and not so much sugar, whereas this ripe banana that's brown is going to have way too much sugar. And the key for a winemaker is to find that perfect blend right in the middle where you get a perfectly ripe grape or banana. It's also very similar to good lemonade. Lemonade is all about the balance between the citric acid in the lemon juice and the sugar that you put in. So we start with our water and we'll put in our lemon juice just to get started here. Now, adding just lemon juice, this is going to be obviously very sour. You have no sugar to balance it out. And these are like grapes that have been on the vine too little. They're going to be very, very acidic. It's not going to taste very good, but if you add a little sugar and these will be like grapes that are on the vine that have developed a little bit more, you're going to find that perfect balance between the acid and the sugar. That's perfect lemonade, and that's just like a grape that has had the proper amount of hang time on the vine. And now we add more sugar. This is going to be like a grape that has too much hang. It's going to be very low on acid and it's not going to have any pop. It's going to be very flat. Now, the key to a winemaker is to pick at the perfect moment. A winemaker can't just add sugar down the road. He has to pick at the right moment when the acid and the sugar are in perfect balance. And this is assuming there's a perfect moment at all. In some years, the weather won't be good enough and the grapes won't ripen enough. And in other years, they'll ripen too quickly and you'll be forced to pick them too early before everything else in the grape has developed. I hope you enjoyed this nerd lab on acid and keep geeking out. I headed back into town to meet the husband and wife team behind a restaurant that's now an institution in downtown Paso. Welcome to Artisan. Someone told me that I'm amongst royalty. Is that true? How does that always get brought up? I might have snuck that in a little bit. Oh, yeah. Yes. But her being former Mrs. California, what does that make me? Mr. California. The king himself. Yeah, exactly. So tell me a little bit about the restaurant. We were living in Orange County at the time. Got married here in Paso in 2004, so we knew we loved it here. Wanted to be here. And we knew that we could utilize my background in the restaurant business as well as just his serial entrepreneurship to be able to get here. But we didn't know when that was going to be. We honestly thought it was probably going to be when we retire. But wouldn't it be cool if we could come here with our kids or kids? We could raise them here. They could be raised in the restaurant. Tell me a little bit about what is the style of food if you had to sum it up? You know, farm to table has been used. It's almost cliche now. So I really call it dirt to mouth. For many years, we had our own farm. We grew our own vegetables. We serve them here at the restaurant. Yes. We're uber local. These other buzzwords that you hear, like sustainability or sustainable. We believe in those things as well. And have from day one. But even this bar that we're leaning against, this is a tree that fell in Templeton and we hired a local woodworker and that woodworker created this bar and all the tables that we have as well. You literally are close to the source with everything. Yeah. Yes. So cool. We, you know, we use a cork flooring because it's sustainable. Yeah. You know, we, we hired a local metalsmith to create some of the lighting here. These sconces that are behind us are made by a local metalsmith. It's not just our local foods, produce, meats, but also local wines. So if you look at our wine list, I would say 99% of our wine list is local Paso wines or local central coast wines. And it seems you get a big local following in the community as well. Yeah. We're really, we feel really fortunate to have that. Nothing better than coming in here on a weeknight and seeing the same couple of people that have been here five times that week. We love that. Yeah. Well, it's awesome. We, uh, if you don't mind, we have to go talk to Ryan. I think we've got to taste some of this food. Oh, enjoy it. All right. Good. Tell me a little bit about what we're cooking today. So we're going to be doing our octopus salad. Um, so this is just one eighth of the octopus. It's just one tentacle, a Spanish dayboat octopus. We just braise it and just straight white wine for about an hour and a half. Yeah, that's it. Bring it to a boil, drop it, let it go. Nice. So we're going to be grilling this up. And we'll just leave that straight on the grill. That'll take about two, maybe three minutes on each side before it's fully done. You don't want burnt, but you want a nice char and you want marks. So you just want to kiss it? Yeah. You just want it hot all the way through. All right. So while that's going, we can totally build the salad. So we start with our chickpeas. These actually come from Los Osos, from a farm called Kandarian Farms. These are pepadews. This is a South African pepper. I believe they're lightly pickled, but they add a really nice, fresh flavor. They're not spicy at all. And then, so these are peeled tomatoes. We just take the skin off. The skin can be a little bit bitter. Drop in boiling water for about maybe 15 seconds, just till the skin pops off, and we just peel them off. Then we're going to grab some, any green will do. Right now we're using kale in ours. This again is local kale also. It's a really, besides the octopus, everything else is pretty much local. Nice. Salt. And then for our dressings, we use Calabrian chili oil. It's really spicy. So you only need like maybe, maybe an eighth of a teaspoon. It's hot. And then, so this is gremolata. Uh, just garlic, lemon, parsley, and local olive oil. Okay. It just kind of adds a little bit of a pop and a little bit of freshness going into it. And then this is our macerated lemon. We just take lemon segments, get rid of the pith, zest, and everything. Cook it in a little olive oil on the stove, probably about, I don't know, maybe 30 seconds, just till it falls apart. It's fancy over here. We do. We are. We keep it really fancy. I want to flip that octopus really quick. So you're just looking for about that much color. Yeah. You just don't want it burnt. If it's burnt, it gets really hard and tough. It's not good. When you see it start to like flex and move, it's about there. Okay. So I'm just going to slice it up a little bit. This is mainly just for presentation. Throw a couple of pieces into the salad. So once it's fully mixed, I'm just going to go straight into the bowl. Put that right there on top. I'm going to grab some of our house-made garlic aioli, which is made just with confit garlic and how you normally make an aioli. And then we top it with just a little bit of fresh oregano. And that's it. All right. So let's try this out. When we first put this on the menu, I was in here eating it twice, every day. Oh yeah. That's one of my favorite dishes. We paired this with the white Rhone blend for a few reasons. Number one, there's enough acidity in the white Rhone blend to match the acidity of the dish. Remember, acid likes acid. Between the lemon juice and the tomatoes in the dish and the acidity in the wine, they can keep up with each other. And the second reason is that the spicy in the dressing goes great with the over-the-top fruity, aromatic, and floral characteristic of the white Rhone blend. All right. So what's the second dish? We're going to be doing our lamb bolognese with house-made pappardelle pasta. Bolognese is a dish that I really enjoy because it takes a long time. You can tell someone doesn't know how to make bolognese when the meat's tough. It has really runny sauce. It should be, it's like meat pasting. You want to let it get nice and thick? Yeah. You want to, you want it like basically mud is what you're looking for. Okay. So the first thing we're looking for is, you want to drop your oyster mushrooms in there. I just look for a little bit of color. So once I start seeing that little bit of color, I'll just let them go. I throw my bolognese in. Now give me, give me the quick fix on how to make the bolognese. So what we do is we take all of our salami scraps, render that down, and then you're going to, we always throw in our meat. Beef is the body. Pork's the flavor. Lamb is the bigger flavor. You got the trio. Usually it's, yeah. And then, so we put that in there. You know, you fry up a little tomato paste, throw in your stock, white wine, marinara, kind of like just let it go. So once I get this far and I see a nice color, just a little bit of white wine and a lot of bit of butter. When you have sauce left on the plate after you eat it, that's a very bad thing. That means it, that means it wasn't done right. So I, I usually let my pasta go about three quarters of the way in the water and I'll finish it the last 25% in the sauce. You're at, you're getting that starch into the sauce and it soaks into the noodle and it's not two separate entities. It's one. The other secret is you want to make sure that your water is salty like the ocean. You're not a pinch, but a. No, like, yeah, I put cups. So this, I just go low and slow. It's already cooked. You're just rewarming. So this is about three quarters of the way done. I'll splash a little bit of my pasta water in there. Cause you do want that in there. So these are Papa Del. We, we, we do an egg yolk based pasta. There's nothing wrong with a lot of fat. Finish this off in the sauce, about the last 25%. I'll just throw in a little bit of pecorino cheese. So we'll grab our plate right here. And then I'll finish with a little more pecorino. This is just some whipped ricotta. And for the last one, this is salsa verde, which is basically a mixture of there's mint, chili flake, caper, anchovy, parsley. Is that it? That's it. Let's try it. All right. The tannin and alcohol in the GSM goes great with the fatty richness of the dish. And the big bold dish likes a big, bold wine. These guys got the right idea. These elephant seals come to the San Luis Obispo shoreline twice a year to rest and breed after the eight to 10 months a year that they spend at sea. I hope you enjoyed this episode in San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles, and we'll see you next time on V is for Vino. Get the wine, full episodes, and more at visforvino.com.