A letter from Robert Haas

Received a lovely note (with a correction) from Robert Haas of Tablas Creek Vineyards.  Mr. Haas was a gracious, learned and generous host one afternoon when I was in California doing research for Easy to Like. The photograph below is of the Tablas Creek Vineyards … yeah, it is that beautiful.

 Hello Edward,
I loved “Easy to Like”.  I appreciated  the satire.  I do not think that we are quite so idealistically pure and demanding as Elliot: even as we become convinced that biodynamic and dry farming and native yeasts are more than just hype.  Nor, thankfully, has the wine press been unaware of what we are doing. The consumers and key gatekeepers in the trade, are becoming more diverse in their wine appreciation so that we can comfortably coexist with the runway wines, “factories” and the critter labels that do not share our ideology.
There is a mistake in your research that could be easily corrected in future versions, if any should be forthcoming.  Tablas Creek did, indeed, import “rootstocks,” but the important imports were the vinifera vine material to be grafted onto the phylloxera resistant rootstocks.  Mourvèdre, Grenache, Roussanne, etc. are vinifera material, or simply vines.  Rootstocks are 110R, 140R 1103, 3309, etc.  We imported them and started our own nursery because we were afraid that that we would have wasted three years of USDA importation procedures to get clean vines by having them infected by sending them for multiplication and grafting to U.S. nurseries with the then prevalent vine viruses here.

Best, Bob