Can I implement if-new-create JPA strategy?

Question

My current persistence.xml table generation strategy is set to create. This guarantees that each new installation of my application will get the tables, but that also means that everytime the application it's started logs are polluted with exceptions of eclipselink trying to create tables that already exist. The strategy I wish is that the tables are created only in their absence. One way for me to implement this is to check for the database file and if doesn't exist create tables using:

ServerSession session = em.unwrap(ServerSession.class);
SchemaManager schemaManager = new SchemaManager(session);
schemaManager.createDefaultTables(true);

But is there a cleaner solution? Possibly a try-catch way? It's errorprone for me to guard each database method with a try-catch where the catch executes the above code, but I'd expect it to be a property I can configure the emf with.