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| Drinking Windows and Values |
| Community Tasting History |
| Community Tasting Notes (average 89.8 pts. and median of 90 pts. in 31 notes) - hiding notes with no text | | | Tasted by BobBachus on 4/18/2021 & rated 93 points: Dark yellow with cloudiness like an interesting urine sample. Heavy passionfruit on nose. 30 second finish. My last bottle of his vintage - properly cellared and held up beautifully. My favorite wine of Abe's and testimony to my belief that he has a real touch with white wines. Thank you Abe! (482 views) | | | Tasted by andtheodor on 3/26/2016 & rated 89 points: I'm not sure I've ever had a wine that smelled so vividly of passionfruit. Apricot, wheat, pink grapefruit, apricot, one of those wines that smells deceptively like late harvest and looks like one too despite being dry. Interesting more than good, but quite enjoyable with the right food. (2043 views) | | | Tasted by David_T on 6/16/2015 & rated 89 points: This has a distinct pine cone note on the nose, along with grapefruit and herbs. The palate is more citrus along with notes of nectarine, herbs, pine and florals. Light acidity, medium minerality. (2123 views) | | | Tasted by domco on 11/21/2014: Not for me. All sorts of interesting, non-traditional aromas and flavors going on here but not sure I was enjoying many, if any, of them. (2618 views) | | | Tasted by PDX-S on 7/1/2014: - Last bottle. Consistent with previous notes. Still quite pleasurable, if a little less aromatic. I was concerned about longevity, but it seems as if this bottle is still going strong. Opens quite nicely after about 40 minutes. Drink or hold. (3077 views) | | | Tasted by ksmith on 4/29/2014 & rated 89 points: Interesting bottle, like all of Abe's wines. Cloudy gold color in the glass. Oily on the palate, with lots of grapefruit and citrus. Food friendly, as there is ample acid, but in the end this was not a particularly memorable SB. (3154 views) | | | Tasted by Colia on 3/23/2014 & rated 73 points: Score of 75 and above are reserved for wine free of major faults. Most producers try to hide faults, but this wine shows it proudly, and it's awful. Raw pork, apricots, pineapple, elder flower, mushrooms, some tannin from skins and seeds.
The real problem is the raw pork. Microbial contamination. (2484 views) | | | Tasted by mtaczak on 11/12/2013: This is a weird one. Cloudy and unappetizing in appearance, intense nose of lychee with hints of ammonia. On the palate it even tastes ... "cloudy." Like a flat, over-extracted sauvignon blanc. But it's still somehow interesting and appealing, since I couldn't stop sipping on it. One for the wine nerds, for sure. (2638 views) | | | Tasted by french16 on 8/12/2013: Scholium Tastings (RT NYC): Skin contact. Not as ripe as the 08 with lemon, lime and tea on the nose. Palate is more exotic though. (2919 views) | | | Tasted by rossi.wine on 6/4/2013 & rated 92 points: Nice yellow colour, unfiltered/slightly cloudy. Lime and smoke on the nose, very expressive. White stone and citrus fruit on the plate, great freshness, lingering, long finish, really quite unique. (2508 views) | | | Tasted by blakel on 4/27/2013 & rated 92 points: Opened this at a dinner party and it disappeared in a flash while I was cooking, so I didn't get to write detailed notes while drinking it - but it was great. Another Scholium wine of tremendous character and personality. Cloudy lemon yellow in the glass. A nose of muscat, toast, peaches - very evocative. More of same on palate, but I didn't get to ponder and contemplate appropriately. Better notes on my next bottle. (2400 views) | | | Tasted by Biggsy on 4/13/2013 & rated 93 points: Very unexpected cloudy orange colour. The nose is piercing, perfumed and very intense with aromas of peach juice and orange peel. With time it evolves to the exact smell of Robinsons Tropical Fruit Squash. On first pour it's zippy and fresh with layers of peach fruit, herbs and a mojito-like finish. With time in the glass it became creamier and fuller with the flavour of apple custard on the finish. Very long. Superb. (2364 views) | | | Tasted by TannicBeast on 3/23/2013 & rated 90 points: 100% Sauvignon Blanc from Sonoma Mountain. Skin-fermented resulting in an "orange" wine in the style of those from Collio. A very interesting effort and not for the faint of heart. Cloudy (unfiltered) lemon/gold in color, with medium (+) intensity. The nose is clean, of medium plus to pronounced intensity and quite unlike any other SB, with aromas of overripe peach, honey and a moscato-like muskyness. The nose is moderately complex and developed. The palate is dry and much more linear than the nose, with medium (+) acidity, alcohol and minerality. Mostly citrus flavors. The mouthfeel is smooth, the flavor intensity is medium plus and the finish is long. Overall, this is a full-bodied white that, although ready to drink, appears to also be age-worthy. The aroma and flavor profile appears to have evolved considerably in the last year, and so its evolution is definitely worth watching. (1979 views) | | | Tasted by K is for Kate on 3/9/2013: This showed as funky and almost like gin or sake tasted between the 2009 and 2011. I preferred the other 2 vintages. (1650 views) | | | Tasted by drdebs on 2/4/2013 & rated 90 points: Agree with other tasters--this is a vast improvement on previous bottles, were funky to the point of weirdness (though I still liked them...) This is racy, apricot-and-sea salt. Had it with spicy peanut noodles instead of my usual Gewurz and it was excellent. (1693 views) | | | Tasted by the godfather on 12/28/2012: Interesting (1578 views) | | | Tasted by JOsgood on 12/28/2012: Terrific nose. Very Prince, very good. (1750 views) | | | Tasted by gordoyflaca on 8/23/2012 & rated 91 points: The Prince is growing up. Less funky than in the past. nose of toast with apricot marmalade and vintage clothing store. Salted peach and yellow plum compote. (2039 views) | | | Tasted by alabunka on 8/2/2012 & rated 90 points: very good wine - yet tasted somewhat different from initial sampling several months ago - Scholium is unique in extracting essence from a given grape (2075 views) | | | Tasted by mattsix on 5/13/2012: Big sav blanc nose, salty and briny. Very prince, very good. (1979 views) | | | Tasted by JOsgood on 5/12/2012: Cloudy yellow in color. Big nose. Funky and natural tasting Sauv Blanc. Lots of acidity. (1887 views) | | | Tasted by EMichels on 5/11/2012 & rated 93 points: Everything that's good about Scholium is in this bottle; I kept going back to it - what higher praise? (1904 views) | | | Tasted by PDX-S on 3/23/2012 & rated 93 points: Now this wine was a show stopper, both aromatically and on the palate. The roundly pronounced nose jumps over the rim of the glass in a single bound with a grapefruit proudly emblazoned on it's chest like a superhero. Then you realize there is so much more than grapefruit going on. Scholium white wines never fail to make an olfactory impression that seems outside the norm, and this is one white wine that made me want to slow down and savor each scent coming out of the glass. Like a dilute grapefruit juice, with hibiscus tea, perhaps a touch of lime, and then, improbably, a touch of honeyed biscuit. A few sips in, the palate was still revealing subtle nuances, but all I could think is that if it were summertime, I'd pour it into an old fashioned glass and down it like an iced tea quaffer. I must have smelled this wine 5-10 times for every sip I took and it never ceased to amaze. Everyone at the table couldn't get enough of it either. Definitely worth seeking out as an interesting white that'll make you stop and smell the roses, and the grapefruits. (1858 views) | | | Tasted by EMichels on 2/21/2012 & rated 90 points: Very primary flavors; Very Abe; Funky; Becomes sweet as it opens (1748 views) | | | Tasted by feldashv on 11/5/2011 & rated 86 points: Powerful lychee infused nose. Mineral taste that starts soft and hardens after. (2289 views) | | | Only displaying the 25 most recent notes - click to see all notes for this wine... |
| Scholium Project Producer Website
THE AIM
The aim of my winemaking is an activity; or more properly, a set and series of activities. The first set of acitivites is the winemaking itself, from studying and attending to the vineyard, to imagining when to pick the grapes, to smelling the fermentation begin . . . and on to bringing the wine to bottle. The making of the wine is, in this sense, an end in itself.
But wine has the remarkable ability to preserve within itself not only the character of a vineyard, a growing season, a fermentation– but it does so in a way that is portable. You can put it in a bottle and give it to a friend, or set it adrift in the vast sea of the market, so that it finds itself eventually in the hands, on the table, of a perfect stranger.
This possibility raises a second set of activities– those that are separate and beyond the making of the wine iteself. These are the activities that the wine can inspire and engender in others who drink it.
Beyond the essential bacchic activities that almost any wine can inspire, I have three particular ones in mind: the wines should make one feel and think of complexity. Not the complexity of arguments or syllogisms, but this kind of complexity: imagine the flat asphalt of a new mall's parking lot. Imagine the same asphalt cracked and broken after years of weathering, traffic, ground shifting underneath it. The pointless complexity of these cracks can be a feast for the eyes, even if it means nothing. The wines should present a similar complexity for their consumer to feast on.
The wines should make one sense decay, decomposition, transformation. The wines should be so distinctly wine and not fruit that one can sense both the yeast and the bacteria, on the one hand, and the passage of time, on the other hand, that transformed the unspoiled fruit into a new substance. The wines must capture and preserve decay and age.
The wines should make you happy that you are drinking them.
THE PRINCIPLES
Specificity of vineyards: our fruit comes from the small vineyards of individual farmers. These vineyards offer sites or farming practices, or both, that cannot be duplicated. For this reason, each wine is a single-vineyard bottling and bears the name of its vineyard. We work very closely with each farmer as partner rather than client. The winemaking is inevitably guided by the fruit that the vineyard produces; but the winemaker may reciprocally influence the farming of the vineyards. But much more important than influencing, or much worse, shaping, the vineyard to the winemaker's needs– much more important is to discover excellence in the vineyard and then attend to and exalt it.
Husbandry of microbes: once we have harvested the fruit, our prime task is husbanding the microbial population of our wines. We do this by interfering as little as possible in the spontaneous development of a natural (if invisible) ecology in our fermenting wine. We do not sterilize the must, we do not add commercial yeasts. If the developing system veers toward winemaking disaster, we intervene. If not, we add and take away nothing. We observe the developing system through the signs available to our senses: we taste, we smell, we measure temperature. We punch down, pumpover, and sometimes chill the must to delay or slow down a given activity–but outside of these activities, we do nothing to interfere in the development of a stable and complex living system in our wines.
Undisturbed maturation: in general, the flavors that we seek in our wines come from ripe fruit, long macerations, and long maturation in barrel. When one of our wines demands by its own nature a variation from these principles, we vary (see the 2004 Glos). Otherwise, we seek to transmute the fruit, not to preserve it. We seek not the primary aromas of the freshly-sliced apple or the just-bitten plum, but the secondary and tertiary aromas of rose petals, chocolate, roast coffee, dried fruits, hung game, old leather, dried mushrooms, a broken firecracker. These aromas depend most of all on the undisturbed elevation of the wine in barrel. No sulfur is added in barrel, the wines are topped seldom, and they remain in barrel until they develop a ripeness that is peculiar to wine, not fruit. During this period of maturation, the microbes reach equilibrium and the wine become used to air. The result are wines that are sturdy and prone neither to bacterial spoilage nor to oxidation. They are used to, and have overcome, these threats before they ever make it into bottle. The wines that did not survive this rigorous elevage never see a bottle. They disappear.
Vineyard designation: the foundation of these wines is the vineyard that produces each one. The winemaking is very much the same for each wine. The character of the vineyard and the microbiology of the barrels each dwarfs the range of possible characteristics suggested by various varietals. For this reason, varietal designation has seemed insignificant for this project. A given wine is not a "cab" or a "merlot" in this project; it is a Tenbrink or a Hudson. Typical designations of appelation are not useful here for similar reasons. One wine is not "Napa" in character, while another is "Monterey." The specificity of the vineyard is so much more significant than the appelation that we avoid such a general (and non-specific) designation. On the other hand, the realm in which all of the project's vineyards are found is the dream-world of California. For this reason, all of the wines bear the California appelation and a single vineyard designation.
Sauvignon Blanc Varietal CharacterUSAAmerican wine has been produced since the 1500s, with the first widespread production beginning in New Mexico in 1628. Today, wine production is undertaken in all fifty states, with California producing 84% of all U.S. wine. The continent of North America is home to several native species of grape, including Vitis labrusca, Vitis riparia, Vitis rotundifolia, and Vitis vulpina, but the wine-making industry is based almost entirely on the cultivation of the European Vitis vinifera, which was introduced by European settlers. With more than 1,100,000 acres (4,500 km2) under vine, the United States is the fourth-largest wine producing country in the world, after Italy, Spain, and France.California2021 vintage: "Unlike almost all other areas of the state, the Russian River Valley had higher than normal crops in 2021, which has made for a wine of greater generosity and fruit forwardness than some of its stablemates." - Morgan Twain-Peterson Sonoma CountyMendocino County |
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