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| Drinking Windows and Values |
| Community Tasting History |
| Community Tasting Notes (average 91.4 pts. and median of 91 pts. in 10 notes) - hiding notes with no text | | | Tasted by redz on 12/24/2022 & rated 90 points: needed 4-5. hrs decant. Hint of prunes, a little tired. 16.8%! (261 views) | | | Tasted by Jay Hack on 1/8/2022 & rated 93 points: 100% Petite Sirah. Outstanding. Dark berry fruit. Roasted meat. Coffee. The fierce tannin is resolved and has sweetened some of the red fruit. Great depth. I have been drinking Babylon since the 2004 vintage. When we got a 2004 barrel sample for a remote tasting, a "civilian" friend said I should use the word "nyquil" to describe the head banging force. No more. It has all been converted into flavor. This wine is showing at we predicted a decade ago, and probably has 10 years or more before it peaks. (716 views) | | | Tasted by joraesque on 8/6/2018 & rated 90 points: Native yeast, balsamic vinegar, and juicy grape tannin. 16.8% ABV, yet drinking less hot than the numbers would imply. Drank well over three days.
90+ (1296 views) | | | Tasted by feldashv on 1/22/2016 & rated 96 points: I've been waiting to open the '09 Babylon. To say it was worth the wait is an understatement. This is the essence of the Project's reds (if not California's). Earthy and silky smooth, with slight spice on the finish. It tells a story from the nose to the aftertaste. A beautiful one. (2281 views) | | | Tasted by Biggsy on 12/1/2015 & rated 91 points: Really lovely nose, led by a fried bacon note, but also a floral character and a little hint of something medicinal. Big and dense, packed with huge flavour and intensity. There is a little hit of alcohol there, but that’s expected for a wine that’s labelled at 17%. Layers of flavour with black fruits, cassis, vanilla and blueberry all wrapped in chalky tannins. A touch animalistic on the finish with a little meaty-ness. It’s a big-un but great for a wintry night. (2239 views) | | | Tasted by dsabolish on 1/16/2015 & rated 88 points: Deep purple, opaque, almost black. Lots of dark, stewed fruit and prunes on the nose and palate. The nose is hot with ethanol, but it's less noticeable on the palate. Velvety mouthfeel with some vegetal qualities. Overall a good wine, but a bit one dimensional. (2350 views) | | | Tasted by cab on 8/1/2014: Good. Always interesting from this producer. This is thick, almost port-like, sort of a minty sagey thing on the finish. Nicely fruity up front. My one complaint might be that there is a sense if stewed prunes, but not overwhelming. More of a winter wine but but nice on a not-too-hot august night. (2554 views) | | | Tasted by Colia on 3/23/2014 & rated 89 points: The only bottle out of 10 Scholiums that wasn't heavily infected with bacteria. Chewy, dense, great ripeness. It suffered a little in the complexity department and some dirty flavors after an hour of being opened, but this one is the best. (2432 views) | | | Tasted by TannicBeast on 3/23/2013 & rated 93 points: Cloudy (unfiltered) deep ruby with hints of purple and no sign of ageing. Very dark legs and significant viscosity are an omen of things to come. The nose has a little bit of Old World cheesy, microbial, brett funk which quickly blows off to reveal blackberries, sweet spice, vanilla, and graphite dust. The palate is dry, but very fruit forward, with pronounced alcohol, at 16.8%, and a very smooth mouthfeel. The acidity, tannins and minerality are all medium (+) which helps balance out the palate. It is remarkably balanced for a PS, but is still skewed towards the soft end of the spectrum. The flavors are intense and the finish is long, consisting of black and blue fruit and baking spices. Drinkeable now, but likely to improve for the next couple of years and to last for several more. This is a wine of significant extraction and purity of fruit, with no perceptible oak influence. It is big and jammy and crisp and clean at the same time, which makes it the most interesting PS I have ever had. Definitely a WOW wine. (1679 views) |
| 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.
Petite Sirah Varietal character (Appellation America) | P.S. I Love You: A Petite Sirah Advocacy Organization
Petite Sirah is a variety of red wine grape grown in France, California, Israel and Australia. Recently, wineries located in Washington State's Yakima Valley, Maryland, Arizona, West Virginia, Mexico, Chile's Colchagua Valley and Maipo Valley, and Ontario's Niagara Peninsula have also produced wines from Petite Sirah grapes. Though developed in France, it is nearly extinct there as of 2002, hanging on in limited plantings in the Isère and Ardêche regions of the Rhône Valley and in Palette, a tiny appellation in Provence. It is the main grape known in the US and Israel as Petite Sirah with over 90% of the California plantings labeled "Petite Sirah" being Durif grapes; the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms recognizes "Durif" and "Petite Sirah" as interchangeable synonyms referring to the same grape. The grape originated as a cross of Syrah pollen germinating a Peloursin plant. On some occasions, Peloursin and Syrah vines may be called Petite Sirah, usually because the varieties are extremely difficult to distinguish in old age.
The 'petite' in the name of this grape refers to the size of its berries and not the vine, which is particularly vigorous. The leaves are large with a bright green upper surface and paler green lower surface. The grape forms tightly packed clusters that can be susceptible to rotting in rainy environments. The small berries creates a high skin to juice ratio which can produce very tannic wines if the juice goes through an extended maceration period. In the presence of new oak barrels the wine can develop an aroma of melted chocolate.
Petite Sirah produces dark, inky colored wines that are relatively acidic with firm texture and mouth feel. The bouquet has herbal and black pepper overtones, with plum and blackberry flavors on the palate. Compared to Syrah, the wine is noticeably more dark and purplish in color. The wines are very tannic with aging ability that can eclipse 20 years in the bottle.USAAmerican 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 CaliforniaNapa Valley.http://www.stagecoachvineyard.com/vineyards/our_vineyards.php
Santa Ynez.http://www.everyvine.com/org/Camp_Four/vineyard/Camp_Four/ |
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