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| Drinking Windows and Values |
| Drinking window: Drink between 2019 and 2024 (based on 11 user opinions) |
| Community Tasting History |
| Community Tasting Notes (average 87.4 pts. and median of 91 pts. in 8 notes) - hiding notes with no text | | | Tasted by Seafoam Manor on 10/26/2022: This is what happens when "Natty" gets it right. In my (somewhat limited) experience with Scholium Project wines, it's always a bit of a mine field, but this managed to harness the wild side.
I would have never thought that this was a six year-old wine. There was still a light spritz upon opening, despite being a very pale ruby, the color is still very vibrant and it is pretty youthful on both the nose and the palate. It tastes like this was almost certainly 100% whole cluster and likely had some degree of carbonic maceration. This was a big bowl of brambly wild berries, very red fruited, with touches of orange zest, a bit of spice and then a big black tea note that grows through the finish. The finish can test your tolerance for bitterness, because it lingers. Probably a touch of bret and little yeasty hints every once in a while, but they manage to walk the line where "flaw" reads more interesting and not a full-on "fault". Refreshing in style, with med+ acid, med- tannin and low abv.
Based on the previous reviews, I think I should start buying lottery tickets. The Scholium Project wines always seem to be very prone to bottle variation and I believe they don't use any sulphur, which always makes aging treacherous, so this is solely what this bottle tastes like and all other experiences will likely differ. Even with a totally sound bottle, this is a love it or hate it style and certainly not a textbook example of Cinsault.
*** Day two, this got a lot more sour, bramblier and are generically "natural wine". Also, I wasn't paying attention pouring the last glass, which was pretty much opaque and downright chewy, from all of the sediment. *** (301 views) | | | Tasted by gordoyflaca on 9/17/2022 & rated 84 points: I don’t know. I’ve drank a lot of Scholium. Maybe I used to be interested in this type of wine, even if out of intellectual curiosity, but not so much now. (261 views) | | | Tasted by talbot61 on 7/11/2022 & rated 78 points: A recent bottle of Scholium wine (Golgotha Reserve 2013) was undrinkably bretty. This bottle started as drinkably bretty, despite a disconcerting, prickly effervescence when I first poured it. It's a medium-bodied high acidity wine, similar to a Jura red, with an attractive cranberry/cherry flavor. But it also had an odd aftertaste that I couldn't quite identify on the first night. On the second night the aftertaste was much more pronounced -- peanut butter! Cranberry juice with a peanut butter aftertaste is not a pleasant libation. I'm starting to panic about the other 10-12 bottles of Scholium wine that I have in my cellar. (299 views) | | | Tasted by Blog on 9/5/2021: Robe rubis, un peu trouble.
Nez expressif, sur les petits fruits rouges, l’orange sanguine avec un fond floral et végétal intense.
Un perlant très léger, une structure acide affirmée, c’est un vin tout en longueur et verticalité qui se développe sur les petits fruits rouge. Une expression particulière, un peu extrême et pas forcément consensuelle du Cinsault, loin du vin de fruit un peu rond qu’on rencontre souvent. J’ai aimé, l’aromatique un peu décalée mais fraîche, le fond buvable et digeste. (312 views) | | | Tasted by joraesque on 12/9/2020: Really turbid and yeasty, reminiscent of beer! Probably all whole cluster? A fun, medium-bodied wine with still strong aromatics. Expect an experiment, and not a Cinsault. Would have preferred it in a 500ml bottle... 12.81% ABV. (612 views) | | | Tasted by ZMAng on 8/31/2019 & rated 91 points: Sampler (Enomatic). Aromatic nose, flowers and meat, burnt ends. Interesting palate, not getting the mentioned acidity, more like a sherry on mid palate, meat notes. Medium length. I like. 90-91.
Just out of bottle: Cherry red. Dense meaty nose, then burnt ends, opening up into floral notes. Dominant acidity, fine tannins, slightly grippy. Medium length.
After decanting for 30-60min: Now most similar to the tasting notes out of the enomatic. Aromatic nose - flowers, potpurri, smoked meat. More balanced, good acidity but no longer dominant. Red fruit, earthy notes, savoury, fine tannins. Long finish. 90-92. (666 views) | | | Tasted by isaacjamesbaker on 6/22/2019 & rated 93 points: Burnt Hill Summer Solstice Festival (Clarksburg, Maryland): So aromatic with rose potpourri, pepper, clove, warm clay, tangy red apple and raspberry fruit. Gorgeous texture, dusty tannins, crisp acidity, crunchy red fruits laced with all sorts of earthy, savory complexities. A beautiful Bechtold vineyard that should do interesting things with age. Wine of the festival for me. (1020 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.
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 Central Valley The Central California Winegrowers (Official site) | Central Valley (California Wine Institute)Lodi Lodi Woodbridge Winegrape Commission | Lodi District Grape Growers Association |
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