The new cult wines: 6 wines to covet

The new cult wines: 6 wines to covet
Jon Bonné, Chronicle Wine Editor
Friday, May 30, 2008



It may be more difficult to define a cult wine nowadays, at least in the Screaming Eagle sense of the term. But all six of these wineries have impressive followings among well-informed wine buyers and consumers - finessing that tricky mix of scarcity, quality and reputation. None were producing wine before the millennium; at least one has yet to release its first vintage.

Scholium Project
Location: Fairfield

Case production: 1,500

Scholiumwines.com

Given its cult following among wine insiders - appearances at sommeliers' off-hours gatherings, for instance - Abe Schoener's effort is set to become the next Sine Qua Non. Just as Manfred Krankl's winery broke cult wines from the Napa Cab template, Scholium is again rewriting the book on cult wine.

A philosophy lecturer by trade, Schoener trained with John Kongsgaard at Luna Vineyards before Kongsgaard went on to establish his own cult Chardonnays. Scholium's first release in 2005 was based on barrels made from 3 tons of Chardonnay that Kongsgaard shared with Schoener five years earlier.

Schoener's unique winemaking style requires a barrel-by-barrel approach. The vineyard sources are often wildly unusual - Verdelho from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, for one - and the methods are either innovative or insane, depending on how much you buy into the textbook model of winemaking. Some white wines sit on their skins for days like a red; natural-yeast fermentations can halt in the winter and take years to complete; many barrels are finished without any use of the preservative sulfur dioxide.

The results are bottled with a unique name -"The Prince in His Caves," a skin-fermented Sauvignon Blanc that fermented for more than seven months in barrel, is simply marked by vineyard name (Sonoma Mountain's Farina Vineyard) and "white wine"- no varietal. It's a style inspired, in part, by winemakers like Josko Gravner and Stanislao Radikon, Italian mavericks who gained a reputation for experimenting with anything from terra-cotta amphorae to sulfur-free winemaking.

This caused a bit of worry among the salespeople who agreed to help Schoener with his wines, including the one who managed to persuade the French Laundry and stores like St. Helena's Acme Fine Wines to buy almost his whole production. "Afterwards, (the sales rep) said, "I didn't think we were going to sell a single case,' " Schoener recalls.

Clearly, it's not a concern anymore.

See the complete story at San Francisco Chronicle.