The Wine Whisperers, Part 1: Budweiser Wine, Foot Yeast and Carbonated Sparkling at The Scholium Project

The Scholium Project isn’t your average Napa winery.

Instead of a posh tasting room, the unheated rental of a barn is filled with bladder presses and stacked barrels with names like Polupous (Octopus in Greek), Sally Field and “lees poop.”

Only the first of those is for selling, however; the last is for when they have a wine that needs some help, says Brenna Harrington, the former San Francisco sommelier-turned-Napa winemaking intern at The Scholium Project.

“We keep healthy lees around to add to any problematic fermentations,” she says. “They can activate fermentations, or if you have some off aromatics, you can add them and sometimes they absorb the aromatics.”

Abe Schoener, the founded and winemaker at The Scholium Project, would normally be here talking lees and aromatics and spitting wine into the drain on the floor with us (“It’s a working winery,” says Brenna – no spittoons necessary), but he was called for jury duty. So instead it’s the young, blonde, tattooed somm taking some time off from the vines to tell us all about lees poop on her own today.

She met Abe when she was buying his wines for a restaurant in San Francisco called The Press Club. “I was kind of burnt out on the restaurant industry. So I called Abe and asked if I could just come hang out a couple days during harvest and see how things went. I came and just never left. I just kind of fell in love with this.”

Not a bad gig, drinking sparkling wine at 10am. But then again, there are the days when she spends 12 hours standing on a crushing pad decorated with lucky cats like the ones in Chinese restaurants, gently extracting juice from skins and seeds using plum presses that are cheap and, most importantly, gentle on the fruit.

“There’s a big rubber bladder. We load the fruit in and inflate it very gently to slowly press the fruit. I run the presses during harvest and we press everything to taste, so I’ll be standing up here for 8 to 12 hours just to press a few tonnes of fruit. We’re constantly tasting what’s coming out. We make fairly severe pressing decisions. Because when you’re pressing, the best juice you’re going to get is the juice that’s coming out first, and the more you press, the more you’re going to get those stemmy seeds, phenolics. So we make these decisions when to cut it off. And we will end up pressing the entire fruit, but we press it pretty hard and we set it aside and we’ll make decisions once fermentation is complete about what we can do with that juice. Are we going to use it for topping or are we going to destroy it?”

A lot does end up being destroyed, she says – about 300 gallons a year, which is a small fortune when you’re only producing about 3,000 cases a season. But it’s necessary when the hard-pressed dregs aren’t high quality enough or if the juice starts to go off, which can happen in a winery that wants every bit of wild yeast to run amok in the interest of experimentation and flavour.

“We don’t inoculate and sanitize. We don’t even have hot water at the winery,” she says.

The Scholium Project doesn’t actually own any vineyards or even the barn itself. It shares the space with other wineries needing storage. Barrels of Matthew Rorrick’s “Forlorn Hope” are located not far from the poop (lees). “That’s actually the brand of a colleague of ours,” Brenna explains. “Any barrels with green tags are his. Two years ago he bought a winery up in Murphys, so he moved most of his production up there. But he shared the space with us for about six years. For the grapes, we work really closely with some other winemakers and growers in Napa, Sonoma and the Central Valley. Because we make sort of specific, geeky wines, we like working with unusual vineyards. So our colleagues typically know that and they kind of clue us in to really cool vineyards they find.”

By that she means places like the backyard of a retired fridge repairman who doesn’t drink but grows 35-year-old Chardonnay vines. Or the tiny McDowell property that produces about 30 gallons of Chardonnay from what may be the oldest Sauvignon Blanc vines in California. At more than 60-years-old, the vines have seen more summers than Schoener himself.

Did I mention these are cult wines? Or maybe it’s The Scholium Project rather than the individual wines that has a cult following.

The wines are often weird. Schoener even started selling them by the mixed case so customers would take the funky with the more…accessible bottles. Often, the wines are more about the journey – the method and the winemaking curiosity – than the final product. But whatever their path, they’re released before they have something interesting to say.

Abe explains his intentions on the ordering page on the Scholium Project website:

“Our wine often does not resemble other wines, but we are not renegades. We are students. Our projects are not always experiments– sometimes we know what we are doing–but they are always acts of emulation, looking up at the work of others we admire.”

Schoener’s been known to hang onto bottles for years until they go from strange to palatable and finally to “interesting,” which in his view is as marketable an adjective as amazing, if not more so. From Per Se in New York to Sepia in Chicago, the bottles are grabbed fresh from his newsletter, with Abe’s notation of his extensive process and experimentation doing most of the selling.

For example, of his 2015 carbonated sparkling wine, he writes:

The 2015 vintage of Blowout Blanc is a wonder!
We harvested Grüner and Verdelho on the same day in late July, pressed and fermented all of the fruit together.
We “pressed” at Tenbrink, the most grapes we have ever worked with in a day, by the utterly innovative and unforeseen Magic Press™:
we destemmed, but did not crush, the grapes into our large stainless tank and then did nothing else: we let the weight of the grapes press the juice on its own without any intervention.
We kept the whole thing chilled and under CO2, and after 3 days, drained away all of the juice— about 80% of the yield we would have expected if we had used a normal press.
We then dug out the tank, pressed the pomace gently and reserved the press wine.
About 3 weeks later, we harvested the super late-ripening, but very low sugar, Lourreiro and performed the same magic pressing. We then fermented the juice partially on its own and then combined it with the now fermented Grüner and Verdelho wine and allowed the whole thing to complete a fermentation together.
After about 6 weeks’ lees contact, we filtered the combined wines to prevent malolactic fermentation, and began bottling on November 4. With the Méthode Futuriste, speed is everything!
The Lourreiro is highly floral in a Muscat-y way as a grape, but develops deep funky Chenin-like notes as a fermented wine. We thought that the 2014 Blowout was so successful in a charming way, but Alex and Dani and I wanted to push the complexity and more adult-nature of this wine. We accomplished this by using a plurality of the musky Lourreiro in the blend and extending the lees contact before filtration. Consequently, this vintage is darker, more saline, more minerally and even somewhat earthy and animal — though the wine remains charming and flattering in the mouth. The point of comparison is more serious Chablis than fun Prosecco.
We are very excited.

Good luck convincing a Bordeaux producer to write like this. Fun. Magic. Méthode Futuriste. It’s wine copy for the 21st century or curious drinkers – open, honest and clear whereas the old school traditionalists of winemaking would guard their multi-generational secrets with their lives.

Other methods Abe uses involve adding dry ice to juice to slow fermentation by keeping it cool after a hot harvest, using a snorkel (like a big siphon tube) to separate the juice from the skins and seeds to put it into barrels, and using smaller barrels with more oxygen exposure to create a flor, a thin layer of surface yeast that you want for sherry, in their 2014 Sylphs, a Chardonnay for tapas lovers.

While we’re talking trends, let’s talk natural wines, because the other thing to know about The Scholium Project is that these are not really hands-off wines. As the description of each makes clear, when needed there’s a little sulphite added, there’s constant tasting and plenty of adjustments, and they even add CO2 for the sparkling wine. Jules Chauvet is probably rolling in his grave!

But, as the description of each wine makes clear, they’re far from the industrialized productions that use commercial yeasts, filters and chemicals to make every bottle taste almost exactly the same every year.

And they’re obsessed with wild yeasts.

In fact, “wild” is an understatement for The Scholium Project wines. What’s possibly its most well-known wine, The Prince and His Caves, is a skin-fermented, unfiltered 100% Sauvignon Blanc that ends up orange-tinged and cloudy. There’s a yeasty and fruity nose, both of which soften in the mouth, making the wine scream summer patio sipper for a beer-lover who’s being forced to drink cool wine.

But let’s think about that yeasty note for a second. It might come from the wild yeasts introduced by the light treading (Brenna and the other interns often roll up their pants and get their feet into the big press, which is the size and temperature of a hot tub, but much more squishy) or it might come from submerging the cap of the fermenting juice and skins in the punch-in once a day.

“When we make red wine, we bring the fruit in and we put it basically into punch-ins – big barrels with no top, so they’re open-top fermentations. We have someone – typically me – in the barrel sort of running in place. Not to crush all of the fruit but just to break some of the berries. Abe likes to say that only pretty women’s feet get into our wine, but he’s definitely gotten into a few fermentations. Then we cold-soak for about three days by constantly adding dry ice and keeping it in the cold room. The dry ice not only keeps the fruit cold, so that bit of juice that’s in there has a bit more time to interact, so pull away some tannins and phenolics.”

Or, that yeasty smell might come wild yeasts on a little field trip…

“I don’t know if you noticed when you drove in, but right across the freeway from us is the Budweiser factory. A lot of times when we’re out there working on the crush pad we can totally smell yeast, which smells like baking bread, actually like stronger yeast than that. I know that yeast has got to be on the wind. And whatever floats over from the Budweiser factory, we’re pretty sure that affects our fermentation.”

Budweiser wine!

Putting the “Budweiser Wine” marketing potential to Williamsburg hipsters aside, Brenna siphoned us off some underage pulls of the rest of what she had in barrels: some young, sweet wines that hadn’t finished fermenting yet and other harsh, malolactic fermenting babies.

“I wish I had a finished bottle of this wine to show you. It’s probably my favourite red that we make. This is 100% Cinsault. It’s not grown a lot here or bottled on its own here a lot. This comes from a really special vineyard that’s over 140 years old out in Lodi. It’s called Bechtel Ranch. There’s a little trace of borace. Randall Grahm who does Bonny Doon Vineyard, he makes a wine out of this vineyard. But we only get a couple rows each, so we only make two barrels of this every year. These vines are so cool. They’re about our height, and it’s these gnarled old bushes. It’s dry farmed. The vines have had 140 years to reach super far down into the earth and pull the water up. You can tell it’s super young. I think it’s going through malolactic fermentation right now, because you kind of get that spritzy, almost rough element on your tongue.”

In a year or two, this wine will get much smoother, says Brenna.

“It feels like it’s in that awkward gangly teenager stage where the tannins haven’t knitted together.”

But when a wine goes off, which happens more often than they’d like, there are sometimes fixes.

“So this wine, this is Sauvignon Blanc. It comes from Mount Sonoma. It’s a really Muscat-y nose in a Sauvignon Blanc. It’s super perfume-y. So not like your typically New Zealand grassy Sauvignon Blanc. It’s still a baby in barrel. It’s always takes forever to ferment. While most of our wines take between three days to two weeks to ferment, for some reason the yeast that live in that vineyard are just sluggish. Whereas the Naucratis is ready to go and ready to be bottled six months after harvest, this one we’ll have to put in the winery and let is sleep during the winter. and then in the summer we’ll bring the barrels out to the crush pad to keep them warm and the yeasts will start being active again. Then typically it’s ready to bottle in September. During the winter we try to protect it as much as possible. With this amount of sugar, we always worry about things like [volatile] acidity, which typically happens when there’s fermented sugar in a wine. These little bacteria get in there, acetobacter, and start eating up the sugar, producing a nail polishy smell. A lot of bigger wineries that inoculate and add laboratory-propagated yeasts, they don’t typically have the same sort of problems. These yeasts are basically bred to produce specific aromatics and flavour profiles and to be resilient against other microbes or against other things that might get into the fermentation. But with us it’s a struggle every year, especially in our red wines. We had to destroy a lot of wine because of it, or re-ferment the wine. Sometimes we can go in the next year and put the vine in contact with healthy ferments from a healthy fermentation that year. If we can get the fermentation started again, the yeast will typically eat up the acetobacter. It’s really cool.”

Another way to fend off volatile acidity is with sulfites, which Brenna says they use minimally but some natural winemakers dogmatically avoid.

“The acetobacter in the wine eats up something in the wine and it’s producing that nail polish-y smell. That’s what happens when we don’t add enough SO2 and we don’t keep the barrel topped. But if you add too much SO2, then you kill everything in there, including the yeast, and you don’t have a fermentation. Or you can stop a lot of interesting aromatics happening in the wine that happen because of bacteria and natural processes, not just fermentation. You can actually make the wine, have you ever heard the expression “dumb on the nose?” It just dumbs it down, kills the aromatics. We try to be as hands-off and let things happen as naturally as possible, but it’s a fine line. There are producers that do zero SO2 adds. Some people can produce wine that way. Everyone has their own opinions on whether it’s good or not. I haven’t tasted anything that has completely blown me away and the majority of winemakers do add SO2.”

As for the lucky Chinese cats, when you’re not inoculating or sterilizing, says Brenna, you need as much luck as you can get.

“When I was an intern in 2012 here, I went up to the foothills in Anobar County to taste, and I was asking this one winemaker, ‘So do you ever do any wild fermentations or natural fermentations?’ and he said, ‘Honey I’m a winemaker, not a gambler. ‘Course I inoculate!’ When your livelihood depends on it, these fermentations aren’t dependable. But that’s what makes it exciting, especially for us. We really believe in a harmony of microbiology here. We believe that nature has this balance and we have this ecosystem here in the winery that includes all of us.”

Between the beer, feet and other wild yeasts, I think I’d add a few more lucky cats.

But Schoener has been doing just fine with the few that he has. If you can manage to get your hands on any of his bottles, do – whether you like the dark, grassy Zinfandel, the new age carbonated sparkling, the dry-farmed Cinsault, the skin-fermented funk of the Sauvignon Blanc Prince and His Caves (aka Budweiser wine), the $45 Polupous Pinot Noir for Cab drinkers, or the huge tannins and fruit of the 2015 Petite Sirah (it’s punched-down three times a day during fermentation and will need a couple years to calm down, says Brenna. “It’s still going through malolactic, but we let it go and just tell it, ‘Oh, cool, hang out in the corner. We’ll see you in three years.’”).

When I asked David Pendon of Oenopole, a Montreal wine import agency specializing in organic, biodynamic and natural wines, for recommendations of wineries with interesting, maybe funky wines to check out in Napa and Sonoma, these were his words: “Go to Scholium. Write to them and ask nicely.” Thanks, Dave. Because there’s definitely some funk in there. But there’s also big flavour.

After leaving, I had the feeling that this was a place where experimentation, chance and academic precision resulted in each wine tasting completely different from what you thought you knew about Pinots or Sauvignon Blancs or Chardonnays.

So here’s to wine for the curious. Here’s also to wine for the patient…

…because I have a really good feeling about what’s going to happen to that Cinsault after three years in the corner.

 

Check out Part 2 of The Wine Whisperers next week: Coturri

The Scholium Project
For a tour or tasting, here’s where to start
All about the 1026 harvest
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