Revolution by the glass Does a freethinking vintner make California's most interesting wine?

Abe Scholium, winemaker for his Scholium Project wine, next to his verdelho vineyard in Walnut Grove, Calif., on July 29, 2008. Abe Scholium, winemaker for his Scholium Project wine, next to his verdelho vineyard in Walnut Grove, Calif., on July 29, 2008. Photo: Craig Lee, The Chronicle Photo: Craig Lee, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Revolution by the glass 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Abe Schoener swears this is the path to one of his favorite vineyards. We pull up in front of a modest home on a residential street outside Napa. He skirts the manicured lawn, slips along the side of the house, past the detritus of air-conditioning compressors and long-dead pickup trucks. This couldn't possibly be the way, could it?

"Wait till you see it," he beams. "It's priceless."

It's an oversized garden: a single acre of scraggly vines in the backyard of John and Faye Guman, planted in 1982 as a favor by their friend Nathan Fay, who also once sold Warren Winiarski a key plot at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars.

Twenty rows of vine trunks, stunted by viruses and oak root disease, provide less than half the fruit of normal vines, barely enough for 100 cases of wine. The whole thing can be picked, by hand, in just one hour. But these grapes - powerful, honeyed, almost salty, so thick-skinned they're perceptibly tannic. It's prizefighter fruit.

Where other winemakers fled, Schoener swooned. The Gumans' vineyard became the heart of Nereides and Sylphs, his $80 Chardonnays.

"There's a certain degree to which my vineyards are built from other people's castoffs," he says.

Schoener, 47, is arguably California's most radical winemaker. The wines of his seemingly experimental winery, the Scholium Project, are bizarre, ingenious and polarizing - quite simply unlike anything else being made anywhere in this country.

Yet they radiate a hipster chic that tweaks California's often ossified wine industry - right down to the photos on Schoener's Web site (scholiumwines.com), which resemble outtakes from a Mission District art project that went on a bender and woke up in a barrel room. He has a devoted following. Scholium bottles have found a ready home not only in venues like Thomas Keller's French Laundry, but in New York's outre restaurants Momofuku Ko and WD-50. They are the perfect wines for a generation craving gastronomic whimsy.

By no means are all Schoener's efforts successful. I approach them with a mix of adoration, fascination and dismay. But they are thoroughly unique, a tacit call to innovation - an expression of what California wine might be like if all the rules were chucked out and some very thoughtful (if not pragmatic) vintners rewrote them from scratch.

Schoener eschews varietal names in favor of vineyard designations - his way of driving home beliefs about terroir - and each wine gets a fanciful moniker, a sort of scholarly in-joke (see "The stories behind the names," Page F4). Doubters find the wines difficult and the names pretentious, Scholium devotees love the thrill of knowing that the Cena Trimalchionis ("Trimalchio's dinner"), a dry Sauvignon Blanc completely infected with the noble rot botrytis, is a sly reference to the Latin text "Satyricon."

Scholium can seem more an intellectual exercise than a real winery. Vineyard owner Lee Hudson, Schoener says, calls it "thinly capitalized" - initially funded with credit cards and Schoener "wrecking" his pension. He still resides in the same Carneros farmhouse he first rented (from vintner Robert Sinskey) nearly a decade ago, living off income from consulting projects. A year ago he moved Scholium into its own facility, a metal barn in Fairfield shared with the Tenbrink family, Suisun Valley farmers whose grapes he uses in a wine called Babylon.

Yet Schoener pals around with some of California's most famous vintners. He found his best white wine vineyard with help from Screaming Eagle winemaker Andy Erickson. Schoener's mentor (and tormentor) is none other than John Kongsgaard, who makes some of California's top Chardonnays.

Lacking any formal training, Schoener constantly throws wrenches into the traditional winemaking process. Because he eschews commercial yeasts, his wines can take years to finish; fermentation on most 2007s stopped short last winter and didn't restart until spring. His white wines often sit on the grape skins for weeks or months to build complexity and texture, a technique typically reserved for reds. He routinely leaves wines exposed to air or prone to bacteria - until vintner friends help reel his efforts back in.

"Abe just jumped in without having been plagued by that conservatism, and he's friends with enough of us to keep from sliding off that cliff," Kongsgaard says. "I'm often horrified to hear what he's doing or not doing."

Sometimes it goes too far. Schoener tossed out three of nine barrels of his 2006 Pinot Grigio when they weren't decent enough to bottle. "Those barrels represent mistakes I made," he says. "And I need to learn not to make those mistakes."

When his efforts work, the wines can be unforgettable. Schoener's trademark wine, the Prince in His Caves, is an electrically tangy and unctuous Sauvignon Blanc that soaks on its skins for three weeks.

"You either despise it or are immediately attracted," says Mark Snyder of Angel's Share Wines, Schoener's sometimes business strategist and New York distributor.

A study in wine

Essentially, a scholium is an annotation to a manuscript. Schoener describes the Scholium Project as "undertaken for the sake of learning, understanding - hence a commentary, an essay, a study."

That study has become Schoener's sly-minded meditation on wine's traditions. With a blend of innocence and provocation, he questions the rules - asking, "But why?" at each step in the winemaking process. That has generated an enological bag of tricks, a "collection" of techniques from which Schoener cherry-picks.

In his world, Chardonnay need not be the sum of barrel fermentation, lees stirring and new oak. It might be left unprotected to develop the same sort of surface yeast layer, known as flor, used to make wine in Jerez or France's Jura region.

His logic makes more sense once you know of his previous career: as an assistant dean at St. John's College, the Annapolis, Md., school so devoted to Western classicism that all freshmen tackle not only Homer but Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things." It somehow seems reasonable that Schoener once left a Syrah exposed to air until nearly spoiled, then rescued it from the drain when it seemingly revived itself, then dubbed it Scheria, after the spot where Odysseus was stranded before returning home.

The outsider status allows Schoener to be rebellious without being reactionary. "I had nothing to rebel against," he says. "I wasn't part of an orthodoxy. I was an interloper."

Schoener grew up on Manhattan's Upper East Side - at least until his parents ("late-blooming hippies") moved to rural Grafton, Vt. He got his degree from St. John's, followed by a doctorate in Greek philosophy at the University of Toronto.

There he began to develop a serious interest in wine, which lingered when he returned to teach at St. John's. He joined a wine-tasting group and became fascinated by plant biology. In 1998, at his then wife's suggestion, Schoener took a sabbatical in San Francisco. Interested in the relationship between vine physiology and wine quality, Schoener reached out to a former student, Zach Rasmuson - now the winemaker at Goldeneye - and quietly landed an internship at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars.

"They were kind of tickled, having a philosophy professor working for three bucks an hour," he recalls. (Winiarski didn't discover the St. John's lecturer on his payroll for almost six weeks.)

Student finds a teacher

Schoener also befriended Kongsgaard, who invited Schoener to work with him at Luna Vineyards. The veteran winemaker agreed to take on Schoener as his intern the following year. Schoener asked for more leave from his teaching job to become, in essence, Kongsgaard's student.

That dynamic remains today. Schoener still addresses his benefactor as "Il dottore," and when I witnessed Kongsgaard's first visit to Schoener's winery - filled with Kongsgaard's used castoff barrels - he was quick to note technical faults in several of Schoener's efforts.

"He gives me a lot of rope," Schoener says, "and then I hang myself and then he points his finger at me."

At Luna, Schoener became something of a vineyard hunter - chasing fruit sources for Luna's popular Pinot Grigio. He was named winemaker in 2002, and finally relinquished his post at St. John's after what had become a four-year sabbatical. But the job was diverting Schoener from his real interest - vineyards and vines - and after two years he left.

Increasingly, Schoener was intrigued by the minimalist winemaking used for such crisp whites as Verdejo from Spain's Rueda or Austrian Gruner Veltliner. But his real awakening came during two visits to the Collio region of northeast Italy, near Slovenia. Known for its almost biting white wines, the area is a hotbed of experimentalists, notably Josko Gravner, whose retrograde techniques include aging wines in clay amphorae buried in the ground; and Stanislao Radikon, whose wines sit on their skins for months and are made without the preservative sulfur dioxide.

"It's the only place in the world that I've been to where white wine is king," Schoener says.

Collio represented the very opposite the meticulous practices Schoener learned from Kongsgaard - keeping nascent wines as fresh as possible, painstakingly manipulating barrels and stirring lees. "My inclination was to take that and push it," he says.

Since Schoener can't always divine which techniques best highlight his intensely flavored grapes, he has a tendency to create sets of twinned wines - efforts made from the same parcel using opposing methods. From the Farina vineyard on Sonoma Mountain, Schoener makes two Sauvignon Blancs: the Prince, exposed to air and left in barrel to mature at a pace that yields a saline tang and honeyed palate; and La Severita di Bruto, immediately protected from air exposure and kept from evolving to be fresh and austere.

"Abe doesn't know he's being daring," Kongsgaard says. "He has a style that's more advanced than most people who have been making wine for the period of time that he has."

Vines, not winemaking, brought Schoener west. The potential of often impractical parcels is clearly what intrigues him most, enough that he recently started another project reviving seemingly moribund vines in France's Roussillon region.

Cultivating grapevines

His relationships with vineyards are, well, complicated - somewhere between "Anna Karenina" and "Great Expectations." At many sites, vines are nearing the end of their useful lives, or yield fruit in such tiny amounts that it hardly seems worthwhile. (See "Schoelium's sites," Page F4.)

Is this deliberate? Does he consider himself, I ask, a savior of lost soils?

"That's exactly something I said to myself a few years ago," he replies.

What's closer to the truth: He makes a half dozen or more wines at any time, often in batches as small as 15 cases - and prices them aggressively, often at $50 or more per bottle. (His entire production is still around 1,500 cases.) These economics accommodate, if not justify, his preoccupation with difficult places.

"It would be an exaggeration to say I'm out there saving vineyards," he concludes. "It's not an obstacle, but it's not a reason to go into the vineyard either."

Yet Schoener lacks the usual pretense about geography. He loves grapes from low places - sometimes literally. His most unusual site is the Lost Slough vineyard, located below sea level outside Walnut Grove in the deep heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The 190-acre parcel mostly grows fruit for large wineries - Gallo, Kendall-Jackson - but also small, if unruly, experimental plots of Verdelho and Gruner Veltliner that are meticulously picked by hand. "It's just the opposite of what you think of as terroir," Schoener says.

This has been Schoener's year of critical mass, with high-profile tastings on both coasts and deals to serve Scholium wines by the glass in such venues as New York's Union Square Cafe.

The popularity comes after years of word-of-mouth evangelism. High-profile buyers like former French Laundry wine director Paul Roberts (whose first winemaking attempt, a botrytized Malbec, sits in Schoener's winery) drew the link between Scholium and those of Italian mavericks like Gravner, then prosetlytized to their sommelier friends. It was a message that particularly resonated on the East Coast - with New Yorkers like Hearth's Paul Grieco and the Tasting Room's Colin Alevras - where fatigue over California wines was palpable.

"We didn't really push them from our end," Mark Snyder recalls. "It was more like: We've got them, they're completely unique, buyer beware."

Suddenly, Schoener faces the mundane duty of running a real winery. Popularity means an expectation of consistency, which means he can't change his winemaking rules each time. He's locking in long-term fruit contracts. He still has no business plan - "but I at least recognize the importance of them," he offers.

Vineyard collector

In one moment, Schoener claims he's reached his limit on vineyards - he can't add a new one without dropping another. "It's like friendship," he says. "I do feel like I have a really good circle of friends, and I don't need to add more."

Yet he's currently planning a new Verdelho from Lodi, plus a Mourvedre-based table wine from Contra Costa County that would sell for around $30 to attract new customers. During a single afternoon of vineyard visits, he hands his business card to a Carignan grower in Oakley, and considers how to persuade his former boss at Luna to sell him some newly planted Tocai Friulano.

It sounds remarkably like Schoener's experiment has borne the seeds of a real business. Which raises one final possibility: that his effort to question the virtues of modern winemaking has become an irresistibly popular symbol of change.

"In the past few days, for the first time, I have an anxiety that I haven't had before," he says. "There's a few people in the world who, if the Scholium Project went under, would miss it."