But it was also ridiculously miniature, producing in some vintages only about 80 gallons of juice, not much more than the McDowell property. For that very reason, the venerable Pahlmeyer winery stopped buying grapes from the Guman site after 2001. Schoener pounced on it. He calls the end product the Sylphs, after a mythological creature. As with Glos, its accompanying label says nothing about chardonnay, which is just as well, given that it doesn’t really taste like chardonnay. Schoener has likened its flavor to porcini mushrooms and crushed rocks. At around $80 a bottle (of which there are sometimes as few as a hundred in a given vintage), the Sylphs sells out every year.

While Schoener squinted reverently at the chardonnay vines, Brenna trained adoring eyes on him. She confessed to me, in Schoener’s presence, that the experience of working in his winery created “a feeling that is almost reminiscent of being in love.” I had seen similar displays of devotion at wine tastings that Schoener held in Brooklyn and San Francisco attended by well-heeled consumers who, while listening to the winemaker hold forth and sampling his unorthodox wines, buzzed among themselves like discoverers of a latter-day Dylan. Though there may be more coveted cult wines than those of the Scholium Project, the charismatic and somewhat quixotic Schoener is possibly America’s only winemaker with a cult following of his own.

To some degree, Schoener owes his success to the burgeoning market for culinary adventurism. As his friend and fellow small-scale Napa winemaker Steve Matthiasson told me, “The millennial generation are getting into position as wine buyers, and just like they’re into the local-food movement and choosing between Berkshire pork and Mangalitsa pork, they’re also culturally interested in exploring differences in wine.” But Schoener has tapped into a longing that extends beyond an appreciation of flavors and origins. True, his strange, often wonderful wines express the seasonal eccentricities of both the vineyard and the maker rather than a striving for uniform taste and high Wine Spectator ratings. More broadly, however, Schoener is selling the experience of extreme authenticity, of something pure and irreplicable. The arrangement is almost absurdly harmonious: the classics professor who has gone to the land (not just any land, but land that’s forgotten and seemingly irredeemable) and found virtue there, for himself and ultimately for his customers, who by buying his wines are buying into Schoener’s vision and thereby becoming something more than just elitist wine collectors. As Javier Martell, a San Francisco-based lawyer and one of Schoener’s longtime customers, told me: “Part of the attraction of his wines is for people like me who practice law for a living and have a forced rigidity in our lives. Abe’s wines give us an escape — I’m going with the flow, and Abe’s leading me down it, and it’s sort of liberating.”

Liberating and, of course, exclusive. Schoener and his interns (he has no full-time employees) produce about 2,000 cases of wine annually from the Guman, McDowell and about 10 other vineyards (none of which he owns) at the Scholium Project’s modest winery space (also leased) in the Suisun Valley, some 17 miles from his (rented) residence in Napa. Because he makes so little wine, Schoener estimates that he now has a customer list of about 600. Around 400 of these are restaurants and retailers, ranging from Per Se on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to a wine bar in Oklahoma City. The remainder are mail-order customers, who until recently could purchase his wines on the Scholium Project’s Web site at prices ranging from $24 (for a white blend) to $100 (for a cabernet). To help promote his product, the former professor has been traveling cross-country and delivering what he calls a metaphysical lecture series, in which he pours wine for small audiences while speaking on topics like “Wine and Loss” and “Wine and Morality.” Slots for these lecture-tastings rapidly sell out, as do his wines.

I learned about Schoener’s wines a year ago after seeing them listed on a menu in a pricey Palo Alto restaurant and wondering who would be so pretentious as to term their winery a “project.” Later that evening, I looked at his Web site and realized I had it backward: “Scholium” derives from the Greek word “scholion,” as in “school” — which according to the Web site “signifies a modest project, not a pre-eminent one, undertaken for the sake of learning.” I decided to order a mixed case. What arrived at my doorstep were a dozen alien creations. Some of them, including a murky golden sauvignon blanc called the Prince in His Caves and a meaty syrah named Androkteinos (Greek for “slayer of men”), were absolutely delicious. Others — an oxidized gewürztraminer, a limpid cinsault — tasted like experiments gone awry. Still, as the Scholium Web site would explain, each wine had its own funky personality and back story — a long-abandoned vineyard, an impulsive gamble on a little-known grape, a harvest season of biblical freakishness — that, taken together, characterized the ongoing work of Abe Schoener’s life. And so I joined the cult.