Inspired wines from a mad professor

As with many small, utilitarian wineries in California, barrels and tanks practically spill out of Tenbrink, home of Scholium Project, here in the Suisun Valley, just east of Napa Valley. Yet to call Scholium Project a winery and its proprietor, Abe Schoener, a winemaker is a little like calling Salvador Dalí a painter. It's true, but it does not begin to capture his visionary character.

No winery in California is more unconventional, experimental or even radical than Scholium. Half the wines it makes in any given year are exquisite. The other half are shocking and sometimes undrinkable.

All of them are fascinating, which is exactly the way Schoener wants it.

From his intuitive winemaking practices to the obscure names he gives each cuvée to his almost heretical approach to winery hygiene, Schoener marches to his own muse. In the winery, for example, he insists on using only cold water, no soap, to clean equipment and the plant itself.

"Maintaining a complex microbiology is the best way to make wine," he says.

He is a fount of such gnomic sayings. Perhaps not surprisingly, Schoener, 47, was a philosophy professor at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, when he caught the winemaking bug. While on sabbatical in 1998 he took an internship at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars and never looked back. By 2000, he was making tiny lots of his own wine, and now, in 2008, Scholium Project is a full-fledged cult wine, although surely the most idiosyncratic cult wine around, with sales driven by curiosity and word of mouth rather than critical approval.

By the dictionary, Scholium, derived from the Greek word scholion for school or scholar, refers to marginal notes or commentaries intended to illustrate a point in the text. On his Web site, Schoener, whose doctorate is in ancient Greek philosophy, describes it as "a modest project, not a pre-eminent one, undertaken for the sake of learning." In other words, winemaking by discovery.

My first encounter with a Scholium wine was, alas, an undrinkable one. It was a 2006 pinot grigio that went by the name Elsa's Vineyard School of the Plains, inspired, Schoener said, by an experience in the Collio, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in northeastern Italy, one of his favorite wine regions.

This pinot grigio was like none I'd ever had. It was huge: 16.6 percent alcohol. The aromas were piercing, almost painfully so, and while the wine was dry, it was excruciatingly powerful and overwhelming.

I said as much in my blog. The next day, I received an e-mail message from Schoener, with whom I had never spoken.

"I am so sympathetic to your reaction to my wine," he wrote. "I don't think that you said anything unfair about it. It is a kind of behemoth." He suggested that a roast chicken and a minimum of four people would make such a big wine more bearable.

Most winemakers tend to rival politicians in their efforts to stay on message and spin catastrophe into triumph, but Schoener freely and cheerfully discusses his failures, which made me receptive to his invitation to try some of his other wines. He makes 10 or so different wines each year, and a total of about 1,500 cases.

So, on a trip to Northern California this summer, I spent a day with Schoener, visiting tiny vineyards in Sonoma and the Suisun Valley, where he buys grapes, and Tenbrink, where today, long after most of the 2007 whites in California are either finishing their aging or are on the market, his 2007 whites are still struggling to complete their fermentation. "I learn by accident, through inattention," he says.

The wines ranged from massive and far-out to almost classically delicate. Another 2006 Collio-inspired pinot grigio, called Rocky Hill Vineyards San Floriano del Collio, was in a style completely different from the first one. It had a lovely cidery color, which came from macerating the wines with their skins, and a captivating tannic texture.

Even more impressive was a 2006 Farina Vineyards the Prince in His Caves, inspired by the eccentric Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, who made astonishing wines at his Fiorano estate outside of Rome before tearing his vines out in the 1990s. Schoener's wine, a sauvignon blanc, is serious, textured and complex, intense but not heavy, and, in contrast to his pinot grigios, only 13.3 percent alcohol.

Many of Schoener's techniques may seem eccentric in California. He prefers natural fermentations, using minimal amounts of sulfur dioxide as a preservative, and while most California producers exalt bountiful fruit flavors in their wine, Schoener does not. In the course of his cellar work, he said, "I do everything to banish fruit flavors."