12 Seats

12 Seats: our dedication to hospitality and discssusion at once. A series of sessions led by guests from winemaking, grape growing, geology, music… We have hosted Chiara Pepe, Pascaline Lepeltier, Nate Ready, Raj Parr, Deirdre Heekin, and Walter Sterling-- a college President who joined me in a discussion about Machiavelli. We have 10 sessions the works for the Spring and Summer of 2025. I will alert you by email as we schedule them and flesh them out.

The Mt. Veeder Fantasia

I am so happy to announce this very important step in the Rebirth of Scholium.

Several years ago, my dear friend and colleague, Julia van der Vink, started a campaign of serving blind to us Napa Cabernets from vineyards on Mt. Veeder. Gradually, I came to share her fascination with this really distinct section of Napa.

About 6 years ago, she put together a deal to purchase and plant 20 acres on the top of Mt. Veeder. It is not strong enough to call what she and her partner, Rob Black, are doing up there, breath-taking. You can join their mailing list here.

Their intimate introduction of the mountain to me opened my eyes. I did not want a vineyard of my own, but I wanted fruit-- I wanted to make wine. I was not sure how this fit with my work in the South, but I forged ahead. These wines are the result of that forging-- and they represent one of the foundations of the Rebirth of Scholium: a devotion both new and old to the classical excellence that is possible in Napa.

Rebirth of Scholium

There is so much to tell you. Let me try to be brief: in 2020, during the pandemic, I allowed Scholium to wither so that the Los River Wine Company could thrive. 

We are now strong enough to support the work of both. We will make 6 Scholium wines in 2024 and are offering futures on them now.

The 2024 National Olive Oil Tour

 We had such extraordinary fun last year, filling the bed of a rented pickup truck with a couple of hundred bottles and jugs of olive oil and driving them around the country, that we are going to do it again this year-- beginning nearly a month earlier, around October 20.

The 2024 olive harvest at Tenbrink looks really short-- because of rain during the flowering of the olive trees. We are offering right now only half of the oil that we offered last year. If we harvest more fruit than we expect right now, we will offer more oil at that point.

For now we are offering the following selections on pre-release. You may secure your oil right now, and we will pack and ship it beginning October 9-- two days after the olives are picked and milled.

If you are on the tour, we will deliver the oil to you by hand. We are offering 6 one-gallon jusgs, only for tour delivery or pickup at the winery. I will publish the tour itinerary around October 1, once it becomes more settled.

12 Seats on Tour

The Wines of the 2023 Harvest of the Los Angeles River Wine Company

We are so excited to offer these wines. 2023 was a superb vintage for us: beautiful weather all of the way through the whole season and into harvest, beginning with Spring rains to nourish the vines, and ending with cool days during the ultimate ripening-- great for the fruit and for we the workers!

We began bottling these wines with the lightest and most delicate in early March, and completed the bottling-- with one profound exception-- on June 6. I wanted to offer the wines right away, but we were in the middle of a heatwave-- and it only really broke at the end of August. So I held off.

It is hard to present 12 or 13 wines. Take a moment to look at the individual notes, and then buy one of our packages-- or put together your own selection. Every full case, no matter how you put it together, gets at least a 20% discount and free shipping.

You will notice the new labels. They are a sign of many things at once-- but mostly they point to our own sense of accomplishment with these wines. We are beyond our initial explorations, beyond the terror of the pandemic-- the wines are ready to take a place among the best of their historical and contemporary peers.

We will begin shipping these wines during the week of September 9.

12 Seats at Home

tastings!

As often as possible, we host you. We pour wines. Rarely ours alone. How can we welcome you without the presence of our friends?

swag

We have commissioned a small run of Carrhart hoodies and snapback hats to celebrate our wines and work.

A small library of previous vintage wines

Four Historical Scholium Wines in Large Format Bottles

Olive Oils

We are so honored and excited to offer TWO oils this year. The first is from the Tenbrinks, with whom we have worked for a decade. Their oil is truly incomparable.

We are working this year for first time with the Be Love Farm, a regenerative and organic polyculture farm in Vacaville, not far from the Tenbrinks. We think that the olives are similar in quality to the Tenbrinks', our expectations could not be higher.

Except for 24 2-packs of 750 ml bottles, the Be Love oils will be available only in one gallon and five gallon containers; either picked up at the winery, or on our National Olio Nuovo Tour.

The Tenbrinks planted olives in the field opposite the winery before they built the winery in 2007. They planted 105 trees, from 12 different cultivars. They had in mind the polyculture of their families in Italy, where the terroir of grape growing always also encouraged the cultivation of olives. I have marveled in the past at the oils of Quintarelli, Cornelissen, Paolo Bea, Occhipinti and Clos Mogador in Priorat. This is the dream of a winemaker in a Mediterranean climate: to be able to offer an oil from an orchard of the same quality as his vineyards that he works with.

Demand for the oils has been so overwhelming that we decided in 2022 to pre-sell a certain portion of the expected oil. The 2022 oil sold out in two days-- in spite of the fact that we had a bumper crop in 2022 and harvested many more olives than we ever had before.

Olives are a strongly cyclical crop: when the trees bear strongly in one year, they relax and recoup the next year, and then vice-versa. In spite of the Winter and Spring rains that have benefited the grape crop all over the state, we anticipate a MUCH smaller olive crop this year-- perhaps less than half of last year. Consequently, we are offering much less oil than last year-- only 25 2-packs and 25 4-packs.

On the other hand, we could not be more excited for the potential for exquisite quality this year: the combination of low yields and a long, slow growing season hold the greatest promise.

Méthode Futuriste Sparkling Wines

We have accomplished the daring and difficult Futurist aim of forcing bubbles into still wine. Blowout is all about speed, anticipation, audacity: it is a Sparkling Wine bottled and initially released only months after harvest and fermentation. There was no patience in the making-- or consumption-- of Blowout.

And then-- the labels stopped sticking to the bottles. We could not figure out a solution; in the face of so much more to do, we gave up. And let the unlabeled wine age.

Now, in 2021, we have tasted the wine again and it is delicious. I designed new labels, ones that stuck this time. We now release the wine again.

The Tolenas Collaborative

I am so excited about this collaboration: it marks the real flowering of a relationship begun 15 years ago.

Tolenas is a young, small, winery absolutely flourishing in Suisun Valley, under the direction of Lisa Tenbrink-Howard, daughter of Steve and Linda Tenbrink. Lisa learned to make wine working with me and Steve, in their family winery as I made Scholium and he made small amounts of wine from his own fruit. 

In the beginning, all of the wines flowed from fruit grown by Steve, some from vineyards I had worked with since 2003. Soon Lisa and her husband Cliff purchased land in Suisun and began growing their own fruit.

Both of these wines hail from their own home ranch, planted to Petite Sirah and Zinfandel. The wines were made at Tenbrink under Lisa's direction, using techniques that she had learned from me during the years that I worked with her and her family.

Both wines are serious, deep, dark, and rich. Because of their origin in Suisun, and the farming heritage Lisa inherited from Steve, the wines are reminiscent of the great Babylon wines I made from 2004 to 2017-- and are radically different from the lithe, light, red wines I am making from desert fruit in Los Angeles. It is so wonderful to return to Suisun and resume a collaboration with the Tenbrinks-- now involving a second generation of the the family.

A note on the names: when we tasted the wines in preparation for bottling, they somehow both seemed highly literary to me. They were definitely wines of place, but in naming them, the vineyards were not in the front of my mind. For one of the wines, a mythological creature dominated; for the other, the musical sense of a favorite poem.

The Lost Wines of the Scholium Project

These the wines that we made in Napa in 2018 and 2019 while we were consumed with founding the Los Angeles River Wine Company. I did not give the wines the attention that they deserved in 2018 and 2019, and during the pandemic year of 2020, I alternated between forgetting about them and being afraid of them.

I finally tasted the wines in April of 2021 and they are absolutely brilliant, the best two vintages of wine we have ever made. How strange and unexpected.

Please note that there is a 20% discount on all orders of 12 bottles or more-- mix and match or whole cases.

Large Format Bottles

We have just begun bottling Magnums again after a hiatus of several years. We have 25 bottles from the 2021 harvest newly available.

The 2021 Metaphysical Lecture Tour

fragments of the LIbrary of Babel

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