It is an amazing time: we have survived two years in the plague, made wine for two years in a parking lot, and bottled 3 vintages of Los Angeles wines. We have just moved into a new winery, and have nearly completed our fourth harvest in the city--
and soon, you will be able to visit us.
We are so honored and excited to offer this oil again this year.
The Tenbrinks planted olives in the field opposite the winery before they built the winery in 2007. They planted 105 trees, from 7 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 in 2021 was so overwhelming that we have decided to pre-sell a certain portion of the expected oil. The crop looks wonderful this year-- it will be the best harvest yet. We were absolutely delighted with the inadvertent tactic of making different picks last year: it revealed all kinds of interesting subtleties in oils from different cultivars, picked days or even weeks apart. My favorite oil was the freshest, from the first pick; but 3 and 4 were also amazing because of their density and exotic aromas.
We are offering some of this year's expected harvest as futures. We will harvest the fruit over 4 to 6 subsequent Mondays, beginning October 10. I am offering right now 100 bottles of the first harvest, and 25 4-packs, with one bottle from each of the first 4 picks. As we harvest fruit from the 2d, 3d, and 4th, and further picks, I will make new offerings, keyed to the amount of fruit that we bring in and the volume of oil that we mill. In order to make sure that you get some of this amazing oil, you may order and reserve your bottles now.
As often as possible, we host you. We pour wines. Rarely ours alone. How can we welcome you without the presence of our friends?
Barrel Tasting at the Winery
Saturday September 24 at 5 PM
A litte party
Saturday May 7 at 5 PM
The Return of the Scythians
Saturday April 2 at 7:00 PM
The Los Angeles wines of the 2021 harvest
The Napa Tasting-- Sunday April 23 3 PM
It is mid-August 2022. We have harvested every vineyard but one-- only Lone Wolf remains. We are in a new winery, one that we created from nothing with our friend Raj, 6 days before harvesting fruit. It is a glorious year and we are making very good wines.
This release presents the first Northern California wines that we have made since the onset of the pandemic.
We made only Los Angeles wines in 2020, and in 2021, still reeling from the catastrophic reset of the pandemic, we made only a tiny amount of Scholium wine, and made all of it in Los Angeles. Among our traditional Scholium wines, made only one: The Sylphs. We added two new wines made from fruit sourced from our friend Raj in Cambria; and we have one very special 2019 red from the Tenbrinks' Petite Sirah, made in Suisun in conjunction with their daughter, Lisa Tenbrink Howard.
Our third vintage. So exciting, and so much new:
This year, we harvested fruit from seven old-vine vineyards in Southern California, all of them planted on their own roots before 1918. We discovered one new vineyard of crucial importance, and gained access to three more grape sources from vineyards we had known about before but had not been able to work with. The result of this is five new wines this year!
The drought was hard on all of our vineyards and yields were down everywhere. We made only a quarter as much Lone Wolf in 2021 compared to 2022, and about half as much Maglite. On the other hand, there are three really good things to report: as much as the pandemic presented difficulties to all of us, there was not the same ever-present sense of uncertainty and dread as there was in 2020. You can feel this in the wines: they are much lighter and more joyous this year. No joke. And there was no weeks-long heatwave. We made wine in beautiful warm weather, not in opppressive 100-degree heat. And lastly, we were joined by many more colleagues this year and the tribe of serious Los Angeles winemakers is growing.
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.
We have just begun bottling Magnums again after a hiatus of several years. We have 25 bottles from the 2021 harvest newly available.
It is so exciting to offer these wines. Our second vintage. A plague vintage. With 115 degree days in the vineyard, on the crushpad, enveloping the fermentations. We worked with such joy and innocence, almost without equipment, but with so much loving collaboration from a community of friends.
When it was not clear that we could complete harvest, I turned to our legion of supporters and asked them to take a chance and purchase and pay for wine, before some of it had even been harvested. They flocked to us and bought enough wine to allow us to complete everything, and now the fruit is all harvested, the wine has all fermented, and the wines are ready to bottle.
We made 12 wines this year. We are releasing one bottle of each wine to these supporters. One hundred bottles for one hundred allies. We have only enough of all twelve wines to offer twelve more 12-bottle packages. First come.
We are now offering the remaining bottles, one by one.
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.
