The UnCorker

Weird Wine of the Week: 2008 RiqueWihr Gewurztraminer, “The Scholium Project”

June 13, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | 2 Comments

In the spirit of intellectual nourishment, sometimes we punish ourselves. We override those shallow, superficial messages from the senses – you know, those ones that say hey, brain! this tastes like ass . We have to do this, otherwise the palate we have as a 16 year old would determine the course of our gastronomical lives and Bartles & Jaymes would be routinely poured for wedding toasts. Other times, artists are the ones punishing us. Modern architects in the 1930’s designed hard, glaring rooms and insisted their clients not soften them with curtains and throw pillows. Buñuel made film snobs sit through razor blades slicing eyeballs to prove a narrow point about cinematic montage theory. Then there is Abe Schoener – a man of the vine who insists that we think about what we drink. He sets out with the explicit goal – stated on his website – of making one taste decay, decomposition, and transformation. This is followed by a secondary goal – that the wines should make one happy to be drinking them. How much of a wine aesthete you are will likely determine how contradictory you find those two objectives.

The Scholium Project is Abe’s brainchild, and now something of a consortium of like-minded wine weirdos. They take this non-interventionist winemaking thing just about as far as it can go. The wine is bottled when it is ready, even if the fermentation stalls and doesn’t manage to restart itself for months on end. When it comes to yeasts – they are “grateful spectators” – introducing and inoculating nothing. It’s ambient microbes only, that is to say the little critters that ride in on the wind are enough for these purists. Each of the wines they bottle are named in a literary fashion (you know… with greek words and stuff like that) and truly have a story behind them – which is the most fun aspect of the Scholium Project. The website makes great reading – as the provenance and story of each type of wine is there to read about. We love the transparency of this approach – and wish all wines were marketed this way. Of course, the flip side of this is inconsistency. It’s hard to predict what you’ll get when you buy a Scholium Project wine, but we’d guess that Abe would claim the inconsistency is nature’s doing. The RiqueWihr is the winery’s first dabbling with gewurz – which they handled in characteristically oddball fashion by pressing it and macerating it on top of the verdeho skins used for another wine. Use of SO2 is allowed here – and helps control the oxidization and stop the malolactic fermentation. The overall effort comes in at a blistering 15.8% alcohol.

The wine is plush, odd, and challenging. Appearance is greenish hay in color, medium bodied. Initially it smells like an Aveda Store – eucalyptus, pine, petrol/rubber, minerals, grass. Very medicinal. As it warms, saturated tropical fruit aromas emerge… pineapple, banana mainly – but not really as much as we’d expect from a gewurtz. The flavor is soft and ripe through the mid-palate but with a finish that’s dry and spicy, and hot butane from the alcohol. There’s a little oxidation going on, perhaps. Such an odd tincture of tropical fruit and medicinal herbs – almost asking to be swabbed on the skin with cotton balls. The use of small port bottles reinforces this feeling, more suggestive of the packaging for a depression-era miracle cure-all than a table wine. Underlying all of this is a subtle but present mushroomy, loamy funk. We think Abe has succeeded in making us taste the bacteria, the yeast, the wine… not just the fruit. This is one strange outing, but we’re willing to go along on the ride. Finally, there’s the price – $33 for a short, stubby 500ml bottle – extending the discomfort to the wallet. Wines can be hand-made and loved to death in their production – but the price must ultimately be justified by the flavor. After all, $33 per half liter gets us pretty close to some fine white wine territory – like Montrachet or great Alsatian Pinot Gris. We’re split on whether we like the wine or just the idea of the wine – and this high price forces us to ruminate on that point. But for now, we’ll accept Abe’s genius as a matter of faith and understand that judging an iconoclast like this should happen over the course of a career, not based on an individual effort. So do with Abe’s wines exactly like you would do if Frank Lloyd Wright personally designed you a summer home full of edgy angles, uncomfortable furniture and low ceilings – shut up and pay.