Scholium Wines

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 began slowly by making one last vintage of wine from the Guman Sylphs vineyard, three Mt. Veeder wines in 2023, and will make a total of 6 Scholium wines in 2024. We are offering them for your purchase here and now.

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, Dan Petroski, 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 2026, beginning with fireworks at the end of March.

We are a Friulano Winery

It's a long story… Let's say that it happened by accident, but, according the Nietzsche's Eternal Return of Same, it was also inevitable. 

We made mostly white wine in 2025, all from classical vineyards, except for Lone Wolf. As I prepared for bottling this Spring, our 2025 wines looked like the output of a very classical winery in Friuli, in Northern Italy. Here they are.

The 2025 Olive Oil Harvest

The most important thing to tell you is that the olive harvest was TINY this year. So small that the Tenbrinks could offer us no olives at all. Thank goodness olive fruitfulness moves in 2-year cycles, and we can now look forward to much more fruit next year.

For this year, I have made up for the painful shortfall by two means: we have sourced 30 gallons of last year's Tenbrink olive oil, destined for Olio Nuovo, but lost in the warehouse. It's way better than anything you can buy anywhere else in a tin, but it is not as jaw-droppingly brilliant as the Olio Nuovo. Just so that you know.

We have sourced Olio Nuovo this year from an orchard that we have been working with for a couple of years-- in the Sierra Foothills, not too far from our fantastic Oleta Vineyard. We have two single-cultivar bottlings from them, both milled at Il Fiorello-- the amazing millers of the Tenbrink olio since year 1.

43 liters is all that we could source. 43 two-bottle sets. That is it till next year.