I must warn you. I have written a tremendous amount. You can't read this on a phone. And I don't want you to think of it as a task. I have written a full account—but I will preface it with the most concise reduction-—suitable for the modern world. Come back and read the Russian Novel later.

The tour was tremendous. We came to know a new world—several new, distinct cultures of wine drinking. We met a grape grower 40 minutes from Copenhagen. We drank the last vintage of Glos on the edge of a fjord.

We showed wine and sold wine. Norway is now sold out. In three days.

Go to the bottom of this missive. There is a link to the wines that we sold.

I want to start in the middle of the trip—at the event that was its focus and proved to be its summit. You know that five of us made our way from the US to a lovely town on the edge of Norway to join a dear colleague from California who now works there. We went for the sake of history, of understanding, of celebration, and to underline the unbounded nature of our collegiality.

Jake and Allie flew from NYC; Alex and Alex from Napa; Alexis from her Spring residence in Denmark. Courtney awaited us; she had moved from San Francisco about eight months before. She now directs service and the wine program at Lysverket, a restaurant in Bergen that is deeply serious about what is local on the rocky west coast of Norway—but also about working at the highest level of international accomplishment. Alex, Alex, Courtney, Alexis, Jake and I have all worked at the winery, and in the same small and precious Scholium vineyard in Napa. Courtney and I had the crazy idea of celebrating all of the work that we had done in the now disappeared McDowell Glos vineyard by gathering in her new home and inviting friends and colleagues from all of the world to join us. I brought ten vintages of Glos from our library at the winery to NYC; Jake carried the 750s from NYC to Bergen while I kept my hands on two magnums and a 3-liter. Courtney met us all at the airport with champagne; we made our way to town, purchased herring, smoked fish, and live langoustines and prepared dinner in the hillside HQ of our stay in Bergen. It was a wonderful first night.

Scholium Glos is a wine that was made from the remaining vines of a vineyard planted around 1960 by Albert McDowell Sr on his ranch on Glos Lane, on the very fertile banks of the Napa River in Rutherford. He originally intended to plant Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay, on the AXR rootstock recommended at the time by UC Davis. The grafting was somewhat haphazard and some of the vines ended up on St. George instead of AXR, and some Chardonnay got interplanted with the SB. The vines planted on AXR succumbed to phylloxera and Albert ripped them out and replanted to Merlot as they died, but he preserved every vine that did not die off. When I first set foot in the vineyard, in the winter of 2002, there were a few hundred of the original white vines left, each huge, gnarled, and stately—and each surrounded by Merlot.

Around 2006, we also discovered that not all of the white fruit was SB or Chard; some was Friulano, the grape variety known in Napa as "Sauvignon Vert" at the time of its planting. In this way, the wine was from the beginning a field blend; every year but one harvested all at the same time (one year, 2006, we divided the vineyard in half and harvested one half on one full moon and the second half on the subsequent full moon. The place was witchy and it just seemed right) and pressed and fermented together. From the beginning, the intention was to make a wine that was relatively light and transparent for a Scholium white, modeled to a high degree on the Sauvignon of Enzo Pontoni of Miani in Buttrio in Friuli. We pressed gently, fermented in neutral oak and aged the wine for about 11 months before bottling. We would use a small amount of SO2 after primary fermentation to try to prevent malo-lactic, and then filter the wine (if necessary) before bottling.

Albert Sr's children finally began replanting the vineyard in 2010. They began systematically ripping out the old white vines and the younger Merlot, and replanting all to Cabernet. The process was expensive, and took several years. We were so lucky: we got to make four more vintages of the wine until the last few rows were ripped out after harvest 2013. Their decision was only rational; anything else would have been some willing embrace of tragedy. Now there is a beautiful, orderly Cabernet vineyard, conforming to the culture of modern Napa.

On our second day in Bergen, we gathered at Lysverket. We had at least one bottle of every single vintage of Glos. The first Scholium vintage was 2004; the last 2013, after which, the last few remaining vines were ripped out and the replanting of the vineyard to Cabernet was completed. I had brought a magnum of 2011—the year that Courtney had worked in the cellar at Scholium—and a 3-liter and a magnum of the final vintage. Three amazingly devoted Scholium fans flew in for the event from the US and UK; Alexis arrived from Denmark, and Courtney completed the symposium with wine professionals and serious aficionados from Bergen and Oslo. We began with an invocation and then Courtney and her team began pouring, two vintages at a time. The experience was solemn and profound at first, especially because we knew that this wine could never be made again. The first couple of vintages were strong but also somewhat golden, perhaps over-ripe from the beginning, and oxidized. The strength of the old vines came through in the intensity and density of the wines—but to me, the wines were more of historical or spiritual interest than delicious. The first delicious wine was the 2007; and it seemed stern and deathless. All of the remaining wines, from 2008 through the last vintage in 2013 seemed young, fresh, undiminished in every way. The nobility of the vineyard showed through in every wine; and you might be able to say that their improving freshness was not just an expression of the wines' younger ages, but of the increasing skill of the winemaker. I was, after all, learning how to make these, and all of our other wines, during each of the unfolding vintages.

Courtney, in particular, took detailed notes. And here is my digest of her notes, Jake's and Allie's. I am so grateful to them for their care.

We broke up to refresh our minds and palates and devoured some Norwegian hot dogs, a Bergen street specialty. Thus refreshed, we returned to Lysverket. Courtney had assembled an amazing array of wines for our celebratory dinner. Her intention was to draw contrasts with the Glos and underline similar points of triumph. Her selections were delicious and revelatory. She had excluded one SB from a great producer in the Loire for excess varietal typicity—Glos is not a Sauvignon Blanc, it is Glos. This Sancerre was too much and too simply Sauvignon Blanc.

The next day was as special in a very different way. Lysverket's chef and owner, Christopher Haatuft. picked us up in a panel truck normally used to collect seafood for the restaurant and took us right to the coast of the North Sea to visit one of his purveyors, a quiet man who dives for scallops and sea urchins in freezing, tide-swept waters. We knew that we were in a place that was absolutely singular and that there is much than transcends wine, no matter how special. We are grateful to Chris for opening his restaurant, but most of all for bringing us to his friend. We celebrated that night with the restaurant's best clients, then took our festivities to the tiny and intense Don Pippo, a local wine bar, where Alex and I, drunk, exhausted, exhilarated, poured Napa Chardonnay for the implacable descendants of Vikings.

Bergen and the retrospective were in the middle of our tour; now let me take you back to the beginning.

The tour began for me in London. I flew there to be part of RAW, a festival devoted to the nebulous and slightly vexed class of wines called "natural." In some ways, I felt that I was going as member of the Fifth Column—after all, even though none of our wines are inoculated, some of them are made with what we call in the cellar, "a shitload of SO2". I brought only wines that would be accepted within the clique and they showed wonderfully. Our table was mobbed for both days of the event, and I met some very important contacts for the rest of the tour—they had come to London to experience the tremendous variety of wines at the fair.

Even if Glos was at the center of the trip, the historical tasting was not its aim. The aim was to meet Alex Kongsgaard on the coast of the North Sea and for us to show our wines in four cities; to spread the word about what we are doing thousands of miles away in Northern California, but also to learn: to learn what people are thinking and drinking in these fascinating, and influential, cultures.

Alex would pour his family's Napa Chardonnay and Napa Syrah, and sometimes the Judge; I would pour a Chardonnay from a vineyard close to the Judge, a wine I learned how to make from Alex's father, and three other wines that well represent the rather eclectic Scholium catalogue.

I flew from London to Stockholm and met Alex Kongsgaard and his friend and our colleague Alexandra at the hotel. By dinner, Allie, a colleague from NY, had joined us. I was responsible for our itinerary. I had only a few contacts in the city; one through Courtney, and a pair through Michael Sager from London. Each of the contact proved invaluable: Erin, Courtney's friend, hosted us for a fantastic and super-gregarious after-work pouring session at her wine bar, Gaston. It was a wonderful introduction to the city: serious and friendly at once. We learned pretty quickly that the city has a wine culture, and and that it is historically focused on wines of classical character and high quality. On the one hand, people don't mess around with weak wines just because they are inexpensive—they will drink something else. On the other hand, since there is no native winemaking or grape-growing culture, there is complete openness to the many possible sources of good wine—easily including the US. There is an interest in "natural wines," but not at the expense of what you might call conventional quality. If a wine can express both—superb. But no enthusiastic embrace of wines that one might conservatively consider flawed just because they fit within the natural paradigm.

That night, after our evening pouring, we met Michael's friend Fredrik. He and his friend and partner in crime, Johan, run two brilliant restaurants: Café Nizza in one neighborhood, and Babette in another, distant one. Erin's Gaston was pretty much in the middle, in a third. Fredrik and Johan constitute some kind of Mafia of Cool. Their restaurants are absolutely perfect: beautiful, imaginative, disciplined, but with an energy that can challenge any successful joint in New York or London. And they both have their pulse on what the city wants to drink, and, as far as I can tell, also cheerfully help to determine what that pulse is. Let me say this: my favorite meal of the whole trip was a dinner at Babette.

The next day, Johan and Fredrik welcomed us to Café Nizza on the sunniest afternoon since the previous summer. The whole city was out and very festive. They allowed us to take over half of the restaurant, and we poured Kongsgaard and Scholium for their best clients, colleagues, and the crucial importers in the town. I began the day without an importer in Sweden; by the time that you get this missive, that tasting will have allowed me to form a new and important relationship in North Sea.

As much fun, and as great a triumph, as this was, on the next day Alex and I engaged in perhaps the most wonderful event of the tour.

Alex had been my student in his junior and senior years of high school; I helped to home school him in in return for his father teaching me to make wine. I had a Lecture scheduled with Erin at Gaston, it was going to be on Natural Wine. Alex and I agreed to put on the lecture together and changed the topic to something we were both equally interested in, and that fit both of our wines better: Morality in Winemaking. I will leave it for another report to tell you what we talked about. Suffice to say that it was a complete and delightful success, and that we celebrated with Champagne and Chenin and fried herring en plein air, hiking around the heights of Old Stockholm with our new friends and colleagues from Gaston. At this point, we knew that flying to Sweden was a good idea, and even if this were its acme, the Tour would be a success.

That night, basking in the sweet accomplishment of having taught together, we turned up again at Babette—this time for a Sager-style industry takeover. We poured our wines for more servers, wine directors, and the gathered cool kids—who all hung out for hours, eating pizze and anchovies, and drinking the Judge and Delta Soup. It took a wine bar Stockholm to bring them together.

From Stockholm, the four of us flew to Bergen, where Courtney met us. After three perfect days in Bergen, culminating in a flood of Champagne, we flew to Copenhagen; and, propelled by her triumph, Courtney flew to California to celebrate, and captain the celebration, of her sister's wedding.

This city. There is no place like it. I will not engage in travelogue, but I will say this to orient my other remarks: the city is a Venice of the North: warm, deep, beautiful and tied at nearly every step to the water that surrounds and penetrates it. With every upward glance up, about, sideways, with nearly every step, one is struck with how much care has gone into the design of the city and its architecture, street by street, park by park, building by building. The city is not only supremely beautiful and supremely livable: it presents itself as crafted in the most admirable way.

Its wine culture is remarkably consistent and absolutely dominated by a single theme, in every single wine bar and modern restaurant. By "modern," I mean any establishment that swims in the wake of Noma; every restaurant that does not descend from or depend up on the same emulation of French luxury and sophistication that one can find in older establishments anywhere around the world. As soon as you leave Versailles, and enter even a canal-side café in CPH, you are squarely and relentlessly in the realm of natural wine.

Some of its proponents seem not only single-minded but narrow-minded and doctrinaire ("There is only one good producer of wine in Sancerre, only one." And he did not mean Edmond Vatan). Many wine lists are not only strict but seem on purpose to avoid offering any wines that a normal consumer, or worse, a consumer with conservative tastes and some knowledge, might recognize. I had to work very hard to find an Italian wine that I even knew at one famous Italian restaurant. There is a very cheerful, not angry or even polemical, flight from anything classical, or even anything normal and not revolutionary. Babette offered us fun Lambrusco and beautiful Burgundy; the cool kids in CPH are all pouring non-vintage Vin de France with more or less bubbles, that vary triumphantly from bottle to bottle. One can still find good Champagne—this interested me very much. But not much Burgundy or Bordeaux or Chianti, no matter how biodynamic the farming, how natural the winemaking.

This is my overall anthropology of the city's wine culture. It is worth giving you some day by day details to grasp our experience of the city more precisely. We had one ally in the city, not quite central to the wine world, but with good restaurant connections: the food writer Lars Bjerregaard, whom I had met over a bottle of 1998 Kongsgaard Chardonnay in NYC. He was all booked up our first day in the city, so we went exploring without a guide. I had been studying the wine-network of CPH for months through the window of instagram, and, on this basis, I produced an itinerary of the city's wine bars for us, with a city-wide walking tour culminating in dinner at one of Courtney's favorite restaurants, Bæst. The walking tour was wonderful; we fell in love with the city and pretty quickly got the grasp of the character of 3 or four distinct neighborhoods. We learned about the role of the canals and about the role of low-alcohol Grolleau. We met Thomas, who runs the very warm and lovely wine bar, Gaarden & Gaden. Lars had convinced him, without ever meeting us or tasting our wines, to host us Sunday for one of our very casual pop up tastings.

The next day, we headed out on foot again and reached another wine bar, Ved Stranden, just in time for a late lunch. Alex and I agree we have never been anywhere quite like this. It is so comfortable and unpretentious that it seems somewhere in between a small-town library and the living room of a very cultured relative. On the other hand, it seems utterly cool. Utterly calm, confident, and welcoming—and utterly cool at once. How do you pull this off? The food was simple and superb, the wine very interesting and delightful—and wholly within the paradigm. There is no wine list. We got to hear the following exchange: "No, I am sorry. We don't actually have a wine list. But tell me what you want; I am sure we will find you something."

And the man behind the bar really meant it. He might have been devoted to no-sulfur wines, but he was even more immediately and warmly devoted to his guest's happiness. What a city.

We also got to visit a vineyard, where a man working by himself on an old farm is making excellent wines from hybrid grapes, planted to what had been a pasture. This story is so interesting, and, in fact, so important, that it will get its own report in a few weeks.

What an interesting city! So different from its sibling capitals, so different from its cousin on the coast. The city has the stiff formality of Stockholm, but one senses also that it used to be a poor city, or at least, not a grand one. No aspect of the urban design or architecture expresses joy; one senses instead, responsibility and struggle. It reminds me in some ways of some Eastern European cities that I visited years ago. Perhaps it is less the shadow of communism or some general totalitarianism, and more the fact that it just reminds me of Central Europe, even in some ways, of working class Vienna. I spent only two days there and two nights—half the time that I spent in CPH. Alex and I did a very good tasting there—before solemn, quiet professionals. We visited some vibrant restaurants—there is wealth and sophistication.

But the two places that left the greatest impression on me are both modest, simple, kind of dark. Pjoltergeist—very dark, and nearly subterranean. For sure, very distant from the light airiness of any restaurant in CPH. Where we spent our last night of the tour. Absolutely wonderful. And Brutus—just a little more casual, aiming a little less high, but more relaxed and more fun. And brighter. Each of these places evinces a spirit of independence and boldness—but also a kind of serious fun. Brutus was a rebuke to everything cold in the city; Pjoltergeist gave a new take of what darkness could mean. Each had very serious wines; Brutus was more focused on what is new and revolutionary, Pjoltergeist did not disregard Ganevat, but gave much space to Champagne, Riesling, Burgundy. But in neither place was there the possibility of ostentation; Pjoltergeist decorated the room with cardboard boxes—but ones that held the wines of an unpurchasable producer not from Bordeaux, but from the Jura. Because of their surroundings, the two felt like the most daring restaurants of the tour.

I hesitate to mention our successes, but we went not just to learn, but to show, and, in my case, to gain importers in two countries. What was absolutely wonderful and nearly completely unforeseen—people loved the wines. Even in Copenhagen.

California wines are available all over Scandinavia—Scholium is no intrepid explorer in this respect. So it was not mere novelty when one person after another said: "I have never tasted a wine like this." Sometimes they were referring to the Prince, sometimes to Delta Soup, sometimes the Sylphs. The wines showed so well and filled my breast with a humble and happy pride. There is something really good about new lands, about a territory that is unknown, fresh and new, to both sides.

The button above will take you to a selection of the same wines that we showed, that won us such favor and so many new friends, across the Northern Lands. I am so happy to be able to return to our shores and share them with you.

Thank you so much for reading so far. It's been an amazing few weeks. Please stay in touch.