I speak proleptically and full of hope. We are going to bottle this wine in Napa, in late August, but if all goes well, we will be stomping on fruit at about the same time—on the banks of the Los Angeles River. And then you will see very different images, blasted by the Southern California sun.

Here are the wines. You may purchase them here.

100% Chenin Blanc from Tegan Passalaqua's deep sand vineyard in below the Mokelumne in Lodi.

"Spectacular. Brilliant."" I laugh at myself, but I also cannot resist. Actual tasting note from the first time that we tasted the finished wine: "A++."

We stomped on the whole clusters before pressing and allowed them to macerate overnight—we trusted the acidity of the fruit and wanted to build more of its matter into the wine. The result: Stunning acidity; remarkable length and complexity. A beacon for white wine from Lodi.

100% whole-cluster pressed Cinsault from the ancient Bechotld vineyard, farmed by the Phillips family in the middle of Lodi

A strong-bodied but beautiful blanc de noir made from ancient Cinsault in the middle of Lodi.We have aged this for nearly a year on its lees, emphasizing even further the natural strength and depth of the wine. It is no mere poolside rosé, but a long-lived and complex wine.

We made a tiny blend of white wine just for the hand-bottling—and it was so successful, that we racked the cellar for the possibility of somehow replicating the 2016 Géante. Blending is not what we do, so this has been a rather unusual and exciting challenge for us.

I have been absolutely fascinated by the wines that my friend Nate is making at the Hiyu Wine Farm in the Hood River, in Oregon. He makes a solera red that is perhaps my favorite—and I am so impressed by it that I am determined to experiment with solera-aged non-vintage wines in the future at Scholium. This wine was not aged in a solera, but it is a beginning:

Since the Summer of 2016, we have been hanging on to a 2015 white blend that we have wanted to develop and develop—hoping that it would become more complex and subtle with time. It is the result chiefly of several skin-fermentations, including the Prince. We also have excellent 2016 white wine, chiefly from Michael Mara, that is kind of loud and brash. We have brought the two together, with some other bits and pieces, and for the second time in a year, we have made a very interesting and complex wine whose multiplicity transcends its sources. The name comes from a poem of Baudelaire's that I studied for a conference last Fall—and by a wine that I made and named with my colleagues at the Red Hook Winery in Brooklyn. A big wine, reminiscent of Kongsgaard Chardonnay. We want it to be powerful and seductive.

100% Sauvignon Blanc from Farina on Sonoma Mountain.

A beautiful vintage at Farina—perfect, constant ripening, without a single heat spike. We brought the fruit in early but fully ripe, deeply fragrant and high in acid.

The wine has the capacity to be immediately stunning and long-lived in every single vintage. This vintage seems particularly intense and piercing, with great potential for aging.

We have continued our experiment of 2016 and have brought a degree of skin-maceration to the making of this wine. We now foot-tread the fruit on harvest day and let it macerate in the cool for 24 hours before fermentation starts, and then press it quickly and gently. No sensible tannin passed into the juice; in fact, even we cannot trace the effect of the skins. The wine is deep and long, with a kind of smoky minerality. An impressive delight.

100% whole-cluster pressed Chardonnay from the wild, old-vine Guman vineyard in Napa.

Aged for two years in small barrels, without racking, topping, or SO2. Elegant, powerful and with a character reminiscent of the Jura. 2016 was the first vintage of ease in several years—for the four years prior, the drought put lots of pressure on the vineyard, diminished yields, and sped up ripening. The abundant late Spring rains of 2016 allowed the vines to stay strong all the way through harvest, with foliage to protect the fruit from sun, and a sense of reserve to allow the fruit to ripen slowly. And the healthy vineyard supported more fruit than it had in years—we made 80 cases of wine! A tremendous bounty, and very best Sylphs in years.

100% whole-cluster, skin-fermented Sauvignon Blanc from Farina on Sonoma Mountain.

The growing season leading to harvest was perfect—some late Spring rains to guarantee bounty, but not so late that they interfered with flowering or fertilization; constant warmth during maturation but with no heat spikes at all; we harvested early, without haste or pressure. And the fruit was explosively strong in flavor; almost nutty, but with very good acidity. We fermented the Prince this year in three separate lots; each with its own very individual character. One lot went weird right from the beginning and developed a Jackson Pollock-like coat of molds on the surface; one seemed like its fermentation was going to stall; the third was perfect from the beginning, fragrant, rich, and timely in its fermenting.

We experimented further this year with our floating cap fermentations—white and red wines made with the skins and stems, but allowing all of this material to be carried to the top of the fermentation by yeast, and never punched down back into the wine. The method produces wines that are more subtle and complex than what we achieved in the past, and no less dense or intense. We had to abandon this protocol with two of these fermentations: when we saw the weird molds, I scraped them off the top and then asked my brave friend Eliane to hop into the fermenter and use her legs to completely stir the mass of fruit. The was that it was a one-time blossoming and that whatever was leftover would not survive in the depth of the fermenter, and that fresh fruit from the bottom would not blossom in the same way. For days we held our breath, and then one morning—a perfect and beautiful wine. With no traces of its initial strangeness.

Eliane also stirred up the slow fermentation; I think that she climbed in two or three days in a row. And just like its sister, within days, perfect fermentation was restored; the wine finished, dry, complex, subtle. Everything that we could have wanted.

Superb! The acme of this wine. Very much like the 2016 Prince, we feel that we have never experienced a similar conjunction of absolute grace and power in this wine. Like the Prince, it is lighter in color than usual. But it is also lighter in body—the wine is weightless and has the light agility of ballet dancer. Yet it is utterly complex and long. It is a perfect example of how lightness in a red wine is not necessarily at the expense of power or depth—and, even more important to us—how power need not interfere with transparency and grace. !00% Cinsault from vines planted on their own roots 140 years ago; 100% whole-cluster; fermented in puncheon with the Courier protocol of undisturbed floating cap, for nearly 4 weeks. Then aged without interference or intervention for 12 months in neutral oak. In spite of its lightness, the wine will age well and long. Think not Lodi, but Volnay.

A graceful but intense red Zinfandel from Tegan Passalacqua's old-vine vineyard on the sandy edges of the Mokelumne in Lodi. A very special vineyard, the source of two of our favorite wines. This year, the red Zin was our most beautiful wine of the vintage. There is something perfect about it—intensity and grace, lightness and power—and beautiful but restrained fruit. I feel my ability to praise the wine failing before its charms.

The growing season was perfect, with late Spring rains, moderate warmth through the ripening season, and no heat spikes. The fruit was health and strong and fermented more quickly and cleanly than it usually does. We pursued the path of light extraction that we had begun in 2016—the whole clusters were foot-treaded on harvest day, breaking up about a third of the berries, but left undisturbed from then on. No punchdowns, no pumpovers, just a strong, dry cap of skins and stems floating above the wine. Somehow the depth of the fruit and stems passes effortlessly into the wine: it is dark and tannic; one can only sense the delicacy of the fermentation in the grace of of the wine.

This is truly one of the most perfectly composed and beautiful wines we have ever made. A co-fermentation of Merlot and Sangiovese from a hillside vineyard in Martinez. The fruit was ripe but not super-ripe; and in spite of the drought, the berries were small, but not as tiny and ridiculously tiny as they often have been. We have made a wine of finesse and balance—we are reminded of very good, classical red Bordeaux.

Our greatest triumph with this wine! We decided in 2015 to make much less of it and to focus more on the wine. With this vintage, for the first time, we eliminated any Cabernet from the blend and concentrated on the excellence of pure Tenbrink Petite Sirah. We fermented without destemming in small wooden fermenters, and after fermentation, blended in only a tiny bit of Bechtold Cinsault for lightness and grace. Power, but no bluster or noise.

A stunning wine made from very slightly dried Petite Sirah grapes harvested from the Tenbrinks' superb vineyard. We harvest fruit on the high side of ripeness, just as vines are beginning to shut down and berries to dehydrate. The fruit is stunningly intense in flavor and maintains very high acidity even as its flavors become more rich and complex.

We do not destem and ferment the fruit in two small wooden fermenters. The whole period of fermentation and maceration is about 40 days; beginning with this vintage in 2015, we allow both fermentation and maceration to proceed without punchdown or pumpover. We produce an inky black wine of great power and intensity—but also grace and subtle architecture. We think that allowing the cap of skins and stems to float undisturbed is the source of this new subtlety.

Surely our best vintage of this wine since 2004.