like i posted in the what are you drinking thread...

odd

day 1
enticing citrus and melon nose, but then viscous and very oily on the finish. almost like a petrol finish. i am not a fan of that petrol taste although some seem to like it.

was more enjoyable day 2 with some air and after warmeing in the glass to room temp (and even warmer... ). Still had the same nose, but the strong oily and petrolly finish mellowed with increased temp and the mid palate became more consistant / level with the finish (which continued for a while) letting some fruit and some lighter/higher tastes follow to the end.

Those who defend the wine claim that it is a "dried sherry" flavor... but petrol (actually diesel) is the flavor I picked out of another scholium wine. Consistency is not Abe's strong point.

Dreaded double post.

RandyW you are tasting volatile acidity. I have experienced inconsistency between bottles of the same wine. The first bottle of 2002 Sylphs was one of my favorite wines of 2005. The last two bottles were slightly bizarre. One worse than the other, neither nearly as good as the first. They had the VA/petrol notes and tasted more like a Roussanne/Viognier than a Chardonnay. Dain posted the same experience on eBob (one sublime bottle and one strange bottle).

Quote:

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"The only problem the whole night was the Scholium Sylphs Gumin Chardonnay. This was the second bottle of this that I opened. The other one was at least a 98 point great chardonnay. This one had essence of vinegar at first pour (decanted for 15 minutes) which then morphed into essence of acetone. Smelled like nail polish remover; tasted like it too. I have no idea why because this is a great wine. Bad bottle?"

Volatile acidity issues....small amounts interesting and even good.....large amounts....maybe not so good.
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David Dain Smith
Dain Wines

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I was worried that the wine was starting to crack up. Here are Abe's notes in response:

Quote:

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I was alarmed to hear reports from trusted tasters that two bottles of the 2002 Sylphs had failed to deliver the expected pleasure. The wine is rather extreme at its best, and often seems to walk right up the line of volatile acidity transgression. It was bottled unfiltered since it had spent three years in barrel without sulfur–I figured that this was more than adequate time for the wine to reach a biological stability that would keep it from catastrophe in bottle. But one must always be vigilant, especially when it is hard to explain why a certain bottle seemed much less attractive than a former one.
So I organized a tasting to review the 2002 Sylphs in the context of 2 other Chardonnays of mine and one ringer. One of the questions was whether the unfiltered wine was declining in bottle; the other main question was whether the wine was so extreme even when it was sound that small differences in serving or storage conditions could make the wine unpleasant. In order to get the best sense of this, we tasted all of the wines blind and did not discuss our sensations until we had each assessed all of the wines carefully and in different sequences.
The 3 wines made by me had all been stored for more than a year in my guest bedroom, which until May 1 2006 was utterly without climate controls. The room would routinely go up to 90 odd degrees in late summer. This would test the effect of deleterious storage conditions.
I pulled two bottles of the Sylphs and one each of 2000 Scholium Project Les Tenebres and 2002 Maldonado Los Olivos. The ringer had been stored in the same room since July 2005. I thought that the rotten storage conditions would be far worse than any others that consumers had subjected the wine to . . . .and so I felt comfortable with the notion that I could extrapolate from the condition of this bottle to almost all other bottles in circulation.

I invited 4 friends to join the tasting, and to stay for dinner afterwards. I could not imagine opening these bottles without (eventually) sharing them with friends, over food. One guest was a Burgundy expert with a with a wide professional knowledge of California wines, two were California wine experts, the fourth an inexperienced but enthusiastic taster who would give the civilian's reactions to the wines. My consolidated notes on the state and relative quality of the wines follow:

TASTING: JUNE 3 2006

In general, it was very easy for all of us to pick out the ringer. It was much less floral and extravagant on the nose, and had a high degree of minerality, without much fatness, in the mouth. It was very difficult to tell the other wines apart-- nobody identified them correctly, not even the winemaker.

2002 SYLPHS: brilliant, unctuous, bright gold. Same degree of oxidation as the 2000. Much thicker and denser in appearance. Extravagantly flamboyant nose strongly redolent of new oak in a mature wine. The nose was not caramelly or vanilla, but very elevated and piercing– with the same ability to take over a room as a fresh-baked pie. It had some of the characteristics of apple pie in fact: baked pie dough, butter, cinnamon, nutmeg, roast apples. The wine is not buttery however: there is too much brown spice and acid in the nose. It is more like a butter-based savory sauce. The nose also has a striking fresh-sliced mango character, with some of the sharpness of the fresh fruit. This is no doubt the VA component. It is not dominant, but is still a fundamental part of the nose. None of the wines had a VA component that one would notice as VA, certainly nothing vinegary, not even sherry-like. Some aldehydic notes in the nose, mostly caught up in the apple-pie complex. The nose also had a salty, sea-side mineral component.

In the mouth, the wine was nearly equally flamboyant. It had a very focused but short attack of fruit–but not exactly fresh fruit. Roast pineapple, dried mango, preserved lemon rind. The middle was very strong and long, dominated by dark flavors: brown spices, browned pastry dough, dried porcinis. An acid spine supported the very rich flavors and kept the wine light in the mouth. The acid led into the long, complex finish: all very smooth acid and mineral wound up in each other. Probably the longest finish of all of the wines. This was the second favorite wine of each participant.

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Verdict is still out, but I am a bit worried about this one.