It’s Friday evening, and I already finished a bottle of their La severita di Bruto with friends, insisting that I wasn’t going to be blogging anything this evening – but one smell of this and yeah, well, I lied.This wine smells of tinned litchi fruit that someone is eating in the middle of a peat smoke fire on the beach. Seriously. I don’t know what to make of it; I’ve never had a wine that smelled like this before. It smells like someone is dredging rose petals through a smoky sludge of decaying leaves and tar. It smells like someone banging chalky erasers against each other in the middle of dusty warehouse of discarded library books. It smells like ground basalt stirred into a solution of sea water and orange flower water. In short, it smells kind of awesome.In the mouth, it gets even stranger. It tastes slightly oxidized, yet fresh, with all kinds of outré notes ranging from off-brand cling peaches to orange blossom honey from Provence to smoked horse meat to, I don’t know, bruised rambutan mixed with gravel. In short, it’s all over the map, delightfully so. The finish lasts for ages, it’s wonderfully rich and fat in the mouth, and opens up a weirdly panoramic vista of fresh air and sunlight.Yeah, it’s weird, but this wine is both sui generis and a real keeper. By the way, the La severita di Bruto?  Also very good if not as much of a look-at-me-I’m-crazy showstopper of a wine. That being said, it’s probably the best sauvignon blanc I’ve had from California; yes, the finish is a bit hot, but it works well with the peppery aspects of the wine, and the aromatics are in a class of their own – kind of like high end Marlborough sauvignon minus the pneumatic passionfruit aromas + some of the mineral aspects of Sancerre in one big, goofy package. Recommended.The Scholium Project
Price: $30 (500 mL)
Closure: Cork