2023 Jolie-Laide Syrah California 750 ml

Jolie-Laide is the kind of winery that industry insiders talk about in hushed tones. Antonio Galloni has called their wines “nothing short of magnificent”—and their bottles turn up on the most forward-thinking wine lists in the country. Collectors and sommeliers compete for allocations. The California Syrah is the calling-card bottling that put Scott and Jenny Schultz on the map, and the one that keeps people coming back vintage after vintage.

When Scott Schultz was running the wine program at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in Yountville, something drove him crazy. Night after night, he’d watch perfectly intelligent people open a wine list and go straight to Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, or Cabernet. He knew there was a whole other world on those pages. He just needed to find a way to show people.

That frustration became the engine behind Jolie-Laide, the Sebastopol winery Scott founded in 2010 after apprenticeships at Realm, Arnot-Roberts, and then Pax Mahle’s Wind Gap. The name translates loosely from the French as “pretty-ugly,” a term of endearment for things that are unconventionally beautiful.

Today, Scott and his wife Jenny—a UC Davis–trained chemist turned winemaker—run Jolie-Laide out of Sebastopol, where they’ve built a reputation for finding exceptional fruit and then getting out of its way.

For the Syrah, that means fruit sourced from high-elevation, windswept sites along California’s North Coast—rocky hilltop vineyards in the Yorkville Highlands and Mendocino, farmed organically, where cool ocean air and unforgiving soils push the vines hard and keep sugar accumulation in check. Scott picks early and deliberately, to lock in acidity and hold alcohol down.

The grapes arrive whole-cluster, get foot-crushed, and ferment with ambient yeasts in open-top tanks. Each vineyard site is handled separately, aged in neutral French oak barriques, and blended just before bottling. The result is a Syrah that has almost nothing in common with the big, extracted, high-alcohol California versions of a generation ago—and everything in common with the cool, perfumed Syrahs of the Northern Rhône.

Galloni put it plainly: “These remain some of the most unique, compelling wines being made in Sonoma today. I can’t recommend them highly enough.”