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"What do we call ourselves?” Dennis Scholl repeats the question with a chuckle when pressed to describe his exact occupation. Venture capitalist? Art-world doyen? Or, in a nod to his latest endeavor, boutique winemaker? Sitting inside his Venetian Island living room, Dennis exchanges amused looks with his wife and business partner, Debra. “We have a lot of interests,” she offers helpfully. Indeed, fixing an all-encompassing label on the Scholls is no easy task. For Miamians who have spent any part of the past three decades scoping out undervalued property, the 51-year-old Scholl has long been a familiar pacemaker. In the ’80s, he built his reputation as a visionary real-estate attorney and investor, helping to transform South Beach’s Art Deco District—an area that few local banks would then touch—from a blighted slum-by-the-sea into the American Riviera. Over the following decade, his name’s presence on the sales contract often seemed to virtually double the value of a given slice of county land, long before the concept of “flipping” became part of South Florida’s daily vernacular. Meanwhile, in contemporary-art circles, the Scholls were becoming internationally known for their photography-heavy collection, the highlights of which have drawn some 10,000 visitors—from jet-setting Art Baselites to local high-school groups—to troop through their home where much of this work is hung. Museums have come calling, as well, adding Dennis to the ranks of trustees at the Guggenheim in New York, the Tate in London, North Miami’s own Museum of Contemporary Art, and currently the Miami Art Museum. Out in Las Vegas, Dennis has become similarly well-recognized—and blacklisted from casinos such as the former Barbary Coast for lucratively counting cards while playing blackjack. “I’m a big math geek,” he laughs, admitting that those same number-crunching skills have also gotten him eighty-sixed from Caesars Palace. “Before they even deal the cards, there’s going to be a little tap on my shoulder.”
Still, amidst all the high art, high finance and even higher card stakes, one thing Dennis was never called was a oenophile. “Eh, I used to drink some wine now and then,” he says with an offhand shrug. All of that changed in 2001 when he met Richard Betts, master sommelier at The Little Nell restaurant in Aspen, where the Scholls have a second home. “He’s a wine rock star,” Dennis gushes, excitedly recalling the new milieu Betts drew him into, one where aficionados of the almighty grape speak reverently of hundred-year-old vines and particularly prized plots of terra firma. Two years—and many drained bottles—later this newfound passion became a new business. “Richard and I were up in the mountains hiking, looking for mushrooms….” He throws up his hands in mock protest: “We don’t say what kind of mushrooms we were looking for. But Richard began to talk about this project he’d been envisioning,” a dream of not just serving world-class wines, but also making his own. By the end of the hike, Betts had an investor and Betts & Scholl wines had plans for their debut varietal. Much like Dennis’ art-collecting aesthetic, Betts’ wine tastes run far from the mainstream. The pair soon found themselves in a Jeep bouncing around the sandy Australian countryside, scouting out a unique blend of grapes to fashion a Grenache—a strong wine often looked down on as plebian by the field’s dominant palates. Likewise, their subsequent decision to produce an Australian Riesling—a dry white wine more commonly associated with Germany than with vineyards down under—also raised eyebrows. “Our biggest problem in the beginning was just getting people to try it,” Dennis says.
In the wake of that praise, all of their previously issued vintages have sold out. There may still be a few bottles of their Hermitage Rouge in the wine cellar of Prime One Twelve, but when they’re gone, that’s it until next year. Yet despite this demand, Dennis has steadfastly refused to raise either the production size (300 to 800 cases of a given vintage) or the price point his wines retail for ($29 to $69 a bottle), keeping them sought-after but still relatively accessible. “Richard’s famous slogan is that wine is a grocery, not a luxury,” he explains. “We want this to be fun for people. We want them to experience the passion we have for melding contemporary art with the wine world.” On that note, Dennis’ novel twist has been to commission his favorite artists to create customized labels for each new Betts & Scholl varietal, including a still from filmmaker Isaac Julien and a drawing from multimedia craftsman Jim Lambie. “A wine label is like a record cover,” he says. “You’re trying to get the wine to stand out, to shape its identity. So for our California Syrah, we wanted a California artist.” Raymond Pettibon, famed for his twisted images of suburban Los Angeles iconography that once provocatively graced Black Flag concert fliers, seemed like the perfect choice. “It turns out he’s a big wine fan, so he jumped at the chance to do it,” invoking America’s classic-car culture with a drawing of a 1959 Cadillac’s tail fins, a good match for what Dennis calls the “urgency” of the Syrah as it slides over your tongue. Choosing Liam Gillick as the artist to create the label for Betts & Scholl’s second Grenache was simple. Getting government approval for its name was trickier: “Debra said we ought to call it The Chronic—the stuff just goes on and on,” Dennis says of the wine’s lingering aftertaste, “and as Richard and I were driving around looking at different parcels of land, we were always playing hip-hop in the Jeep.” The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was less enthused, banning The Chronic on the grounds that its name implied, ahem, “medicinal qualities.” Once again, Debra came to the rescue, suggesting they resubmit the same wine as the more oblique The Chronique. Sure enough, within two days they received government approval to go to market. Regulatory comedy aside, “People try to see more business in this than there really is.” Dennis says the overarching drive in his winemaking, as with the rest of his life, is to continue challenging himself: “Can I build a collection of contemporary art that matters? Can I make wine that earns a 93 from Wine Spectator? Can I count cards well enough so that I never have any cost of going to Vegas?” Success, he adds, comes from ignoring the trend of the moment and looking ahead, whether to the next dozen cards in the deck or to the next generation’s emerging artists. “When you go to Buffalo and step inside the Albright-Knox [museum] and look at the little placards next to the pictures, they read, ‘Matisse, 1936, acquired by Mr. Knox, 1937.’ Matisse wasn’t Matisse in 1937. He was just some guy painting.”
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