(SFChronicle) - Renaissance, a winery deep in the Sierra foothills, has remarkable wines — and a history almost too outlandish to believe.

This morning we published a project that I’ve been working on for many months, a #longread about what I believe is without question California’s strangest vineyard: Renaissance. It is not a typical wine story. It features a doomsday cult, an Israeli painter-turned-natural-winemaker, vines that don’t die, even camels in a pen. Oh, and some of the greatest Cabernets that California ever produced.

Renaissance Winery, which ceased operations in 2015, will be familiar to some of you. Its wines, especially from the 1990s, when Gideon Beinstock was winemaker, are legendary and extraordinarily long-lived. They come from Oregon House (Yuba County), a remote town in the Sierra foothills, on a property owned by the Fellowship of Friends — an organization centered around alternative philosophical beliefs that many have called a cult.