Winemakers Must Come Clean: Clark Smith

(Wine-Searcher) - Clark Smith thinks many winemakers aren't being honest with their customers, because they can't.

"Almost everybody uses [modern] technology, but they want to be seen as on the artisanal side," Smith says. "That's why we all 'do the minimum,' whatever the hell that is. It's an illusion, and we've worked very hard to create it. I'm offering an alternative that we just be straight with people."

Smith's new book, "Postmodern Winemaking," is an occasionally dense text studded with moments of poetry. He can go deeply into the molecular changes in wine and the methods that cause them. And his embrace of wines is inclusive; on the phone, he bristles at the idea that wines with less oak flavor could be considered "better."

But what he most wants is harmony, minerality, and a sense that the flavors combine into something more moving than pure chemistry would suggest.

Smith defines "postmodern winemaking" in the book as "the practical art of touching the human soul by rendering its grapes into liquid music."

Smith has been making wine in California for more than 30 years. He was the founding winemaker for R.H. Phillips in the 1980s. He invented a reverse-osmosis method of alcohol reduction, and participated in early trials of micro-oxygenation. As the founder of consulting firm Vinovation, he's a world-traveling wine troubleshooter.

He makes very different styles of wines under the WineSmith label for his own amusement and slight profit. He makes a wine called Faux Chablis by reducing the alcohol of Napa chardonnay with reverse-osmosis (though personally I've never found it to taste at all like Chablis), and a more primitive wine called Roman Syrah with no added sulfites.