I am just finishing Clark Smith’s new book, Postmodern Winemaking, and I’m starting to cool off. The book wound me up quite a bit, and I have always had an impression that Clark enjoys winding people up. So, I salute the big crank himself, he definitely got a rise out of me. Unfortunately, not every rise was for reasons that I would wish, were I Mr. Smith.
For those not scoring at home, Postmodern Winemaking is Clark’s opus and apologia for an approach to winemaking, in the most New World and forthright sense of the term. The guy definitely lives in a different zip code than I do, drinks (or tastes professionally) different wines than I do, and has a different approach to the world. I found it culturally expanding to see how different his world is from mine, though he makes various nods in the direction of things I like as he goes along, and he clearly has some attraction to the same things that attract me, but I think at the end of the day we enjoy different beverages for different reasons and are unlikely to persuade each other.
Part of the issue is that I live up a little holler with my inbred kin, and we get to do what we want, though the periodic sudden popularity of some of my favorites over the years has been pesky. Smith works often with large volume producers who are trying to move trainloads of wine through Safeway or Costco, and those wines pretty much don’t impinge on my awareness at all. Joe Salamone never ever sends me an email about the latest Apothic or Prisoner, nor does David Lillie. So much of Smith’s work involves wines that really don’t touch me unless I am trapped in a small enclosure with them at 37,000 feet. He periodically dismisses various winemaking practices that were used on most of the stuff in my cellar with an airy wave at how they’d never move in the Omaha market, or to the requirements of tank-farm winemaking. But then in the next sentence he will get all nostalgic for the old cabin and how it used to be done, soulfully. This frequent inconsistency, or dare I say self-contradiction, is one of the annoying aspects of the work. Smith justifies it to some degree by his title. He is not one of your Cartesian formalists, oh, no, he is a postmodernist, which allows him to take inconsistent positions on a bunch of issues and tell you to stuff it if you disagree with one or another.
Which isn’t to say that some of the book isn’t interesting or valuable. He argues convincingly for the importance of colloidal assemblies of tannins and hydrophobic flavor molecules in red wines. This may be old news to the winemakers out there, but it accounts for quite a bit of the behaviors of interesting, ageworthy red wines to me, and will be part of my context for wine now. Smith frequently asserts things about larger vs. smaller colloids, and surface area to volume relationships to taste that don’t always make much sense to me, but having a separate phase into which greasy things partition definitely makes sense. It also helps account for puzzling issues like bottling shock, travel shock, and so on, although Smith doesn’t give much guidance on the interconversion of the various colloidal actors, how quickly and how reversibly changes might happen. I wish he had gone into this in more detail, though the analytical methods may not exist to allow a definitive story.
He has quite a bit to say about the oxidative transformation of tannins in various stages of winemaking that is of interest, though I have to admit that I haven’t made enough wine to have an informed opinion on this one. I would note that a guy like Nady Foucault still seems to make some pretty good reds with some pretty refined tannins, and if there is a micro-ox machine in his cellar it has to be hidden behind the secret door. I’m sure that Clark is right—if you are going to make industrial wine on a large scale, micro-ox is a valuable tool. And wood chips would be a much more environmentally sound way to use 200 year old oaks than to convert just a tiny fraction of them into new barrels (though presumably you could do some of each, as well).
May I mention one minor aspect that winds me up particularly? Smith’s whimsical approach to the chemistry of wine tannins, which he identifies as the most important insight of his book. His chemical structures and equations are flat-out wrong, as are various details about organic chemistry that only matter if you are an Enlightenment-bound asshole like me, and not a free spirit postmodernist. But Smith, if you illustrate your key argument with a structure labelled, “Florida,” please make sure it isn’t actually a picture of Louisiana. If you are making a big point about quinones, please for my nitpicking self, make your chemical structure a quinone, rather than a generic dienone that will have totally different redox properties and reactivity. This will help people to take you seriously, rather than suspecting you are just decorating the page with structures to appear authoritative. And if you choose to pronounce on the pKa of an unsubstituted phenol; dude it’s 10. One silly log unit does not totally undermine your argument, hey, what’s a factor of 10x between friends? But best not to say it at all if you can’t be bothered to get it right. This generic sloppiness, lack of editing, or what have you undermines the book at many unexpected points. He should also have run a self-similarity test on his text to identify the frequent repetitions of various identical analogies in various different spots through the book. The Béarnaise sauce analogy gets old if you have it for every meal.
Other offhand factual assertions are mistaken, misinformed, or wrong.
In an even more minor issue, Smith’s notions of the intellectual history of science, music, and much else are very, very different from mine. People who reach for quantum mechanics and wave/particle dualism as a means of escaping pesky issues of certainty or consistency in the macroscopic world make me want to reach for a baseball and throw a brushback pitch and ask them if that was a wave or a particle that made them move their head? Do they expect the baseball to diffract if I throw it through a radiator grill? Spare me allusions to quantum mechanics justifying intellectual laziness in a book whose analytical methods for pigments and tannins and so on would be incomprehensible without quantum mechanics to explain them. Anyhow, this stuff pisses me off, but you could get something out of the book despite it. And if you aren’t trained in chemistry, the cartoon of Louisiana probably looks much like Germany anyway, so whatever.
Sadly, his book (which is to some degree a cookbook, with recipes from modern enology, directed at the professional winemaker) does not address even for a moment the largest current questions of enology for me. Say, why did premature oxidation suddenly appear in the early-mid ‘90s to render so many great white vins de garde so frail? What changed? Why haven’t we been able to fix it? Most of the major market white wines that seem to occupy a lot of Smith’s mind are not meant to age, so perhaps it doesn’t loom as large to him, but I wish he had some insight.
Smith also speaks in broad generalities about wines, consumers, markets and so on. It is probably a PoMo thing to do, but I felt that his arguments would have been greatly improved by more grounding in specific examples. He was shocked to find that many “Natural Wine” (the Noodle spare us the definitional issues, he generally leaves it to Alice) devotees have a hankering for native fermentations, despite their known risks. I am shocked that he is shocked. Perhaps a quick chat with Paul Draper, who has been using wild yeasts since the 1960s? Or hundreds of European producers, whose families have been using them for centuries? Really, is it so crazy? Smith needs to get out more. Or drop by my place for a drink. I haven’t done a survey, but I am certain that the majority of the wines in my cellar were not inoculated, though there are definitely tasty ones that were.
This illustrates a broad weakness of Smith’s posture. The guy is a WINEMAKER. Many of my favorite wines are made by people who think of their job as mostly growing the grapes. Smith acknowledges such people, but seems to feel that they are mostly insincere, or that they will be making bad wine in many vintages. He says, “In my view, ferally fermented wines taste more of their microbes than their grapes. The terroiriste faction argues instead that the native yeast is part of the land’s expression...they think the seasonal climate variations in a specific vintage are reflected in the populations that show up in the fermenter. It’s a weird position, because rather than explore the distinctive taste of the place as expressed in the grape, they want (or so they claim) to taste variations within an appellation as the highest expression of terroir. Product inconsistency is what they are demanding. [well, yes] Okay, but show me the money. Much as we may appreciate the passion, talk is cheap. I want to see their personal credit card purchases in vintages where this didn’t work out so well.” Huh. I have often thought that natural yeast fermentation is probably hard to practice without good sustainable viticulture. You can’t just take chemically grown grapes and count on them having a good flora. But he can come see my credit card purchases for the last 15 vintages of Clos Rougeard, or Clos des Briords, or Clos du Bourg, or Clos what have you. I have actually had that identical conversation with Marc Ollivier, who definitely observes variable yeast populations by vintage and feels that it contributes to the “product inconsistency” that is indeed what we are demanding. Taste a vertical of any of those wines (or many others) and get back to me about which vintages should have been inoculated.
But California for many reasons is a place of growers and makers, and the twain don’t meet as often as one would prefer. Smith nods in the direction of viticulture occasionally, but mostly he views grapes as imperfect vehicles for his methods. They come in the door, and you have to do what you need to do to them to whip ‘em into shape. Smith is disarmingly candid about his own practices, and urges more sunlight for the industry in general. For instance, “My practice is to reduce wines immediately to approximately 13.2%, and later to balance them to an appropriate 'sweet spot' by the addition of clean high-proof wine spirits, thus tuning the final blend and increasing stability.” Vintages like 2010 in California that gave some of my favorite wine in decades are the starting point for a learned discourse about adjusting total acid, pH, and the best modern technical means for doing so. Not at all for saying, “finally Nature has delivered some great grapes, let’s use them!”
But he offers zero comment on the match of cultivar and rootstock to site, and why you might wish to have one rather than another, and why you might not need the full armamentarium of acid adjustment up and down, alcohol adjustment (mostly down, of course), and so on, if you had just planted the right grapes in the right spot, and maybe not irrigated the shit out of them. He also claims that most modern Burgundy is chaptalized (no doubt), but says the same about Bordeaux, thinks everyone gets an extra degree of abv. I thought they did it by R/O before fermentation these days rather than chaptalizing, am I wrong?
Outside of tank-farm winemaking, Smith has a hankering for soulful wines of good minerality, or so he says. I wish he had adduced a few more examples other than his own wines of exemplary mineral wines, the conversation would have made more sense. (I mention in passing that he has a theory of minerality based on the redox chemistry of metals in the wine that makes zero sense to me.) But he also offers gems like: “...Pascal Ribeareau-Gayon, who when we met in 1991 was director of the Faculty of Oenology at the University of Bordeaux. He expressed delight over a 1990 Merlot he had been involved with that had a pH of 3.95 and a TA of 2.9...To be truly great, he felt, a red Bordeaux must have low titratable acidity. Acidity, he points out, stimulates salivation, and [explanation of why this is bad]...” This is just a fundamental aesthetic difference I have with the guy. I really don’t mind red wine that makes me salivate. I don’t know the pH of most of the reds I drink, but I suspect few of them are in the range he advises: “The desirable target zone for bottling red wines intended for aging is pH 3.70-3.85, depending on tannin concentration, in order to obtain sufficiently low acidity for grace on the palate.” Grace, eh? Is that what all that modern Bordeaux has? I could never quite put my finger on it, I always thought they were insipid, but it turns out it was grace after all.
So it’s an interesting book, not for a general audience, but in both means and ends I think Smith is after different things in wine than I am. I sure am glad that there are crazy people out there who haven’t fallen for this stuff, who make wines I like and drink. Because even the good side of Postmodern Wine doesn’t seem likely to be my cup of tannins.
For those not scoring at home, Postmodern Winemaking is Clark’s opus and apologia for an approach to winemaking, in the most New World and forthright sense of the term. The guy definitely lives in a different zip code than I do, drinks (or tastes professionally) different wines than I do, and has a different approach to the world. I found it culturally expanding to see how different his world is from mine, though he makes various nods in the direction of things I like as he goes along, and he clearly has some attraction to the same things that attract me, but I think at the end of the day we enjoy different beverages for different reasons and are unlikely to persuade each other.
Part of the issue is that I live up a little holler with my inbred kin, and we get to do what we want, though the periodic sudden popularity of some of my favorites over the years has been pesky. Smith works often with large volume producers who are trying to move trainloads of wine through Safeway or Costco, and those wines pretty much don’t impinge on my awareness at all. Joe Salamone never ever sends me an email about the latest Apothic or Prisoner, nor does David Lillie. So much of Smith’s work involves wines that really don’t touch me unless I am trapped in a small enclosure with them at 37,000 feet. He periodically dismisses various winemaking practices that were used on most of the stuff in my cellar with an airy wave at how they’d never move in the Omaha market, or to the requirements of tank-farm winemaking. But then in the next sentence he will get all nostalgic for the old cabin and how it used to be done, soulfully. This frequent inconsistency, or dare I say self-contradiction, is one of the annoying aspects of the work. Smith justifies it to some degree by his title. He is not one of your Cartesian formalists, oh, no, he is a postmodernist, which allows him to take inconsistent positions on a bunch of issues and tell you to stuff it if you disagree with one or another.
Which isn’t to say that some of the book isn’t interesting or valuable. He argues convincingly for the importance of colloidal assemblies of tannins and hydrophobic flavor molecules in red wines. This may be old news to the winemakers out there, but it accounts for quite a bit of the behaviors of interesting, ageworthy red wines to me, and will be part of my context for wine now. Smith frequently asserts things about larger vs. smaller colloids, and surface area to volume relationships to taste that don’t always make much sense to me, but having a separate phase into which greasy things partition definitely makes sense. It also helps account for puzzling issues like bottling shock, travel shock, and so on, although Smith doesn’t give much guidance on the interconversion of the various colloidal actors, how quickly and how reversibly changes might happen. I wish he had gone into this in more detail, though the analytical methods may not exist to allow a definitive story.
He has quite a bit to say about the oxidative transformation of tannins in various stages of winemaking that is of interest, though I have to admit that I haven’t made enough wine to have an informed opinion on this one. I would note that a guy like Nady Foucault still seems to make some pretty good reds with some pretty refined tannins, and if there is a micro-ox machine in his cellar it has to be hidden behind the secret door. I’m sure that Clark is right—if you are going to make industrial wine on a large scale, micro-ox is a valuable tool. And wood chips would be a much more environmentally sound way to use 200 year old oaks than to convert just a tiny fraction of them into new barrels (though presumably you could do some of each, as well).
May I mention one minor aspect that winds me up particularly? Smith’s whimsical approach to the chemistry of wine tannins, which he identifies as the most important insight of his book. His chemical structures and equations are flat-out wrong, as are various details about organic chemistry that only matter if you are an Enlightenment-bound asshole like me, and not a free spirit postmodernist. But Smith, if you illustrate your key argument with a structure labelled, “Florida,” please make sure it isn’t actually a picture of Louisiana. If you are making a big point about quinones, please for my nitpicking self, make your chemical structure a quinone, rather than a generic dienone that will have totally different redox properties and reactivity. This will help people to take you seriously, rather than suspecting you are just decorating the page with structures to appear authoritative. And if you choose to pronounce on the pKa of an unsubstituted phenol; dude it’s 10. One silly log unit does not totally undermine your argument, hey, what’s a factor of 10x between friends? But best not to say it at all if you can’t be bothered to get it right. This generic sloppiness, lack of editing, or what have you undermines the book at many unexpected points. He should also have run a self-similarity test on his text to identify the frequent repetitions of various identical analogies in various different spots through the book. The Béarnaise sauce analogy gets old if you have it for every meal.
Other offhand factual assertions are mistaken, misinformed, or wrong.
In an even more minor issue, Smith’s notions of the intellectual history of science, music, and much else are very, very different from mine. People who reach for quantum mechanics and wave/particle dualism as a means of escaping pesky issues of certainty or consistency in the macroscopic world make me want to reach for a baseball and throw a brushback pitch and ask them if that was a wave or a particle that made them move their head? Do they expect the baseball to diffract if I throw it through a radiator grill? Spare me allusions to quantum mechanics justifying intellectual laziness in a book whose analytical methods for pigments and tannins and so on would be incomprehensible without quantum mechanics to explain them. Anyhow, this stuff pisses me off, but you could get something out of the book despite it. And if you aren’t trained in chemistry, the cartoon of Louisiana probably looks much like Germany anyway, so whatever.
Sadly, his book (which is to some degree a cookbook, with recipes from modern enology, directed at the professional winemaker) does not address even for a moment the largest current questions of enology for me. Say, why did premature oxidation suddenly appear in the early-mid ‘90s to render so many great white vins de garde so frail? What changed? Why haven’t we been able to fix it? Most of the major market white wines that seem to occupy a lot of Smith’s mind are not meant to age, so perhaps it doesn’t loom as large to him, but I wish he had some insight.
Smith also speaks in broad generalities about wines, consumers, markets and so on. It is probably a PoMo thing to do, but I felt that his arguments would have been greatly improved by more grounding in specific examples. He was shocked to find that many “Natural Wine” (the Noodle spare us the definitional issues, he generally leaves it to Alice) devotees have a hankering for native fermentations, despite their known risks. I am shocked that he is shocked. Perhaps a quick chat with Paul Draper, who has been using wild yeasts since the 1960s? Or hundreds of European producers, whose families have been using them for centuries? Really, is it so crazy? Smith needs to get out more. Or drop by my place for a drink. I haven’t done a survey, but I am certain that the majority of the wines in my cellar were not inoculated, though there are definitely tasty ones that were.
This illustrates a broad weakness of Smith’s posture. The guy is a WINEMAKER. Many of my favorite wines are made by people who think of their job as mostly growing the grapes. Smith acknowledges such people, but seems to feel that they are mostly insincere, or that they will be making bad wine in many vintages. He says, “In my view, ferally fermented wines taste more of their microbes than their grapes. The terroiriste faction argues instead that the native yeast is part of the land’s expression...they think the seasonal climate variations in a specific vintage are reflected in the populations that show up in the fermenter. It’s a weird position, because rather than explore the distinctive taste of the place as expressed in the grape, they want (or so they claim) to taste variations within an appellation as the highest expression of terroir. Product inconsistency is what they are demanding. [well, yes] Okay, but show me the money. Much as we may appreciate the passion, talk is cheap. I want to see their personal credit card purchases in vintages where this didn’t work out so well.” Huh. I have often thought that natural yeast fermentation is probably hard to practice without good sustainable viticulture. You can’t just take chemically grown grapes and count on them having a good flora. But he can come see my credit card purchases for the last 15 vintages of Clos Rougeard, or Clos des Briords, or Clos du Bourg, or Clos what have you. I have actually had that identical conversation with Marc Ollivier, who definitely observes variable yeast populations by vintage and feels that it contributes to the “product inconsistency” that is indeed what we are demanding. Taste a vertical of any of those wines (or many others) and get back to me about which vintages should have been inoculated.
But California for many reasons is a place of growers and makers, and the twain don’t meet as often as one would prefer. Smith nods in the direction of viticulture occasionally, but mostly he views grapes as imperfect vehicles for his methods. They come in the door, and you have to do what you need to do to them to whip ‘em into shape. Smith is disarmingly candid about his own practices, and urges more sunlight for the industry in general. For instance, “My practice is to reduce wines immediately to approximately 13.2%, and later to balance them to an appropriate 'sweet spot' by the addition of clean high-proof wine spirits, thus tuning the final blend and increasing stability.” Vintages like 2010 in California that gave some of my favorite wine in decades are the starting point for a learned discourse about adjusting total acid, pH, and the best modern technical means for doing so. Not at all for saying, “finally Nature has delivered some great grapes, let’s use them!”
But he offers zero comment on the match of cultivar and rootstock to site, and why you might wish to have one rather than another, and why you might not need the full armamentarium of acid adjustment up and down, alcohol adjustment (mostly down, of course), and so on, if you had just planted the right grapes in the right spot, and maybe not irrigated the shit out of them. He also claims that most modern Burgundy is chaptalized (no doubt), but says the same about Bordeaux, thinks everyone gets an extra degree of abv. I thought they did it by R/O before fermentation these days rather than chaptalizing, am I wrong?
Outside of tank-farm winemaking, Smith has a hankering for soulful wines of good minerality, or so he says. I wish he had adduced a few more examples other than his own wines of exemplary mineral wines, the conversation would have made more sense. (I mention in passing that he has a theory of minerality based on the redox chemistry of metals in the wine that makes zero sense to me.) But he also offers gems like: “...Pascal Ribeareau-Gayon, who when we met in 1991 was director of the Faculty of Oenology at the University of Bordeaux. He expressed delight over a 1990 Merlot he had been involved with that had a pH of 3.95 and a TA of 2.9...To be truly great, he felt, a red Bordeaux must have low titratable acidity. Acidity, he points out, stimulates salivation, and [explanation of why this is bad]...” This is just a fundamental aesthetic difference I have with the guy. I really don’t mind red wine that makes me salivate. I don’t know the pH of most of the reds I drink, but I suspect few of them are in the range he advises: “The desirable target zone for bottling red wines intended for aging is pH 3.70-3.85, depending on tannin concentration, in order to obtain sufficiently low acidity for grace on the palate.” Grace, eh? Is that what all that modern Bordeaux has? I could never quite put my finger on it, I always thought they were insipid, but it turns out it was grace after all.
So it’s an interesting book, not for a general audience, but in both means and ends I think Smith is after different things in wine than I am. I sure am glad that there are crazy people out there who haven’t fallen for this stuff, who make wines I like and drink. Because even the good side of Postmodern Wine doesn’t seem likely to be my cup of tannins.
