Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
inventions of others and devising applications of worth. This is distinguished from simple stealing of ideas only by way of acknowledgment.
I omit many persons to whom I am extremely grateful, and to them I will deliver thanks personally. I seek here to serve the reader by mentioning the names and works of my intellectual benefactors who contributed in important ways to the observations this book contains. Of the hundred people acknowledged throughout its pages who contributed to my understanding of wine, I have chosen my greatest teachers for elaboration here.
No greater professional good fortune could have befallen me than the tutelage of Patrick Ducournau of Oenodev/Vivelys, who (I dare anyone to contest) is the twentieth century’s most important enological innovator. His view of élevage would never have dented my consciousness, however, were it not for his lieutenant, Thierry Lemaire, the most remarkable postmodern winemaking ambassador to the English-speaking world that can be imagined, and his equally brilliant colleague, Jimmy Betheau.
Years before Oenodev, I benefited beyond measure from the wisdom and faith of Bruce Rector and Pascal Ribereau-Gayon, the insights of the late Don Blackburn, and the patronage of Joe Benziger, my last and best boss. At Benziger, I was introduced simultaneously to reverse osmosis, wine structure, and the international enological community—the hand of destiny obvious only in retrospect.
Since my entry into the postmodern winemaking world, my perspective has been enriched by research collaborations and generous sharing from enologists throughout the world far too numerous to list. Principal among them were the members of the OIV Groupe d’Experts sur la Technologie du Vin, in particular, Art Caputi, Jay Behmke, Michel Moutounet, Véronique Cheynier, Alain Bertrand, Terry Lee, Mario Bertuccioli, Monika Christmann, and Santiago Minguez. I have also been schooled extensively through my relationship with the Australian Wine Research Institute by Peter Godden, Paul Henschke, Richard Gawel, and Leigh Francis, among many others. Among the current faculty at UC Davis doing considerable postmodern groundbreaking are Linda Bisson, David Mills, Andy Waterhouse, Mark Matthews, David Block, Anita Oberholster, and Hildegard Heymann.
Of my colleagues at Vinovation and its licensees, I would have been fortunate indeed to have worked with only a single one of these splendid partners: Rick Jones, Kay Bogart, Domingo Rodriguez, David Wollan, Gary Baldwin, Michael Paetzold, and Gianni Trioli, all of whom advanced my understanding of wine technology immensely. From among the thousands of winemakers who have had faith in us, highly useful insights were returned by David Noyes, Richard Carey, Bo Barrett, Randall Grahm, Michael Havens, Jon Emmerich, Barry Gnekow, Bob Broman, Peter Mathis, Peter Allan, Doug Nalle, Glenn Andrade, Paul Dolan, Paul Frey, Gideon Beinstock, Randy Dunn, and John Williams. The wine industry owes a great debt to the inspired compliance innovations of BATF’s enology star, Richard Gahagen.
Otherwise unmentioned in the text are many others who deserve my appreciation for their contributions to my understanding of wine’s nature and its interaction with human perception.
For my grounding in the many aspects of modern winemaking, I am ever beholden to my professors at UC Davis: Ann Noble, Michael Mahoney, and Rosemary Pangborn (sensory sciences); Dinsmoor Webb, Cornelius Ough, and Michael Lewis (fermentation science); Martin Miller and Herman Pfaff (yeast); and Mark Kliewer and James Cook (viticulture). I was especially privileged to learn from phenolics guru Vernon Singleton and the brilliant and passionate wine production engineer Roger Boulton. I am most of all grateful to my microbiology major professor Ralph Kunkee and distillation ace Lynn Williams, who gave the department a richly human face.
A decade earlier, I was lucky to receive undergraduate instruction at MIT from giants: Noam Chomsky (linguistics), D.S. Kemp (chemistry), Jerome Letvin (biophilosophy), and Hans-Lukas Teuber (psychology). Before them, I learned writing from R.J. Stegner and chemistry basics from E. Leland Watkins of Indian Springs School, where any parent ought to send their children.
We learn best by teaching, and wine historian Jim Lapsley, who vastly expanded my awareness of pre–World War II enology, also contributed to my winemaking fluency by sponsoring my idea for a condensed class on wine chemistry fundamentals at the UC Davis Extension, where I taught from 1984 to 2008. Ken Fugelsang, Jim Kennedy, Barry Gump, and Susan Rodriguez played key roles both in creating my adjunct teaching position at CSU Fresno and in contributing to collaborative research; and at Florida International University, Mike Hampton, Simone Champagnie, and Chip Cassidy continue to sustain my efforts at screwball postmodern research.
In preparing this text for publication, I must first acknowledge Jim Gordon of Wines and Vines for supporting many of the initial articles as a monthly column in Wines and Vines magazine and Roger Dial, who published most of the rest on AppellationAmerica.com, where Dick Peterson has generously contributed endless hours to the Best-of-Appellation panel. UC Press sponsoring editor Blake Edgar has been an encouraging and instructive ally throughout the book’s rendering, supported by talented production editor Rose Vekony. The illustrations were mostly rendered by Jennifer Shontz, except the multipanel cartoons (figures 1 and 9), which were done by Brenda Cornett. Anne Canright and Sheila Berg supplied over a thousand editorial suggestions, deftly balancing my tone between the scholarly and the insouciant, continually impressing me with their compositional acumen and tolerance of, shall we say, my artistic temperament. Marilyn Flaig’s skillful index can be read alternatively to the table of contents as a guide to the issues I address.
Thanks for their insightful reviews of the text to Jamie Goode, Bruce Zoecklein, Lisa Granik, and, above all, Joel Peterson, who was kind enough to really whack me on the shaky parts.
While any writer benefits from a supportive family, few are as fortunate to receive technical insights in their chosen field as I have been from my now-deceased clinical psychologist wife, Susie Meyer-Smith, and from my talented systems engineer brother and partner, Brian Smith.
Introduction
I perceive today an ever-widening gap between winemakers and consumers. As in any marriage of long standing, we sometimes go for long periods without talking as much as we should, especially when changes are occurring that we can scarcely articulate. The fine folks who pay good money for wine are disconnected from wine production people, so distanced are wineries from their customers. Even at the winery, as winemaking matures as a business, visitors to the homes of the familiar brands are far more likely to encounter marketing and salespeople than actual winemakers.
The intimate relationship that is part of the promise and the appeal of an essentially artisanal industry also suffers from a growing distrust of winemakers, fostered by a mounting awareness of unexplained and suspicious-sounding winemaking technologies. What’s with all this manipulation? In our increasingly competitive world, winemakers, when heard from at all, tend to deliver soft soap that pegs our malarkey meter, and even in one-on-one conversation the boutique winemaker will often be less than frank about treatments the wine has undergone.
All too often, a technological path chosen for making the best wine is not divulged publicly. It is no simple thing today for winemakers to tell the truth. Under pressure from their marketing departments to produce that special something while appearing to do nothing, winemakers commonly chicken out, claiming to “do the minimum,” unaware that this apparent duplicity casts an odor of suspicion on our profession.
With a dizzying availability of wines of every stripe, it’s little wonder the buying public has turned to supposedly unbiased third parties to make their choices for them. Critics have assumed a powerful policing role despite, with rare exceptions, an absence of any serious winemaking training.
In the midst of this chaos, a revolution is taking place within the winemaking community. Precepts of the modern winemaking system we were all taught in school simply don’t support the making of the great wines the market demands, and as a result, some of our most successful winemakers have strayed quite far from conventional dogma.
My intention in this volume is to articulate concisely and systematically the new paradigm of winemaking that dominates the forefront of research and practice. Although this is an insider’s view of today’s wine industry and I speak to my fellow winemakers in our common language, I have chosen a style that is also digestible for the engaged lay reader driven by curiosity,