Clark Smith doesn’t exactly sit in his nothing-fancy office on a cul-de-sac in an industrial area of Sebastopol, Calif. In the space of a few moments, he turns to the laptop, to prove a point; he’s up opening bottles of his wine, to prove a point; he reaches for a couple of posters, to prove a point; and he leads an inquisitor into a faux wood-paneled hallway where, just to prove a point, he gestures to framed articles by myriad writers who have taken shots at him for making “Frankenwine.”

Dressed in a black print Hawaiian-style shirt at a dingy behemoth of a warehouse that houses Vinovation – his company, which some say is changing the way wine is being made – Smith is clearly in his element. He goes on and on, and on some more, comparing wine to music, in learned, philosophical soliloquies. It’s also clear that he is very smart, very astute, perhaps even cunning. Above all, he’s good-natured, ebullient, and extremely likeable.

But not all feel positive about the 56-year-old Smith, who uses fiendish-looking technologies that reduce alcohol in wine and adds oxygen while eschewing old-fashioned oak barrels. Some call him and his colleagues “bullying sycophants” and accuse him of “browbeating real lovers of wine.” One wine enthusiast on Eric Asimov’s New York Times wine blog (The Pour, March 6, 2007) recently wrote of Smith, “He is indeed making a product which resembles great wine in his laboratory the way Dr. Frankenstein created a resemblance of life in his.”

Nonetheless, Clark Smith, one of the great progenitors of de-alcoholization and micro-oxygenation (MOX), faces down the detractors without hesitation, seemingly with glee.

Having the Last Word, a New Jersey Tradition

In a recent interview in his Sonoma lair, APPELLATION AMERICA put it to him straight-away: I think you enjoy being in the center of this conflagration.

“It’s an interesting challenge. Am I a drama queen? I guess I probably am,” he responds unequivocally. “I’m from Jersey and we don’t take this kind of shit lying down. I’ve been thinking about these issues for 35 years and I’ve taken it on as a challenge to try to alter the conversation in such a way that winemakers can get up in the morning knowing they can tell the truth about what they do.

You include yourself as one who is being vilified?

“Well, yeah but I asked for it. I asked for it,” he says with a chuckle.

Why?

“I guess I have a Jesus complex … I’m very interested in my life making a difference.

So, you don’t mind being called a blowhard and a technocrat?

“I do. I think it’s unfair but that’s what I signed up for,” he continues. “I’m visible, so that’s what I’m going to get. And I am a kind of blowhard … I try and boil it down, but they’re complex issues.”

He begins explaining those issues, by putting it into historical perspective: “Winemaking is a place – not science itself. It’s a lot of the stuff that got laid down in the time of Galileo and Newton. … (It) was an early indicator of certain bankruptcies that come up around linear thinking.”

As an attempt to set the record straight – according to Clark Smith – he’s writing a book, “The Myth of Science: The Failure of Scientific Enology in the Vineyards of Southern California.”

“… (With) the 1970 vintage, the French figured out that ‘something went wrong here’ and they’d better press sweeter and gentler and be very careful to avoid getting tannin into the wine in the first place,” he begins. “(As a result) they began making wines that were much more shallow.

“But we still had this problem with reductive strength … Then the flying winemakers came from Australia in ’86 and said, ‘Hell, we can solve this whole thing – just let ‘em (grapes) hang longer. The tannins will be resolved and you can drink ‘em right away.’ The Italians picked it up in the ‘90s, and then we picked it up.

Is Manipulating Wine Not Part of the Process?

“I’m partly to blame, offering the ability to adjust the alcohol,” he acknowledges. He’s pushed to explain further: Some people think you’re more than partly to blame. There are people who think that you’re manipulating wine, that you’re changing wine. That what you’re doing is not natural. You use another word, “conventional.”

He’s quick to respond: “You think people want wine to be conventional? People think that an off-dry German Spätlese is a traditional German wine. That wine didn’t exist before WW II. It’s not traditional. It’s conventional. It’s a good word for the latter half of the 20th century where we broke with every tradition there is in the wine industry, took everybody that had any skill out in the woods and shot them in the head.”

Metaphorically speaking, some people may want to do the same with you.

“Look at what’s happening to me. I’m getting nasty e-mails now,” he says. “Most people are quite ignorant about all the details and why shouldn’t they be? Who on earth would want to know all this shit? It’s not an insult. It’s a very obscure area. It’s very complex.

“I don’t have to call it micro-oxygenation. I don’t think we should be calling it ‘reverse osmosis.’ What we’re really talking about is the same filters that we use for sterile (sterile filtration at bottling), except they’re much tighter, so it’s just a flavor-proof membrane. That would be a more reasonable way to talk about it. But the press refuses to do so because R.O. sounds weirder. So, they’re amping up the weirdness.”

When he’s reminded that he continues to use the acronym “R.O.” on his website, he responds: “I gave up. I gave up,” a confession that he gave in to a writer, after days of discussion, who he accuses of “picking up incendiary quotes to support her hypothesis. But it’s not her job to report the facts because she’s not a journalist. She’s a paparazzi.”

You say you’re sticking your neck out by talking about these issues, but you don’t have much to lose. Look at all the attention you’re garnering.

“Yeah, I guess so, but it’s not really resulting in much in the way of wine sales. But that’s OK,” he says, while laughing.

If De-alc and Mox are So Bad, Why Are Wineries Lining Up to Do It?

Are his de-alc and MOX customers staying away?

“Oh no!” he’s quick to respond. “The people we would like to understand all this are their bosses – owners, CFOs, CEOs, marketers – and I think we’re getting through to them.”

Why shouldn’t we be afraid of technology?

“I didn’t say we shouldn’t be afraid of it,” he snaps. “Convenience technology is much of the enemy. Of my two main enemies I think we should all be beatin’ the shit out of convenience technology.”

He cites a procedure such as pumping over, which electronically circulates fermenting red wine from the bottom to the top of the tank to break up the skin cap, instead of punching down (manually breaking up the cap).

“There’s not a winemaker on earth that’ll tell you that’s (pumping over) a good idea, but we do it so we can have bigger tanks and less labor. That’s an example of how electricity completely screwed up the wine industry.

“The other one (enemy) is the Proctor & Gamble-educated wine marketers that have had their taste buds surgically removed and are trying to reverse-engineer consumers’ preferences and tell winemakers that they have to make wines that we all hate .”

But apparently, not all of us hate those wines. These are wines which sell like crazy because young Americans in their 30s and 40s who have just come to wine and are being weaned off of Coca Cola and iced tea, seem to love those fruit bombs because they’re sweet and they go down easily. They might be considered sexy but not intellectual wines because once you finish making love to them, the saying goes, there’s nothing left to talk about.

So, he’s asked, who are we to say that’s wrong? “Part of my campaign is against easy answers on the part of winemakers. Instead of saying, ‘Your wine lacks color, why don’t you put Mega Purple (a proprietary-named color additive) in it? But you don’t have to do that. If you have some skill … You see here where it says ‘stabilized color’ (in an effort at full disclosure, he places on the back of his branded wines, WineSmith, all technical data), that’s stage 1 micro-oxygenation.

“That’s what it’s for and that’s a way better idea than Mega Purple. Over here where it says ‘resolved structure’ and over here where it says ‘harmonize’, that’s stage 2 and stage 3. These are way better ideas than fining (by the use of an organic agent to clarify and stabilize a wine) to strip out the tannin and the flavor from the wine.

“If you haven’t had an education in what wine is and how it can be worked with, then you’re basically bottling cocoa powder because you don’t know what the Aztecs taught the Belgians – how to transform cocoa powder into chocolate; how to transform something nasty into something profound.

“It’s like when you open up your window one morning and look out on your front lawn (and) somebody’s dumped 25 tons of bricks,” he says in one of his many digressions. “Most guys will just call up a trucking company and have them load the bricks up and take them off to the dump. Now you’ve got your front lawn back. But if you’re a mason, you put an addition on your house and you say, ‘thank you very much.’

“If you know how to work with the raw material to build a structure, you don’t strip it out of the wine. You use it to make wines that have much more presence and much more depth and much more longevity.”

”California Winemakers Don’t Know How To Taste Grapes!”

Didn’t you once say that California winemakers don’t know how to taste grapes?

“They don’t,” he answers succinctly. “(But) it’s harder than it is in France because often you’re dealing with a lot of sugar and it’s not so easy to tell the difference between fruitiness and sugar.”

What will happen when winemakers begin to take a closer look at their grapes in the vineyard? Are we going to see alcohol levels come down?

“I think so. More winemakers are starting to see the power of the ‘sweet spot,’” he says, referring to a term he uses when the desired alcohol level and therefore, the style, is achieved by the use of de-alcing. “More winemakers are learning how to examine fruit to determine ripeness. … It’s going to take a little while for guys to figure out just what real ripeness is.”

So, if what you’re doing is good for wine, making better wine, why don’t your clients want it known that they’re using de-alcoholization and/or MOX?

“… What disturbs me a little by this point is that I thought we’d have more participation from winemakers. I’ve been talking to some of them about why they’re not talking. It turns out that a lot of these guys really just want the stuff for themselves,” he conjectures.

“There are fewer freedom fighters among winemakers than I expected. They like the competitive advantage and they really don’t want to empower their competitors to use these things or understand them. So, they’re just hoping I’ll shut up.”

Will you, he’s asked? The response: Most likely not. The answer apparently, deserves a philosophical explanation: “There’s a purity in what wine is that’s a lot like music. Wine is liquid music,” he says. “Music’s invisible. Wine assumes the shape of the container. Wine is not in any sense physical sculpture, except in its color. Yet, it contains all of this; pure emotion and pure information. … It has a certain impermanence.

“All of us are grappling with what’s the nature of physical reality and on the other and, what is it to be a human being? Here you have some science issues and here you have some art issues. The point of art is: Do I belong; and touching soul to soul. What moves me and why and how am I the same and different as other people?”

A minute or two after the reporter leaves Smith behind, to do whatever it is that he does under the rocket-ship shaped machines he uses to ply his manipulations, the mad scientist comes out into the parking lot, no doubt to explain a point.

“It’s a very exciting time in the wine business,” he offers, not so much as an afterthought but as a lingering provocation. “It’s like being a physics student in the ‘20s – 'Is it a wave? No, it’s a particle!' There’s so much uncertainty. “But in the end, it’s all about people, not grapes. We need tolerance.”

End of Part II