More Than Beverage | Clark Smith | Barrels and Roots

I sat down with Clark Smith to explore why wine is not just something you drink, but something that connects people to land, culture, history, and the human soul. We went deep into the evolution of American winemaking, from the early days of trial and error to the explosive growth of thousands of wineries, and how that journey shaped what we drink today. 

Clark shared why he believes modern winemaking has become overly focused on cleanliness and control, sometimes stripping away the very complexity and character that make wine meaningful. We also unpacked ancient Roman practices, the surprising history behind Champagne, and how advances in science and technology have both elevated and, at times, misguided the craft. From sulfite-free wines to the idea that wine has more in common with music than beverage, this conversation challenged the way I think about taste, authenticity, and what it really means to create something with soul. 

If the future of wine belongs to those who truly understand it, not just consume it, where do you see yourself—chasing perfection, or chasing something deeper?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yeah, uh, champagne's the worst wine in the world. Uh you gotta hand it to them, though. See, uh what uh Donperignon figured out, people had been, as soon as we had bottles, people had been fermenting in the bottle. That wasn't the invention. What Don Pignon found out is that you could put a shit ton of sugar in that wine and it wouldn't referment because the CO2 suppresses the fermentation. And so uh the the uh court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, went nuts for these really sweet, highly acidic, you know, you know, still regular white wine made from champagne isn't is searingly acidic and has no flavor. It's totally bland and tart. Uh it's horrible. But if you put a whole ton of sugar and some bubbles, well, now what you got is alcoholic seven up. And uh, you know, before atomic energy, we didn't have sterile filters until after World War II. So we we didn't know how to make sweet wine except port and sherry and some of the real highly high sugar wines, but just for table wine, the only way to do it was uh with champagne, with with with uh the CO2 pressure that prevents uh refermentation. So that everything went along great. So we're talking about the sec, the dry champagne, that's what it means, had 60 grams per liter of sugar. That's twice as much sugar as Sutter Homo White Zinfandel.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Welcome everybody back to the Barrels and Rivers Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Trace, and I have a really interesting guest with me today. Uh, would you like to tell people who you are and a little bit about what you do?

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Uh, sure. Uh, my name is Clark Smith, and I'm a winemaker in California. I started life as a MIT dropout in the 60s and wandered out to California, got a job in a liquor store. Back in those days, there were only 250 wineries in the United States, and uh we really didn't know what we were doing. Uh California had only made port and sherry until the mid-60s. So we, you know, we didn't know anything about making table wine, and we made a lot of terrible wine. Um but uh the industry's grown amazingly. Uh now uh we've grown from at that time 250 wineries, now we have about 13,000. Uh and there's a winery in every U.S. state, average of about 100 wineries in every state. And so I've been uh kind of got it on the ground floor of uh developing uh to me science and art come together in a few places. Uh one is music and the other is winemaking, where uh it's really science in service to art. And so I've played around quite a bit with that. I've invented a bunch of processes that have made better wine in the world and and uh keep scratching my head about the uh unique attractiveness of wine uh as a well it isn't really the way I do it, it really isn't even a beverage. It's uh you know, wine isn't a thirst quencher, it's more it's got more in common with the soulfulness of a great musical piece. And the alcohol's just kind of annoying. Uh but uh it it's quite fascinating to me uh just how the human soul can connect with the land through through the making of wine.

SPEAKER_00 4:21

That's a powerful one like you've been involved in wine since the 1970s. Like when you look back at that era, what did the culture of winemaking look like? And and what did people fundamentally misunderstand about wine back then?

SPEAKER_01 4:36

Well, um there weren't very many people drinking wine. A lot of them, uh I th I think uh World War II and uh the time after that, when a lot of the GIs were stationed in Germany and France and Italy, uh they got a taste for wine uh and it came back here. And California at that time really wasn't making uh table wine. Uh believe it or not, the average alcohol of a California wine in in 1960 was 18.5 percent. It was all port and sherry.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

And then uh by 1970, it was only about 5% port and sherry, and the average alcohol was 11%. So it's a huge transformation that happened right about that time. Um so what that meant is that you everybody was a if you were into wine, you were kind of a geek. You know, like it's sort of like the people that are into classical music, you were kind of a throwback, and um and it was a really fun time because yeah, people people got it about what what the appeal of wine is, and uh since then it's deteriorated into you know uh trying trying to chase uh newbies in the market all the time that want to drink maybe they want to drink Cabernet Sauvignon, but they want to drink chocolate flavored, sparkling, sweet Cabernet Sauvignon in a can. You know, and that's that's that's not what wine is about. So uh if we talk about where the future is headed, uh um you know, we had 26 years of unbridled growth, which meant we always had a bunch of newbies uh that didn't really understand what what great wine is about, and now they're exiting, they're going off to do something else. Maybe it might be uh craft beer or kombucha or or hard seltzer or or raw cannabis, and what's gonna be left is the people the geeks that really get it, like they were in the 70s. And I'm really looking forward to that.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

One of the things that I think about is that um I don't know if you can say people got into it for the wrong reasons, but I mean I work in in media and content and YouTube, and it used to be that people would make a YouTube channel because they had something to say, they had a reason to say it. Um and then suddenly people saw, you know, some of these YouTubers making these insane amounts of money. And they wanted to get rich and they wanted to get ahead, and they wanted to just, I want to do that, I want to be able to, you know, be famous and things like that. And what happened is that people got into it and the direction shifted. Um, and what I think is happening, or hopefully will happen, is that it realigns, that we get a um a new direction that kind of comes together, you know. But it it's it's interesting too because one of the things that you said there is the how science and the art kind of play with each other, and a lot of modern winemaking presents itself as scientific and precise, you know? And I I hear so much of that when people come on. But from your perspective, where has science improved wine and where has it actually led people in the wrong direction? Because I mean, and and and one of the things too is like they've been making, we've been making wine for thousands of years, and they didn't have the exact science that we have now. But you know, um, I'm just so curious, like, is it making a real impact and difference, or do you feel like it can be a distraction too?

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Well, uh, there's a lot of different ways to answer that question, but you're right. Uh winemaking goes back at least 8,000 years. And if you took a winemaker from any time during that period all the way up to uh the beginning of the 20th century, and you brought them forward today into a winery today, they wouldn't recognize it. Um, you know, they didn't know anything about electricity or stainless steel or refrigeration or you know, plastics or inert gas, you know, all the things that are in a winery today didn't exist back then. It was it was, you know, foot stomping and uh a lot of manual labor. Um and part of the problem, well, let me see. I mean, I mean the the good part is our wines are much cleaner than they used to be. Um, but maybe they're a little too clean. So, for example, uh, you know, we've made huge strides in understanding the microbiology of wine. And so let's talk about Britannomyces, for example. It's a yeast that gives an earthiness uh to wines, and it's it's to me the uh it's the special sauce that makes Bordeaux profound. It's a little bit like uh you know, we got a Chinese restaurant down the street here that makes a a garlic black bean eggplant dish.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Oh, that sounds delicious.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

It's earthy, it's full of animalia, you know. It's it's just really soulful, and it's like it's like this guy back in the kitchen that doesn't even speak English, and he's showing me places in my soul that I didn't know exactly. You know? Uh well I think most California winemakers got into the business because they had a wine like that. But now they're really now that they're having to feed their families and earn their salaries, they want to make clean wines. And so I'm afraid California wines are a little bit more like Kool-Aid. Um, so there's a lot of sterile filtration and a lot of uh doing everything they can to make fruity wines uh that don't evolve, that don't age and acquire these uh uh soulful characteristics. So I haven't sterile filtered a wine in 25 years. I I I really like the development that a wine can have in bottle. Um and it's it's risky, but um if you if you know what you're doing and you can craft a wine so that it has a structure that integrates all those flavors, uh just like that Chinese guy, if you know what you're doing, it doesn't come off as spoilage, it comes off as you know a song to your soul. So uh in California, we've kind of kind of lost that uh, you know, we're we're uh chicken shit about trying to make great wine. We just want to make good, clean wine, and I don't think we'll ever really appear on the world stage until we get over that.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

That's interesting, you know. You've worked with thousands of winemakers over the years, you know.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

What's one lesson that you that you wish young winemakers today um and what what is one lesson about wine that young winemakers today often have to rediscover the hard way?

SPEAKER_01 13:17

There's a lot of consumers, I'm not sure what what percentage, uh, but they're very vocal. For example, the natural wine movement, uh, that don't trust winemakers. And they don't trust winemakers because we really are lying sacks of shit. Um, and it's you know, when people came out to a winery in the 70s and 80s, they would see the stainless steel and the electricity in the refrigeration and didn't freak them out. It should have freaked them out because wineries were only just beginning to do that sort of stuff. But because you had all those things in your kitchen, you know, you have stainless steel, you have refrigeration, you have electricity. So that didn't seem weird. But when we started getting into more sophisticated techniques like some of the things I invented, like reverse osmosis to take out volatile acidity and reduce alcohol, or microoxygenation, uh the wineries actually didn't really understand how it worked. And it didn't sound like I don't know, there was this myth of manipulation that got started. Uh, and I think it was just because we weren't being up front with people and saying, This is this is what I do, and I'm proud of it, and this is why I do it. Um, think about Wolfgang Puck gets on TV, okay, and he's going, I've got this gooey brie here, but I want to grade it so I can I can put it in my potatoes for my puff technology. Uh but it is gooey, so I can't grade it. So I'm gonna freeze it with liquid nitrogen. You want to watch? You know, and and he's doing all this high-tech stuff and bragging about it. And that's what I think winemakers need to learn to do is don't do anything you don't want to brag about, and then shout it from the rooftops because these guys work so hard, and then they instead they say, Oh, I do the minimum. You know, I'm I'm not really doing anything. The wine makes itself in the vineyard, and it's bullshit. And I think we disrespect ourselves when we do that. And really, there's no money in this business, so your honor is all you have, and we we throw it away cheaply.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

It's interesting because you know, the the idea of taking credit for things and doing things that are really innovative. Like some of these people that I've met have so humble. And like, oh, I don't do that much. I'm just barely, you know, I just sit there and but yet the reality is if you go into any winery, those winemakers are working their butts off, like from morning till evening.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

You know, they are hammering away at and they're sweating bullets in their dreams, thinking about disease pressures and you know, what am I gonna do about this and that? Yeah, they're on it all the time.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Constantly. And you know, something as simple as as the the need to keep the uh the room clean, everything clean, like these guys are hustling. Um and it's amazing to see how hard they work and the cool things uh that they are creating. Um so I I wanted to ask this because you've written about ancient winemaking practices, including the Roman approaches to sulfite-free wines. Like, what did early civilizations understand about wine that modern producers sometimes forget?

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Well, um the the the sulfide-free thing is very interesting. Uh uh, you know, it's impossible to have a sulfide allergy because the human body produces a gram per day. But the Romans, they had um, they called it blue smoke, and they used it. Um they had a primitive form of gunpowder, and they used it in in the uh as an insecticide in orchards and stuff. They had it, but they didn't like the way it made wine taste. Had nothing to do with health. Um but they just uh basically it would turn wine into what we think of now as conventional clean wine, uh but without the soulfulness. And the the best wines that I make are sulfide-free, and they're they're just well here's the way to think about it. Uh let's say you're a centurion in Gaul, in some potent village in Gaul, all right, and you centurion means you got 99 guys working for you, and everybody hates you. So you invite the village elders over, and you give them a steam bath, and you give them some brick oven baked bread, you give them, you know, like focaccia and some of these stinky cheeses, and you dip in the focaccia in the olive oil, no butter, because Attila the Hun can make butter, no beer, because anybody can make beer, but you give them this magical, you know, whether it's a Syrah or you know uh sulfite-free red wine that's just exploding with complexity. Uh, I don't know what whether you like uh unpasteurized cheese is like a pois. Uh it's kind of like that, you know. It's just, I mean, a poise really does smell like dog shit, but it's really good dog shit, you know. You get 40 bucks a pound and happy to pay it. And it's like that. You just the complexity and profundity in these wines, the guys are, you know, they're stumbling home and they they say, well, maybe we won't stab them in their beds tonight. Uh so basically, you know, olive oil and uh, you know, steam baths and and wine were uh sort of there were marks of civilization. You could only do it like it takes 10 years to get olive oil. You plant a tree. Um so these are these are things that took the skill and the time of a stable civilization, and that's why the Romans did it. They were they were they were trying to show the benefits of of civilization. Um and uh so anyway, that's what I I don't eat I don't label my sulfi-free wines as sulfide free, I label them as uh uh Roman reserve, and that's what Roman Reserve.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

That's awesome name, actually. Um, you know, one of the things too that like you it shared some really interesting opinions. One of them was on champagne. It's one of the most famous regions of wine in the world. You've argued that the region itself isn't actually well suited to making brute. Can you unpack that paradox a bit?

SPEAKER_01 21:26

Yeah, uh, champagne's the worst wine in the world. Uh you gotta hand it to them, though. See, uh what uh Don Pignon figured out, people had been, as soon as we had bottles, people have been fermenting in the bottle. That wasn't the invention. But Don Pignon found out is that you could put a shit ton of sugar in that wine and it wouldn't referment because the CO2 suppresses the fermentation. And so, uh The the uh court of Louis the Fourteenth, the Sun King, went nuts for these really sweet, highly acidic, you know, you know, still regular white wine made from champagne isn't is searingly acidic and has no flavor. It's totally bland and tart. Uh it's horrible. But if you put a whole ton of sugar and some bubbles, well, now what you got is alcoholic seven up. And uh you know, before atomic energy, we didn't have sterile filters until after World War II. So we we didn't know how to make sweet wine except port and sherry and some of the real high high sugar wines. But just for table wine, the only way to do it was uh with champagne, with with with uh the CO2 pressure that prevents uh refermentation. So that everything went along great. So we're talking about the sec, the dry champagne, that's what it means, had 60 grams per liter of sugar. That's twice as much sugar as Sutter Homo White Zinfabel. And then you had the demisec with 90 grams and the and the dew with the sweet was 120 grams of sugar, 12% sugar. Really, really sweet wines. And they were terrific. So, no problem. Then the British come along and uh around 1900, and they they said, Well, here now, we'd like a little less sugar. And the and the French said, But it would taste terrible. Said, well, we'll give you a pound sterling if you do. Very well. We'll take your English money, but we will not give it a beautiful French name like demisec or du. We will call it an ugly English name. It sounds really bad in French. Extra dry. Uh, and this is still 30 grams, you know. So then they came back and they said, well, we'd like it drier still. But only an animal would drink such wine. And that's where brute came from. It's an insult to the British palate that uh that that they would drink this horrible wine that only that was only suitable for for animals. Uh and that's that's where the word brute came from. But then you get uh you get the bomb, you know, uh, which was all about Hitler scaring the pants off of every scientist and politician of the free world. Now we have atomic energy, and a German company called Nuclepor learned how to put plastic sheets into the atomic piles and create little holes. So now we could filter out the yeast uh and keep uh keep table wines from exploding. So now all of a sudden we get these sweet Rieslings and White Zinfandel and all kinds of, you know, everybody and his dog can make sweet wine now. So the French lost their edge to do that, and now 75% of the of uh champagne is brute, even though, by their own admission, it's crap. So what I like to do in I think California uh makes way better dry sparkling wine than France can because our grapes have flavor. So I make a uh Santa Cruz Mountain Grenache that's uh brute zero, it doesn't have any of those sage at all, uh, but it's not it's full of flavor and it doesn't have this searing acidity. And uh I think uh California brutes are much better than the French wines, and the uh the other guys that are really getting this right are the English. So there's a there's a lot of scuttlebutt about how England makes better champagne than champagne does.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

Well, you know, wine has always been shaped by larger historical forces, you know, like you mentioned wars and technology and economics. Is there a moment in history that you think quietly changed wine forever, but most people don't realize it?

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Well, I certain certainly the bomb. Uh and and of course uh uh you know you gotta look at electricity. Um you know, Ben Franklin was the he was the top uh electrical scientist of his era. And he went to his deathbed proclaiming that there was no practical use for electricity. But now look at us. Yeah, right. So that changed everything. And uh I mean, one of the things in my book is I say never trust anything with a power cord. Because the problem is it gives you the power to do great ill. When you when you gotta do things by hand, you really give it some thought. Uh one example, there's a chapter uh on on uh the wine press. You know, you know, that uh you've got these vertical slats, and uh it was originally developed by the Romans for for pressing olive oil. So it worked fine for 2,000 years, and then around 1950 it stopped working. And uh rather than to give it five minutes of thought to figure out what happened that changed that that press into a something that just didn't function, uh that you know the problem was that the juice wouldn't couldn't travel, you know, pumice is is kind of sticky and uh it doesn't have juice channels in it. And so uh so what they did is they just threw electricity at the problem. They turned the basket uh horizontal and put chains inside to beat up the pumice, and uh, and then we had bladder presses and tank presses and all kinds of ways of uh of of pressing the juice, when in fact the whole problem was that we had replaced the wooden bottom, which was porous, uh, with steel. And so the juice isn't supposed to come out those slats, it's supposed to come out the bottom. And really, five minutes reflection could have saved that, and finally, now we've gone back. Like if you go to Opus One, they've got the old presses, but they have juice channels in the floor. Um and that that's uh I don't know. Just anytime you can throw electricity at a problem, rather than thinking about how it actually works, you're bound to cause some trouble.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 29:39

Well, and it leads to my next question because your upcoming book, The Myth of Science, challenges some deeply entrenched assumptions in winemaking. And what motivated you to start questioning those foundations?

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Well, I got annoyed, I guess. Um, you know, between MIT and UC Davis, I got a lot of stuff pounded into my head that it just ain't so. Um, I'll give you an example, and this goes way beyond winemaking, is you can't publish in a peer-reviewed journal unless your data passes some statistical tests, uh called hypothesis testing, um, uh, or uh analysis of variance, or um uh confidence intervals, you know, where you see like a you're you're looking at data, and you you have these, you know, histograms, these bars, and you say, well, this one's significantly higher than this one, and they'll you'll have an A and a B, and these are both Bs, and this is a C. All that hypothesis testing is based on a fallacious assumption. And it just pissed me off that I had all this stuff pounded into my head, which again, if I had given it five minutes thought, or anybody else in the scientific world, they would have realized that it's just wrong. And what's wrong, let me see if I can explain this. Let's say you're you got this new fertilizer and you want to find out whether it makes say corn plants grow taller. Okay, so you set up you set up uh maybe you got a field over here and a field over here, or or you can even take little pieces of each field and have a randomized block design. Anyway, you got the treatment and the controls, all right? Okay, so you go out and you measure uh the heights of the control plants, and they're gonna be kind of a bell curve. They're not all gonna be exactly the same, but they're gonna have a mean, and some of that are less and some that are more, and it's gonna have a bell curve. And then you go to the treatment, and that's gonna have a bell curve too, and you want to know whether they're different. Um, so you have to look at how they overlap.

SPEAKER_02 32:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Uh so far, so good. Nothing wrong with that approach. But the problem is you need to know what the shape of the curve is. How is it is it tall and skinny, or is it, you know, does it uh wide and broad? And so that's measured by what's called the standard deviation. It's basically the measure of the shoulder of the bell curve. Okay, yeah, and that's fine too. The the fallacy is if you try to use your data as a an estimator of the uh the actual standard deviation. And and that that's what they taught us in school, and it's just not true. And in fact, this was uh made up by a bunch of eugenicists back around 1900, uh Pearson and and student, and there's four of them, Gossett, uh, and they were using this uh they were using this mathematical variation to to prove the inferiority of the of races that they didn't like. And they were trying to to justify the sterilization of uh you know like Southern Europeans and and uh and blacks and uh actually you know Teddy Roosevelt was a big eugenicist, uh, and so was uh uh uh George Bernard Shaw. This is pretty popular until Hitler came along and actually decided to, you know, actually do something about it. And so uh eugenics is definitely out of favor now, but we're still using the frequentist interpretation. Let me give you an example. Let's say I've got a deck of cards here, and I turn one of them over, it's a spade. Okay? So I that's one chance in four. Now I turn another one over, and that's a spade too. So then I keep turning them over, and every time I turn a card, I get another denomination of spade. Now I've got 13 spades. Now the frequentest will tell you that it's almost a certainty that the 14th card will also be a spade. That's the freak, the frequentest interpretation. But if you know anything about cards, you know that that's all the spades there are. And so actually, the chances that a 14th card is a spade is that is is exactly zero. So that's that's called a Bayesian inference. And uh that's the war that's going on right now. There's something called the uh crisis of non-reproducibility. You know, all these you know millions of scientific papers with studies that can't be reproduced because they're using statistics that aren't valid. So that's wild. Yeah, I find this 50 years into my career and it pissed me off. Uh I feel like the credibility of science is not going so well. Kind of relates to what I was talking about about winemakers not being honest about what they're actually doing. The arrogance of scientists, climate scientists, doctors, uh, you know, is well known and people don't trust them anymore. So uh the book is really it's not an indictment, it's just uh the subtitle is uh a winemaker recommends repairs. And I think uh, you know, if scientists can just realize that a lot of you know, you may be the world's greatest expert on this particular species of beetle. But you got if you're honest, everything else you think you know about scientists, you're just taking somebody else's word for it. And a lot of it just isn't true. But if you this is good news, because if you can get to that point, then you can start talking about your work with humility. Uh, you know, as a climatologist, just report the facts. The the second you you come an activist, you take a position about what other people should be doing, you're gonna you're gonna end up with some peculiar uh political occurrences when uh you know when scientists are no longer respected because you're asking, you know, tens of millions of of people, you know, coal miners and roughnecks, uh, to go find another job. And you know, the the billionaires that own those coal mines and those those oil rigs, they're not gonna like you very much either. But if you could just stick to here's what my data says. Um David Hume used to talk about the second you go from what is to what ought to be, you cease to be a scientist. So I think a little humility gives us a way to reach across the aisle and uh and uh work together to get us out of the the uh the fix we're in. Um you know most Americans believe that there's something goofy going on with the climate. It's kind of hard to ignore. What they don't agree with is whether or not it's human cost. Who cares? Who cares who shot John? It's a childish argument. Let's just as long as we believe that we got a problem, let's work together to fix it.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

Yeah, you know, it's interesting to me because I um I am not a scientist, and I do not have all these answers. And one of the things that's interesting though is I have seen people use and I mean using um the information that they have at their disposal to push an agenda. And I mean, I'm sure that in whatever arena that you're looking at, that can be a truth as well. You know, and I think that um when you have something that you know, for me, I am a huge fan of, you know, I love I love all things analog. And I love, you know, I I'm I started as I'm I'm a video maker, filmmaker, um, content creator, but I still my my core passion is with film photography. I love taking pictures with film. And one of the things with that is there is an art and a science to it, you know, but yet there's also this um, you know, there's a certain amount of mix of chemicals that you need. There's a certain there, it's definitely science, you know, to develop the film. But at the same time, you if we were to perfectly refine that process down and make it so that every single role was perfect. And you know, one of the craziest things that's so beautiful is when I am a dumbass and I open up the back of my camera and I don't realize there's film still in there, and I oh my god, I slam it shut. Those light leaks create some of the most beautiful images that you could imagine. And sometimes the mistakes, yep, yes, sometimes those mistakes that we make turn into absolute magic. And I think that's one of the things that I'm pulling from this that we have to make sure that there's still room for the human nature of things. Because I mean, again, I'm also worried about you know, the rise of AI and winemaking that, you know, oh well, we've got this new process that will completely do everything for you, it's completely automated. And you know, for me, I I'm want to keep the human in everything, whether that be winemaking, whether that be consulting, whether that be sharing content. Like, my god, the number of people that are making content now that are just using AI-generated scripts to spam people. I don't need that. You don't need that, none of us need that.

SPEAKER_01 41:54

But for someone who's AI is like if you had a California high school education, you probably can't spell your way out of a brown paper bag. And so then, you know, AI could help you to write, you know, proper grammar. But when I write, uh you can tell that I'm not an AI. For one thing, I have a sense of humor. Uh and uh I think we're going to get much better at discerning the difference between AI-generated text and actual good writing. And I think that's a good thing. Um but let's uh let's go back to language just a little bit here. All the things you were talking about about film, that's not science, that's technology. Science is a realm of inquiry. Science, you know, engineering is about getting things done whether you understand them or not. Science is a realm of not knowing. And uh Einstein used to say the reason we call it research is we don't know what we're doing. So I think we get all those, you know, technology engineering. This is a whole chapter in my book. It's just trying to clarify the language of what science is, anyway. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

Well, I wanted to ask you this because for someone that's just beginning their journey in winemaking, what mindset or philosophy would you hope they bring to the craft?

SPEAKER_01 43:39

That's a good question. Um I think the biggest mistake I ever made was to go to college right after high school. College is not a place where you find your métier or career. career so I my best piece of advice is is get out in the world um you know as a winemaker traveling to Europe uh but also Australia and South Africa you know g get get out there you know sign up for for a hitch with a with a bunch of wineries and spend two or three years uh and and you know that's where you're gonna get your your artistic vision from you you're not gonna get it in school uh and then uh I don't know I I really don't think UC Davis turned me into a winemaker it it turned me into a well educated scientist although many of the things they taught me aren't really useful or even true um but it certainly didn't teach me how to make wine um when I was there they weren't even tasting wine the whole four year program and no classes in tasting wine I had to start one in the in the experimental college uh they definitely churn out qualified you know technicians but the and in fact the uh the the 1880 act of the state legislature that established the Department of Viticulture and Enology uh directed them to uh to teach the uh the the art and science of winemaking but that's not what they do uh you know it'd be like if you went to Juilliard and all they ever did was talk about amplitudes and frequencies and you never got to play the piano right well that leads to my last question if you're pouring three glasses right now what three glasses are you pouring for me well we did this on uh soundcheck in New York uh we poured three glasses of wine for the the host uh and asked him to comment on them and he said well this one is really fruity and round and smooth and then this next one is is kind of harsh and bitter and and uh so he described three completely different wines and then we thought these are all the same wine wow all we did was to change the background music you were listening to when you were tasting those wines it's uh it's it's on my site if you go to whoisclarksmith.com and click on wine and music there's a there's a whole uh uh uh a bunch of npr things and stuff that look for the sound check and uh that might be one way to do it I'm not sure that was what you meant it's all good where can people go to find out more about you and what you do uh well uh whoisclarksmith.com is kind of the clearinghouse there's uh um if you look at you click on shop and that's where you can buy my wines uh wine and music take you to my other book uh you click on Put Smod and Winemaking there's a whole site about uh about that philosophy uh and uh I do a lot of consulting so there's a consulting website and then there are uh courses if uh if you'd like to skip the whole four-year analogy program and just take my one weekend class I can basically give you everything you really need to know that you would get out of a four-year program in uh 88 10 minute segments over the course of the weekend that's probably the best place to start I also have a YouTube channel that's got all kinds of fun stuff on it uh that's uh Winesmith1 the the digit one