153: Clark Smith - Postmodern Winemaking and Video Course

Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Jim Dwayne. On this episode, my guest is Clark Smith. Clark is a longtime winemaker. He's a winery technologist. He founded Vinivation and the alcohol removal. Sweet spotting technologies and sold that off. He's also credited with bringing microoxygenation to the wine industry in the United States. He's an author, wrote the book Postmodern Winemaking, published in twenty thirteen.

The reason I wanted to have Clark on this podcast is because he's a teacher. used to teach a lot of the extension courses through UC Davis. A lot of these, I think they were often weekend classes. And that's the reason I wanted to have him on the podcast, specifically now, because during the pandemic, Clark put together when he could no longer teach in person, Clark put together a video course. Fundamentals of winemaking made easy. This is a class that I came across recently and I bought it.

And I was So impressed with the content and the quality of education and winemaking resource, which has been the prime directive. of this podcast since day one and always will be to provide a a free analogy resource for as many people as possible. Something I didn't have when I was trying to learn winemaking, but is now possible because of new technologies. Not that podcasting is that new, but you know what I'm talking about. Twenty years ago, this wasn't.

Long story short, Clark put together the analogy video course that I had always dreamed of doing, but he did it better than I would have done it. Eighteen hours of content over eighty-eight videos. I'll spend more time in the outro of this episode, right after the interview, kind of describing what the class entails, because I don't want to take too much time here. And you can always find more information at the website insidewinemaking.com. There is a tab called Winemaking Video Course.

So the question that I would like to answer is who is this video course for? If you've been listening to this podcast and understanding most of the technical stuff, and I do try to be technical, then you will be comfortable with the material in Clark's video course. As someone who still gets a little bit of anxiety when the word chemistry even comes up, I can assure you that

You don't need any background in chemistry. Clark's early classes cover specifically acid chemistry, which is a good primer, but he does it in a very accessible way, easy to understand.

The course then progresses to cover all the aspects of analogy of what you would need to understand to be a competent winemaker. So I know the first question on everybody's mind is what does the cost? And it's four hundred and fifty dollars. As someone who went to UC Davis for two years at about I don't even remember what it is, but I think it's now twenty five grand a year just for tuition. And two years of opportunity cost, I don't regret it. One of the best times of my life.

But I know a lot of the people listening are in a different place in their career where going back to school is not an option. And so having a video course on demand at four hundred and fifty dollars, which compares to the UC Davis winemaking certificate program, which I think is about ten grand and takes about two years. It's not the same level of education but... As someone who makes podcast and understands the value of things that are on demand and evergreen.

Video courses are pretty cool. So I'm excited to partner with Clark. We have a deal. If you purchase the course and use the discount code InsideWinemaking, you get twenty five bucks off. I get a commission. I'm ex super excited to bring this to everyone because it's really truly the best value resource out there for technology. Okay, I'll say some more in the outro. Here we go with Clark Sven.

Thank you for for taking the time to do this. And you know, thank you for building what I think is the best winemaking resource out there, your video courses. We're gonna spend some more time talking about that later in this conversation. Okay. Uh but to start so people could understand your background, can you kind of take us?

through the path of uh what brought you into winemaking and and um do a a quick summary of your technical career and then we'll get into the things that aren't so technical, more artistic and more fun. Okay?

Um I grew up on the East Coast. My dad was literally a rocket scientist. At one point uh he was involved in building the Saturn engines for the Apollo project down in Florida, but I'm mostly uh sort of a northeast coast guy and uh spent my beaver cleaver years in uh Westfield, New Jersey, which is where I got my

my attitude from. I think it shows up in my writing that I'm I'm really I'm not I'm not necessarily a contrarian, a lot of people think so, but I I really enjoy telling the inconvenient truth. Uh it's kind of a sport in New Jersey. So I'm kind of a wise ass, I guess. Uh uh Went to MIT for a couple of years and

then in my junior year they they wanted me to declare a major and I I just couldn't do it. There were too many great options, you know, I got I got molecular biology from Francis Crick and I got linguistics from Noam Chomsky and there were like twelve of these, you know, really holy scientists that taught me my freshman in and uh sophomore courses and and I was also a folk singer, songwriter and I really had no idea how I would pick just one thing to do.

uh something that I was looking for something that involved both S like science in service to art. And that dual inquiries into the nature of the physical world and the uh what it is to be a human being. And so uh I dropped out. And wandered out to California with no clear aim in mind. Got a job in a liquor store. Somebody came up to me and it with a bottle of Palmesan Emerald Dry.

and asked me if it was any good and I said I had no idea. Took it home. It was all right. Uh next thing I knew I had uh uh I tried every bottle in the store. And at that time, there were only about 250 wineries in the United States. 250 in the States? In the whole country. And so that meant that it was possible to go meet all these people. And our store, which had about a thousand facings. W it was basically the Library of Congress for any wine you could buy in the United States.

Uh, and about the well, for domestic wines and then another thousand uh imports and that was pretty much all there was to know. So I got on my horse and went around and tracked down every winemaker in California and Oregon and back east and and got to know them and then in seventy six I said, Oh hell, I this is the thing I need to do. Um you know, it's one of those things where not not that I

Not i it was like I was afraid of what would happen if I didn't do it. And uh I knew that it would always haunt. So Um I you know, I have about a hundred and twenty winemaking clients that get new ones all the time, doing startups largely with small wineries. And I always tell'em never be a winemaker or a jazz musician. Unless you have to do it. And that's the way it was for me. So uh I started with a winery called um Vetercrest.

that was in Emeryville near the Anchorage of Bay Bridge. And I was a cellar master there for three years. Then went ahead and went to Davis, finished up the bachelors, did the masters program.

And uh then I got snapped up by uh the Jaguer family in the Dunn Hills at R.H. Phillips. And so I was the founding winemaker there and made wine there for seven years. And then Uh I'm I'm sorry, but we were talking earlier uh I worked at R. H. Phillips in two thousand two and

Worked a small world. Yeah. Uh got to work with John Gear a little bit. Yeah. Did he spit sunflower seeds at you every time he was talking to you as well back then? Well they were that's what they were into was uh was was lambs. and s and uh uh confectionary sunflower meats is what they called them. Uh yeah, well c of course he was a great marketer. And uh still isn't it?

And and made uh it was kinda like I was trying to make the best wine that could be made, particularly to show off the quality of the Dunegan Hills, which was really unknown back then. And he was trying to come up with with packaging ideas that would cause people to buy the wine whether it was any good or not. Um and so we sort of raced that way. And then uh in 1990 I left RH Phillips and started Winesmith Consulting. And uh my principal client was the Benzigers.

And Bruno Benzegru's liver had gone bad on him. And so he needed to start making non alcoholic wine and he bought a reverse osmosis unit to do it. And I got chained to that thing. I didn't even know what an RO was. Uh uh to make non alcoholic wine. And That put me in touch with the flavor companies back east in Cincinnati and New Jersey, uh, where we were learning how the how flavor companies work. You know, practically everything

in the grocery store has flavor technology associated with it. They'll They'll make green beans but they'll they'll reflux the aromas and put'em back in or jellies or you know, almost everything in the store except wine,'cause it's against the law. But I did learn a lot of things about flavor technology and I gave a lecture in uh eight in uh ninety-three. We used to do these

Uh uh Bruce Rector would have it. Have the winemakers and the marketers go out in the woods and there'd be about a hundred of us and we'd press the envelope and think dig deep thoughts and think outside the box and all that crap. And uh and so I gave a lecture on flavor harvesting on the idea that we could use those technologies. So you can't use flavors, but what you can do is put a condenser on the top of the fermentation table.

And then you're gonna enrich the aromas quite a bit. All that stuff that you smell when you go into a fermenting winery. I mean that's just wasted, so you could get that back. And I gave a lecture on how to recover uh flavor from from leaves and from solids and and from fermentation. And then at the end of the lecture yeah, I'd finished my lecture, I was ready to present it and I kinda just before I went to sleep I thought, well Let's turn this on its head.

And what about if you have something in the wine that you don't want? Is there a way that we could use separation technologies to get it in the clear, take it out? And then I thought of an example that we'd been doing these non-alcoholic wines and we knew that acetic acid came into the filtrate. So you got an inky black Cabernet and all uh uh the the membrane is like ten thousand times tighter than a sterile filter. So so the permeate just looks like water.

But it does have acetic acid in it. And I said, Well, you know, you could put that through a water softener and take the acetic out and just put it back and that would be a way to take uh volatile acidity out of wine. And I just went to sleep and didn't think about it much more. I gave the lecture the next day and then Charlie Talbert came up to me, uh, who was one of the winemakers there, and he said, You know, I got this stuck Merlot that we've been trying to get dry for a year.

Do you think that process would work? Hell I don't know, but we got an RO right there. Why don't we go get some resin and uh and see what happens? And the wine actually ended up going dry while we were processing. So we knew we were on to something. The Benzegers didn't want anything to do with it, but they were willing to rent me the R.O. With the truck.

Um and we that's we started this winery called uh Vinovation and that grew, we took on a lot of other technologies like ultrafiltration and microoxygenation and c kind of became a magnet for uh technologies from uh largely from France and uh so then we kind of morphed into a cooking school and it was interesting because we never advertised For the first four or five years. It's just people would go into the bars and they go

You'll never believe what I'm gonna do. And uh and we put several hundred wines that were over the legal limit with VA into the wine spectator top one hundred wines of the world. How cool. So I did that until two thousand eight and then by that time we had we had become the largest wine production consulting firm in the world.

But y you know, I was running a big staff and kind of having to babysit their kids and all that stuff and and I decided to just take top people, we we had maybe twelve hundred California wineries and took about a hundred and twenty of them, the smart ones, and turned them into consulting clients.

And so that's what I'm doing now. I I I write, I uh consult. And uh and then a as you said, I I do uh courses in person and online. Uh when I was at Davidson In the early eighties I was working for the University Extension and Jim Lapsley would have me do uh you know, a refrigeration course or a sparkling wine course and I just get all the sparkling wine people, you know, Eileen Crane and Donnie example.

uh, on and on and they'd come and talk about it. And uh Uh so when I when I got out in 84, I went to gym and I said, well, okay, now you owe me. And I'm gonna do my course and What it's about is all these people that wanna start a winery They wanna have the education, but they don't wanna spend two to four years in a college program. And I thought, because at MIT They had the top people in the field teaching the Because they were able to boil it down.

into, you know, uh so they're teaching nuclear physics to a five year old. And I really admired that and I wanted to do that. And I looked at what I had actually learned, like the Cliff Notes version of what there really was up to the essentials of the degree. And I started this program originally called Fundamentals Modern Wine Chemistry in nineteen eighty four. And then I started teaching it all over the country and by uh

By the time the pandemic hit I had put about forty five hundred winemakers through that course. There's about Instead of two hundred and fifty, there's now about twelve thousand bonded wineries and God knows how many actual brands out there. And so I've put a pretty big proportion of those winemakers through my course. And then when the pandemic hit, nobody wanted to show up for a for an in l uh person class and so I put it online.

Okay, there's a lot to unpack there. Um maybe go in in sequence and and talk a little bit about Vinovation, something that I was familiar with'cause I finished Davis in two thousand four, so that's when I was really coming into the industry to to work. Mm-hmm. Um so got to to work with Vinnovation and and Oh you did? Yeah, sure, sure. You were running on our own?

Uh I didn't run an RO wheat. That's when we were sending wine out to Sebastopol. Oh oh as a customer. Yeah, as a customer. Right. Yeah, like everybody else. Right. Right. And yeah, then I remember there was you had to get the D S P the distilled sp spillers permanently. Well that was for alcohol adjustment. Yes, yes, for alcohol.

Um I've worked with some of the other technologies as well, but one thing I wanted to talk to you about because I've always found very interesting. I was first introduced to this when I was a student at Davis, so this is twenty years ago. But we had some party. I think it was maybe the repeal party w we would do on December sixth. And we had uh Fresno State and Cow Poly students, the the V and E programs come up for this party. Yes. And one of the people came from from Fresno brought this

uh the set of wines it was like ten or twelve wines and it was the sweet spotting trial. So it was the Ah that that's five wines. Okay. Yeah, that's that was pretty interesting. Uh I had been for many years threatening to run over Ken Fugelsang's refractometer with my car. This is one of the big things I believe in is that bricks has absolutely nothing to do with ripeness.

And uh, you know, berry inspection is is something I preach. Uh probably the last thing you want to look at is the sugar. Uh and so he calls me up. Uh this was September seventeenth of nineteen ninety nine. And he said, well, we we did what you said. We we this is the Deaver Vineyard and and we we said, well, we're gonna uh we picked it.

Uh we waited until it was ripe and it wasn't raisiny or anything like that. But this is Fresno, very dry air. And so he said, Well it came in at at thirty one five. Wow. Uh but it wasn't overripe. It was but it somehow they got it dry by the grace of God at eighteen percent alcohol and it was pretty uh pr pr pretty hot and bitter. So we took a piece of it, about twenty-five percent, with the RO took it down to ten percent.

And then we made blends. Oh. Uh it was twelve five, twelve six, twelve seven, twelve eight, all all the way up to fifteen five. So it's thirty-one wines here. And we have twenty-two judges, and we just asked them to vote for their preferences. And uh you know what the graph looks like. Uh it's not a bell curve. No, that's what's interesting to me. It's there are these sweet spots.

Uh, that are like radio stations when the wine tastes really good and it's it's fractal. You know, what that means is that. Like the Mandelbrot set, the the that what you see in large, you also see in small. So for example, one of the sweet spots was 15 oh and it was like a really good shot enough to pop. Very complex, a little bit of leatheriness, and uh and it got seven votes.

The fourteen nine didn't get any votes, it was thin and salty. The the fifteen one didn't get any votes, it was hot and bitter.

So th we get the same when you're almost on the sweet spot is when the wine is the most unbalanced, just like a radio station. You get more static when you're almost there. Um So there were four sweet spots it was the w we found uh fifteen oh fourteen three five which tasted like uh jammy in your face California Syrah and then uh thirteen seven five, which tasted like a northern Ron,

and then thirteen oh, which tasted like Syrah that you had grown like in a Loire you know, it's high acid and very simple blueberry And we uh we entered the two middle ones in the uh In the high price category of the Orange County Fair, got a silver on the fourteen three five and a gold on on the thirteen seven five. And uh

The interesting thing is if you took those two metal winning wines and blended them together, it was undrinkable. Really? Well, it's just like uh I i i i i i i it it's a dissonance like chopsticks, you know, uh And that's what we all always observe. You know, we did by the time I left there, we'd done about forty thousand wines this way. And we never get a Belker. We always get these You have to dial in the sweet spots and it's very interesting that people agree on where they are.

So there's something deep in the human DNA about harmony and dissonance and why. So that's my question. What do you think that is? What it what what is special about certain points in in alcohol. I have no idea. Okay. I I don't. But I I I think I understand what's going on. Back before we had language, let's say 100,000, 200,000 years ago, you're you're hungry and you're wandering around the woods and you see these berrets. And so you put'em in your mouth.

And If they're full of alkaloids, like poisons, then they're gonna be really bitter and you're gonna spit them out. if they're nice and sweet and and and fruity and they don't have that bitterness.

then you're gonna eat'em. And and there's something in the midbrain that makes the distinction between harmony and dissonance. And I think that's what's going on. I also think it's why uh TCA at you know, a few parts per trillion can rob you of that illusion of sweetness and make a wine that you want to spit out. I I kind of I'm a little bit sad that tweaking uh alcohol is a tool that's not more accepted within the wine industry.'Cause yes, it's a it's an intervention, but if you're like

a small estate like me, you may not have a lot of different components to build blends. And so it may just be more difficult to find those harmonies. But it's to to know that those harmonies may exist.

by by tweaking alcohol. That would be a really nice tool to have for for a winemaker. Well I think even the way you frame that statement means that you've bought the premise by the natural wine movement, people like Alice Firing that don't know anything about wine and have made it a sin for us to do our job. Uh there's the only difference between the word artisanality, which you know, I think winemaking is

We're just chefs, it's a form of cooking, it's the ultimate slow food. We're supposed to be artisanal. Uh, when you say manipulation, now you're talking about uh like artful deceit and and it's a sin. And that is such horseshit. And I don't know why people bought into that, except that the natural wine movement is firing live LMO over their over their heads and they don't want to be proud of what they do. And it I understand. I'm I'm sad about it too. I'm actually furious about it.

Um I don't think you should ever do anything that you don't want to brag about, and then you should brag about it. And so, you know, I'm not ashamed that I use reverse osmosis. Uh e even Alice Firink says that if you have VA, it's okay to use RO. Oh. Yeah, it's in her weird little list. Uh do you know what natural wine is? What's the definition of a natural wine? Oh that I've never been able to pin that one down. Oh I know exactly what it is. Okay. Whatever Alice says it is.

Makes it simple and and she has no interest in the truth. She has no interest in good wine. She's she's a zealot. She's a she's got this religion going on and uh it see I work with thousands of wine and I've never met anybody in the wine industry that was in it for the money or to deceive people.

I mean really th I think when people say they want natural wine, their their heart's in the right place. Sure. And and you know, none of us wanna do anything that i you know, that we don't think is a good idea because it costs money for Pizza. And uh and and we're all in it to make something w well, w I hold myself up to the standard of my wine should be

should pass uh Franklin's proof. Uh Ben Franklin said wine is is proof that God loves us and desires us to be happy. And I won't bottle wine unless I've Brought it into harmony, made a wine that's age worthy, varietal, speaks to the terroir, and has graceful longevity to it.

So I think I think we've been sold a bill of goods and we should we should just tell Alice to you know, pound sand. But unfortunately People have taken this religion as a dogma and they don't want to talk about the work they do. Um I I love um Wolfgang Puck. He'll he'll get on TV and he'll say, Well, you know, I've I'm I won't I I have this puff technology

And I want to grate this ripe brie so I can put it in my puff and then do it sous vide, you know, it's got all these technologies. All right. Uh he says, but I can't grate it because it's too gooey. So I'm gonna freeze it with some liquid nitrogen. You wanna watch? You know, grating this ripe breeze and and I just You know, he's bragging about these techniques that he's worked out. And and that's the way I think winemakers should be. Uh instead of

you know, just trying to pass muster but you can always tell they're lying when they say I do the minimum. And people can tell this guy this guy's full of shit. He's he's he's not telling me what he really does. Um and so it's like a bad marriage with the general public. And my what I would say to winemakers is Like I said, tell the truth, brag about what you do. What I'd say to wine consumers. It's like a bad marriage.

you know, there's things you get to a point in a marriage sometimes where uh, you know, he's got certain urges he doesn't wanna talk about and and and you're just uh There's no openness for people to tell the truth to each other. And so I think if you're visiting a winemaker and you make some kind of overture that you're willing to know what he really does and what he really thinks, they'll open up like crazy.

And and w we could go back to the way it was in the seventies when uh when there was a great openness in the um you know in in in these new winemakers. I want to talk about post-modern winemaking, but before we do that, we're going to get into uh modern winemaking. But for that, one quick question on MicroOc. Okay. I haven't done it for years, but one thing that that I was never able to answer on so I think you're the guy to maybe answer this.

It's what is the deal at sixty degrees Fahrenheit? Huh. Why is it that I can microox a big red wine and it works really well when I'm at seventy degrees and you know, this we're you know, at the end of harvest we're in November and December and the temperature's cooling down. And when I hit sixty degrees, instead of uh all of a sudden we're picking up DO in the wine. What's so magic about temperature in in relation to to wine? So it's not sixty, it's fifty nine. Ah, okay. Well.

Here's here's a uh a benzene ring with two OHs on it. They're next to each other. That's called a visinal diphenol. And chapter six in my book is about this reaction. Okay. So Your your book, Postmodern Winemaking. Yeah. Uh so Vern Singleton at Davis figured out how this reaction goes. uh basically an oxygen comes along and it uh half of the O two oxidizes one of these guys, uh

And then that causes the other one to be more reactive. Actually r lowers the PKA from from nine to four. And so it's gonna react with both. Boom, boom. Second order reaction. That makes it very temperature dependent. So uh it's maxed out between 59 and 65 degrees. If you go higher than that.

Now you the order of the other reactions that can happen, like the oxidation of SO two and and uh aldehyde formation and so forth, become preferred iner energetically. So you don't really want to go above sixty-five. If you go below fifty nine, uh

you're gonna lose twenty five percent of your reactivity per degree Fahrenheit. So by the time you get down to fifty degrees, you have almost no reactivity at all. And that's why uh you know, in cold cellars like in Burgundy and and in many places in Oregon and Canada. Wines go to VA right away because uh uh because the wine has already bound all the SO2 to the pigments.

The only thing we have going for it is the oxygen appetite, but you've robbed it of that by going way on down. So so it's fifty nine is really fine, but Anything below that and you get lots of aldehyde and no evolution of the dramatic increase in dissolved oxygen if you're measuring. Right. Which that's right. All right. Well, thank you. I've been waiting for years for that answer.

It must be in the course somewhere. Maybe you haven't gotten that far yet. Uh okay. So in twenty thirteen you published the book Postmodern Winemaking. Yes. Um What is before we get into postmodern, what what is modern winemaking? So that we can contrast into post modern. What was the average alcohol of a California wine in 1960? I'm not sure if it was really low because people couldn't get grapes ripe or it was really high because they were being uh

Spiked with alcohol. I assume it's quite low. So give me a number. Twelve five. Eighteen five. That's wild. We made nothing. Well everybody thinks we're making nothing but B V private reserve cabin. It was they couldn't even give that stuff away back then. Nobody was drinking anything except port and sherry for the first thirty-five years after prohibition. Um

And if people were drinking table wine at all, like the GIs coming back, they were drinking French wine, German wine. Okay. Nobody believed that California could even make table wine. Alright, so what was the average alcohol of a California wine in 1970? Seventy Okay, so when was it eighteen f eighteen five? What year was that? Nineteen sixty. Sixty. So now we're going to seventy? Yeah. Uh we we down to sixteen?

11%. Quite the swing. And the reason is I'm trying to remember the name of the guy who there's there's a There's a there's an index of how long a c conversation takes place on the internet before before somebody mentions Hitler. Yeah, right. Yeah, so here we are. Uh if it hadn't been for Hitler Uh, we never would have split the atom. And if'cause it was really expensive, they had to scare the shit out of us before that was gonna happen.

Once it did, one of the peacetime new things was that you could put plastic sheets in uh nuclear reactors and the alpha particles would etch holes, which you could then uh sort of develop in f uh fluoric acid and you could determine the size of the holes, and this gave you the ability to integrity test we call it bubble pointing, uh the the

um filters we were using for still filtration. So now all of a sudden, for the first time in history, we had a way to take yeast and bacteria out of wine and that meant that we could make uh off drive whites. And the guy who figured this out, the company was Nuclepor. Ironically they were in Germany. And uh Peters' Shell, uh uh put together this idea and made um blue nun lippromok. And Blue Nun Lipromok is the is the great great grandmother of all modern wine.

So before that, for the first 8,000 years, you had what we now call erroneously, uh uh orange wine or amber wine. White wines were on the skins and they were aged. Uh and then we started making Sir Lee wines like in Muscade. So these were all uh wines that were seeking profundity, just like red. Once we had a fresh light light. Leapro milk, everybody went nuts. They'd never tasted wine like that. And so everything that was being made by 1970.

was uh gallo chablis, almond and rhine wine, Weibel Green Hungarian, Wennie Gray Riesling. Everything was eleven percent alcohol and maybe two percent sugar. Uh, and even today, like the New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs, they're dry, but they're still fresh. And this whole idea that white wine needed to be fresh uh that's that's modern analogy. Okay. Now uh When we get up into the late sixties and there's a call for dry wine. Or or lower alcohols. uh the reds and the whites we were making

w w the winemakers didn't have a clue how to do it. So when you had uh oh l let's see who the real old timers, of course Telcheff and all of his people, um Uh, you know, Souverain started in 1968. Uh I was I was working on uh retail in Oakland and half of the wine's on the shelf. would be considered today completely unmerchinable. They had VA, they had aldehyde, they had H2S, they were just full of defects.

And that's because nobody knew what they were doing. And we had this real openness where people would talk to each other and say, well, this is what happened to me. Oh, okay. Well, that's what happened to me. And here's how I fixed that. And we were just the other industries couldn't believe how open the conversation. Davis jumped into that. They told us how to do a malolactic. They they they told us how to use SO2.

They taught us all of the what we what I now call the modern enological conventions and they're all about making good wine. Uh shelf stable too. Right, exactly. So it was never their goal to make great wine. Right. Uh they just wanted not to be horrible. And uh and you gotta hand it to'em. They did a great job with that. And unfortunately they've never moved away from that. And so now, like uh for example, uh if you steril filter a cabernet, we did we did one with uh Rob Davis uh just uh

Your go December. Right from Jordan? Yeah. Okay. So we're tasting a bottle uh seven fifty of the uh the first advantage is seventy six. And it's in pristine shape. Still red, it's not dry at all. It's got great fruit. Everybody's y he's there and and we're patting him on the back. And I'm saying, Rob I know this wine very well. It was historically important at the time because of its restraint. And uh I I I you know, I sold this wine at Mansion Cellars in nineteen seventy nine.

Rob, it tastes exactly the same as it did then. Forty six years later, there was like no point in aging it. And he says, Yeah, I know all my wines are like that. And it's because Tom Jordan was paranoid about Brett. And so uh uh he had them sterile filter every single bottle of wine. He says, Well, let me show you something now. And he he pulls out a magnum of the same wine. Uh

So he pours that around and it's magnificent. I I put it up against all the first growths in a good vintage. Just one of the best cabernets I've ever had in my life. And he says, Well, Andre, Telchef, told us, you know, you oughta, this is the first year, let's let's bottle a couple hundred commemorative magnum.

And Rob says, Well I can't do that'cause I don't have the change parts for the line. For the bottling line, right? Yeah. And Andre says, Ah, heck with it. Let's get a siphon hose and we'll just bottle it all out of the barrel. And that was the difference. And that's when I learned for absolute certain that that the bottle bouquet, the profundity that really got me into the industry and probably you too, uh uh great wine comes from microbiome.

And unless you can develop a balanced microbiome, you will never make great wine. You know, and m you know, I just got got back from Oregon working with uh the winemaker magazine and and their uh home winemakers up there. I love those people and one of the neat things about them is they're not set up to sterile filter even if they want it.

And their wines are much better than commercial wines. Not all of them, but but on the spectrum you've you rarely see a commercial wine that has the greatness of of some of the wines those guys make. Um I I remember Kermit Lynch, he really bang the drum of not filtering. Yeah. Wasn't that one of his main tenancies? Absolutely. Yeah, still is. Yeah. And and you know, it works. Why don't California wine make? Why why do they sterile filter? It's because they're afraid.

And, you know, they're trying to feed their families and, you know, they're kind of paranoid and they don't know anything about microbiology. In France They they didn't know anything about microbiology for, you know, a a thousand years. But uh in fact, uh pro you know, uh Pasteur elucidated the mechanism of fermentation in eighteen fifty seven. Night in in eighteen ninety five, Pierre Pachet, who was a director of the University of Toulouse,

declared that uh Pasteur's theory of germs was a ridiculous fiction. Really? Yeah. So it's just really recently that we've known anything about microbiology. And of course, I think, with human health and the the the human gut. Like I think we still are overly reductionist about it and not appreciating the breadth of of species. Drink a drink a whole bottle of Jack Daniels and then see how you feel about your microbiome the next day.

Yeah, we really need it. Um, and uh, you know, as goofy Americans we're kinda paranoid about germs, but you know, without them we'd be in real rough shape. And it's exactly the same problem. So so uh I preach the idea of a balanced microbiome. Uh in order to do that, well, you have to get lucky. Ha but you have to keep your cell at uh m a more or less constant temperature and humidity. It it can vary a little from

summer to winter and that kind of thing, but you don't want to freak the microbiomes out. And uh i you know, almost everything is beneficial. We're mostly just worried about P. coccus, patanamyces, and and uh acetobacter. Uh Acetobacter, you need higher pHs, good extraction, healthy tannins. That's kind of what I was showing you here. This is a petite verdeau with all those things. And it's gonna age for a long, long time. It's an eighteen, it's already starting to get some bottle bouquet.

And you know, it'll be a fabulous wine for several decades, I think, and just get better and better. Uh so you need oxygen appetite to suppress Acetobacter. SO2 has no effect on Acetobacter in red wine. Because the pH is high enough. No, because it's all bound to pigments. There is no molecular SO two in red wine. Uh for Brett, what you need is competition, because it's a hospital disease.

So you want to have other stuff compete for the micronutrients and and just kind of keep it at bay and then I think a little bit of bread is kinda good. What one of the things that's hard about managing a microbiome in your wine is if we're being honest, we don't know what's there and when. Yeah. Okay. So I'd like to say understanding is the booby prize.

If you have a technique that works, it doesn't matter if you know how it works. When I get bottled bouquet, I I really don't know. I know how to set the wine up for success. But I have no idea what's going on and I don't care as long as it works. Okay, so uh what I was gonna say is that the French didn't have all these technologies, but they just Did what they did. And the ones that were successful, you know, over time through trial and error, they worked out something that worked. Technique.

Yeah. And this is me I'm I'm always saying how about less theory, more technique, more observation. So for example, uh Andy Waterhouse said that um th that uh you you can't uh uh th that a sulfite free wine has to be refrigerated for its one year life and

You know, I'm I I leave mine in barrel for six years and and then they're not even ready then and they really need to breathe. I don't have oxidation problems with sulfite-free reds. I have reduction. And uh even when they're ten years old you still have to breathe them for a week. Uh but they are the best wines they make. And he doesn't know what he's talking about. uh because he's working from what his theory tells him and he's never tried it. Um what getting back to the French.

The reason they're not afraid of not sterile filtering is that they didn't have sterile filters for five hundred years. And it worked out okay. Mm-hmm. So now they're just doing what they've always done. Didn't necessarily understand anything about what was going on. Um but

You know, you do it this way and this is what you get. It's just like cheese making, you know. You take the sheep and, you know, you bury the sheep's cheese in in uh sheep dung and put it in this cave here and It gets all this blue stuff and then it tastes good. So I think that's a real that's why the French have a leg up on us. They don't know anything more about microbiology than we do, but they don't care because they got something that's been working for hundreds of years.

And we don't, because we've only been at it like less than my lifetime. you know, about maybe fifty, sixty years that we've been making those kinds of wines at all. And so uh I think it's time for us to grow up. And so that's why I wrote the book. You know, it's basically about all the things they taught me in school that just ain't so. And it's kind of an invitation to move from making good wine to making great wine and taking those risks.

Maybe just a little bit at a time and uh and and and moving you know, all of California up into something you can legitimately Uh compete with the with the great French. It resonates with me because I've I've often said that type A people uh struggle to be great winemakers. I think it takes type F people. I say F for like ferment. Because if you're type A and you approach it like a pharmaceutical where you wanna know all of your analytes and your concentrations and what's happening all the time.

you're limited to what the tools can tell you and even then Someone who just lets something go, obviously manages the important parts, has good technique, to say. Mm can make a great wine or maybe a a better wine. So it to me it's it's one of the things that attracted me to win making is

You know, I sometimes call it magic, but it's it's just another word for the unknown. Like manage your inputs, manage your environment. But there's a lot going on though. You just don't know. You gotta let go. Well, there's different categories of just don't know. There's there's the stuff that we know to look for, we just haven't gotten around to it. And then there's other stuff that we will eventually learn.

But I think wine is at a level that's incomprehensible to the human mind. Uh there's uh I I I think if you accept that it's fundamentally mysterious Then all you can do is pay attention to it. And see what happens. And the sweet spots are a perfect example. I have no idea. why it works that way. What's really interesting to me is that it works that way for everybody. I I I mean if if I say that's a sweet spot and you do the same tasting, you'll agree. Beats me, but it's it's fascinating.

In in your book you use a lot of analogies with uh cooking and like a chef and also music. Mm-hmm. Are there any other analogies that you think are really helpful to communicate Great wine making, post w modern wine making. What do you think those are the most powerful uh analogies? Well, I know that's what I came up with. Now you're gonna have to make me write another book. Huh. But yeah, I I think thinking of wine as liquid music I think it's

It's it's processed in the brain in the same way as music. Different senses, but the idea of harmony and dissonance is there kind of juxtaposed with personal preference. Where people can vary. It's kinda like uh Uh if the piano isn't tuned, you will leave the bar. You may not know why. But once it's tuned up, then what gets played on it is gonna be

different personal preference based on your personal history or whatever and and so you have it's kinda hard to keep both of those concepts in mind at the same time. Uh and then as far as cooking Uh I I don't know where we use we don't use a timer, we use a calendar. Uh it's kinda the ultimate slow food. I thought Sean Thackeray had some good writings on on winemaking as uh uh as uh taking an approach like

Mm-hmm. Um unfortunately I never got to to meet him or have him on the podcast, but uh I did enjoy his writings. You really m you really missed out. He was great man. Uh And he you know, he's been making postmodern wines all his life and doing a lot of study of uh ancient writings. His library is amazing. I want to go a little bit technical for a minute. Um What have people gotten wrong about working with soul?

SO two and winemaking. And what what is a great way to think about how to most effectively use or not use SO two? Maybe skewing more towards red wines and white wines. Yeah, well let's start with whites because I think that's fairly well nailed down and if you wanna make modern white wine then you want to be, and I talk about it in my class, just you want to be in the pH zone of of 3.2 to 3.4 more or less, and 3.2 would be for Sauvignon Blanc.

Then you have an ML and a Chardonnay. You want to do something a little fatter with a little less acidity, the even three four is fine, even three four five. Um And there, in in that area, you want to uh you want to add your free SO2 with reference to pH. And so I think the point eight molecular uh that you have to calculate from a chart Uh it's normally gonna be around twenty five parts free there. Uh and that that seems to work pretty well. Um In reds.

I've shied away from adding SO two to my juice right away after or crushing and pressing and I've been quite pleased with letting some some oxidation happen in that juice right away and yeah. At this point I'm not adding SO two until I rack the next day. Okay. Well it's it's an option. Yeah. Call it green juice club versus brown juice club.

Uh and it's kind of paradoxical. If you add the standard thirty parts per million, we call that green juice club and the juice will turn green. Uh'cause you're bleaching out some of those browning components, right? Correct. So Uh if you do that, then post-fermentation, you know, all that all that SO2 is going to get gobbled up and you'll have uh an aldehyde pool. So you're gonna have to add 70 parts to get your 25. Because the first 40 are gonna be bound to that aldehyde pool that you created.

Uh so you just go ahead and throw in seventy parts. It's more than most people want to do, but if you do that, you're gonna find that you're gonna come out to about twenty-five. That's green juice cup. Twenty five is free. And we used to do that at R. H. Phillips because if we didn't, our Chardonnays looked like water. Mm-hmm. And we wanted to keep all those phenolics. So we did not want the the browning to occur prior to fermentation. We wanted to get as much of a golden color as we could.

Uh So I was working with Grady One when he first started Sonoma Catraire, and he would use Brown Juice Club because he thought he had too many phenolics, too much bitterness and all that.

And so he wouldn't add SO2 at the crusher. Uh these days Like in Germany and in the Mosul. The difference between the Mosul and the Rhine is in the Mosul they'll actually add extra oxygen and then float they'll throw in some gelatin or pea protein and and and uh and then bubble in some air to float all the phenolics up onto the surface. come back the next morning and and rack out from underneath and now you're gonna make lean right uh reasoning it's that will aid

you know, thirty years. Uh so that's what he was doing with uh browning out his his Chardonnay, and we ended up with Chardonnay that had the same color. Uh uh so Then you have to keep track of what you did on each one of these. Uh he only had to add 50 parts per million to get his 25.

So then you need to measure and see where you go from there. And the whole trick is to get it into the bottle at about point five molecular uh So depending on where you are in terms of pH, i if if you're a home winemaker, you're probably gonna lose about fifteen parts per million. So you have to correct looking at the chart to see, okay, if I if I'm if I lose fifteen parts per million, where am I gonna be in terms of point five?

Uh and they're gonna lose that just because their setup is gonna be oxidative. Exactly. Okay. Right. Uh most commercial wineries lose about ten. And really anal you know Expensive lines like Beringer has a lose five. And that's just coming out of the court. Or the head space if you have a screw cap, which is a lot of e even if you drop liquid nitrogen, you score pretty hard to stay above uh

Uh below a below losing uh five PPM. Yeah. Yeah. So all right. So now red lines. This is where all the wheels come off. Okay. Um most winemakers are not aware of uh uh the work coming out of the University of Bordeaux that shows that uh red pigments I was gonna say Pat Howe recently in her thesis out of Cornell also verifies this, that you simply don't have any molecular SO two in red water.

As it be it's it's bound to pigments. But then it r uh the that's in rapid equilibrium with the free. So when you either do an aeration oxidation or uh uh an iodometric type titration, you're gonna think you have this molecular SO2 and you don't. uh also um The bound molecular is ineffective against the Cetobacter. Mm-hmm. People don't know this. And so even ETS will report your free SO two.

at uh you know you're at pH three point eight in a cabernet and they'll tell you well you have you know twenty parts free SO2 and they'll calculate the molecular Which is stupid because you will never smell SO two in a red wine. Uh it's just there isn't any headspace because there isn't any molecular, it's all bound. So I think that's that's the big news.

Um that the way you keep saying this, the way you guard against uh VA is to have a warmer cellar, so you have reactive phenolics, sixty or better. And uh um To have a healthy wine that hasn't been hung too long, so it has a an oxygen appetite that'll keep you from uh Uh yeah, keep the nutrient away from from sea to back.

So do you think there's speaking in terms of practical winemaking, is there a good use for SO2 winemaking? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you see that? Well well you remember I was talking about the vicinal diphenolscape. Okay, so so we got one and we g we got a diphenol here and we hit it with oxygen, becomes very reactive. It wants to go polymerize with some. Maybe it's another diphenol. Which is interesting when that happens it uh uh It becomes twice as reactive once it's a dimer.

the PKAs shift because of the alcohol substitution there. So uh so it's actually kind of a a homeopathic reaction. that when you challenge a young wine with oxygen it becomes more reactive against oxidation. Okay. The side reaction product to that is hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide uh will go after SO2. It's the fastest reaction known to chemistry. Uh ten to the minus twelfth seconds per mole. Um and so that's what the SO2 is there for, is to scavenge Estalheim.

And uh well scavenge the peroxide or if there is an acid aldehyde then then it'll bind to it uh the acid aldehyde bisulfide complex. Um so that's when you go from smelling your your bruised apple, the acid aldehyde, to quote unquote freshening up the wine, you bind up some of that acid aldehyde with acetone, you no longer smell that. That's right.

Those aldehydes. That's right. Now if you don't use SO two, you're gonna think you did a good thing'cause the wine is darker because the acid aldehyde will bind to the pigments and uh unbleach them. But that's not really a What did we cover everything? Uh oh, the other thing that's really interesting is uh like wine like this started off with a pH of three point nine five.

But over two years in the barrel react with SO two to make sulfuric acid and you know, it's a strong acid. So it raises the T A slightly, like And lowers the pH from 395 to 385. That only happens at really high pH. So by moving the TA you mean point oh five, not not half a gram per liter change. Half a gram per liter. That much? Really? Yeah. Well, that's not very much to take it all the way from nine five to to eight five.

I'm talking about grams per liter. Yeah. You know, I I really discourage people to talk about uh uh uh uh uh uh about uh grams per hundred ml. Right. That's very confusing. Very confusing. You know, if you're walking up the tank, you're really thinking about gallons. Uh and so let's say you want to add one gram per liter to a thousand gallon tank. Okay. Well

How many grams is that? Well, it's somewhere around 4,000 liters, so you should have one, you know, four uh four kilograms. About ten pounds. If you have a hundred pounds, you have a fighting chance to figure out that that's not right. But if you're trying to figure out how many hundred MLs you have in that tank, you're you're too much. I think there's been a change. I mean Yes. People don't talk about VA that way or Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so What is good smart use of SO two in in winemaking?

Or maybe win. Well, I I think I just went over uh you know, in in your modern whites you want to keep about about point eight in storage. Uh figure it out from the chart. Try to avoid really low pHs because the free SO2 in a wine at Ph two point nine. That you're trying to maintain is like five parts. But you're gonna pick up ten, right? So how are you gonna or even fifteen in a home line.

Um, so how the hell are you gonna get that where it belongs so that you don't smell SO2 uh but there's still a little bit there. Um so you're really much better at pH. try to stay a three two or something like that. Um and it that's what you do in white wines. In in reds just twenty to thirty parts free. regardless of PH of pH. Okay. Uh and you wanna stay out of the really high pHs, I think the right zone 37 for Pinot, 385 for Cab Sorab, Petit Sorra, Petit Verdeau, the big boys. Um

And I don't know how to do this with whites, but well I actually do. Uh Paul Fry is a genius that he he's able to make sulfite free whites that Tastes good. That tastes good and you'd never know it. It took him twenty years of making absolute crap. And he kind of worked it out. And his formula for whites is just never let the wine see any oxygen at all. But I make sulfite free reds.

The guy named uh Chip Cassidy handed me this book, God's Men and Wine by William Younger. Uh Younger was a uh ancient wine scholar and unfortunately died before the book was published, so he didn't get to do the book tour and people don't really know about this, but it's one of the Uh well Chip was the largest collector of books on wine in the English language and uh

Look for my pen to write oh here it is. Oh okay. So the book title is Gods, Men and Wine. By William Younger. Okay. Put that in the show notes. And one day, you know, Chip had forty five hundred books. uh largest collector of books on wine in the English language. And he walked up to me in two thousand and one and he handed me this book and he said, Here, this is the best book I got. Um And it has a lot of uh what the Egyptians were doing and the Phoenicians, but most of it's about

Roman wine making. And the Romans didn't like SO two. They had it, but they didn't like to use it in wine. They didn't like what it did. And so I make my sulfite free wines, I call them Roman reserve. And uh they're the best wines I make. And a lot of it came from that inspiration. I thought, Well, that's crazy. That can't be true. So uh in two thousand one I started making them with and without for a couple of years and then I said

you know, th the the sulfide free wines are way better. Uh I was working at that time with Syrah from Renaissance Vineyards up in North Yuba. Very reductive stuff. Uh, a lot of tannin, volcanic soil. And uh then I started working with Cabernet Franc up in Lake County. And the uh the the Pierce family up in in northern Humboldt. We make a Meritage and a and a Syrah from up there. And the Syrah is 2013, you know, we just bottled it. Really? Yeah. And it's it's fabulous.

Um so I've been doing it since then, I guess that makes it uh uh twenty two vinages and uh like I said they're they're my best wines. But you have to know what you're doing. Like you'll the last you know, you got a hundred little segments in my class.

Cell 53 white making is the last one because you gotta understand about microbiome, you gotta understand about structure, you gotta understand about s sweet spots, you have to understand, you know, the whole progression of what you need to do in a vineyard to make uh you know, make and uh to cause to come into being and to extract. uh reactive color and tan and and uh and and then with oxygen build it into uh an integrated structure.

And uh and and and then you can do it. It it it's uh Like say it's like climbing an uh Mount Everest without an oxygen mass. You have to you have to be either a real master or a complete fool. I heard uh masters and maniacs, right? Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. But uh but it can be done. Uh the the biggest mistake you can make is the the low SO2. Mm. Why so? Well, because then you get all the disadvantages of both. And no benefits. You you you kill the wine's reductive strength.

Uh that's one of the things to know about SO two is that this Diphenol cascade I keep talking about is sent back to the starting gate eleven times out of twelve. by addition investor two. So like when you're microoxing right after fermentation, you got this carbonate and it's taking like sixty times what a barrel can give it. In terms of oxygen. Sixty milligrams per liter per month.

Turn around and add the SO two and that same wine will only take five. So people think SO two is an antioxidant, but in many cases it's not at all. Let's switch gears and let's talk about this video course'cause it's quite extensive. Yeah. Um I think I think you said maybe in the beginning that this is something you you had taught in person when the the pandemic came around. Perhaps you saw the opportunity to you know do this I'm just trying to stay alive. Uh yeah, uh it has six parts to it.

Uh the first one and I should say you Y if you've never made wine, you shouldn't take this course. You have to know what a barrel is and the difference between a barrel and a tank, you know, and just basic stuff. What is racking? Uh Uh and if if you don't know anything, then it's probably gonna be over your head. But you don't need any chemistry. In fact, it's maybe better if you don't.

Uh well that's good to hear because I know chemistry scares a lot of potential wine. Well and with good reason, because it's so badly taught in high school, you know. And not only that, if you don't know why you're doing this. You know, it's very hard to learn things when you think they're they have no relevance to your life. So m once people get into winemaking and they make a few mistakes that they don't understand

Then they take my course and they're motivated. Uh and they go, Okay, I hate chemistry, but I guess you better tell it to me anyway. Uh So we actually in the first part all we want to do is teach you the difference between pH and titratable acidity. T A. the you know, the the way the wine behaves chemically and microbiologically, which is determined by pH, and the way it tastes, which is determined by TH.

That's all I want to do. But we start at the very beginning with the atomic structure and the periodic table. Let me talk about uh the polarity of water and equilibrium and just there's a lot of little pieces that I pull out of freshman chemistry To allow you to understand that difference.

And so uh then by lunch on the first day we're that's where we are. And then we part two is about SO two and we use all those concepts like what is an acid, SO2 is an acid, and it and it behaves in an equilibrium and it has three different species determined by pH. So we're we're sort of taking the theoretical principles from part one and taking them for a ride talking about how SO two works, which we've gone over a little bit. Uh then we get the course gets more and more practical.

And we kinda pick up speed and start talking about crush chemistry and uh what it Yeah, all the choices you have to make in uh uh you know in the vineyard and then during crush and how fermentations work and how you can get extraction. One of the things that most winemakers don't understand is that alcohol is not a solvent. Or color.

Mm-hmm. They think the higher the bricks, the more they'll get color and in fact exactly the opposite is true. You really have to water those musts down to about twenty-three bricks. if you want to get good extraction. And then you will make wines like this that are much denser and richer than you would get at high alcohol. And they'll also express themselves aromatically much better. That's counterintuitive for most people. I know.

Well, that's because they're working from theory rather than practice. They've never tried it. And I'll tell'em what to do and then they'll do half of what I said because they're scared. And then they'll come back and they'll go, Well, why do I have no color? And I go,'Cause you didn't do what I told you to do, yeah. Um so that's right. Um

Uh then we get into the cellar in part four. Can I pause you there real quick? Sure. I know from talking to a lot of people that wanted to learn winemaking, they have a lot of apprehension, a lot of fear about managing fermentation. How how do you re approach that in in terms of you know feeding yeast, knowing when and how and how much to feed yeast? Um Because I think it's overly simple to take the old Christian Butzky formula of at this bricks you need this many PPM nitrogen.

Um, if you're looking for extraction, if you're looking for a healthy fermentation, you don't just throw more Twinkies in there. You need'em to eat their oatmeal. And that means getting the micronutrients out of the way. And that's not going to happen if you just throw in tons of DH. Um, that's kind of a modern winemaking approach to to what is really essentially a postmodern problem. Would you mind describing how you you uh uh teach the

Fermentation management in in this video course? What what are sort of the uh outlines or the way you have people think about well I start in the vineyard uh talking about How to manage water, prior to various, how to manage the canopy, uh how to how to push the vine from vegetal growth to uh what we call cycle two to reproductive biology. And then once we've got that play around with the irrigation. We need to pick the grapes when they're ripe but not overripe.

And uh that involves learning how to inspect the fruit. So I'm a big fan of uh very sensory analysis uh by uh Uh well it was uh French guy named Jacques Rousseau, uh, who then got translated by some Australians, uh, uh John Whiting and Erica Winter, uh, and it's a great book. Uh So learning learning how to Wha what was that book called? It's called Berisensory Assessment. Okay. B B S A. Um Gee, I'm trying to remember how the whole course works. I I I talk a lot about how to adjust pH

So that you end up in the desirable zones. And the weird thing is they spent all morning talking about this, but the bottom line is you should adjust all your musts. And I'm talking about at the moment of crush. Early, early. The juice stage, regardless of you know, this is this is before skin soak. If you measure the pH at that point, you want to adjust to 3.45. we can be talking about Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet, and they will all naturally drift into where they belong.

If you just start at three, four, five. Yeah, I've never heard anyone present it that way before. I mean I know y you know, your pH is going to be For s especially reds lowest at that early point in time before you you have the the buffer capacity really coming into play. That's right. Um so I think you know a lot of people wait a few days to see and they and you should to know what your bricks is.

But the pH won't change. Uh uh well, it does change. But but if you knew what it was before your buffer capacity came in, then that's the Otherwise you just have to guess. So if you wait twenty four hours, then we kind of figure you're gonna go from three four five to three five five. That's your new target. If you do a cold soak, then probably three six five is the thing.

Um so you think managing pH, especially earlier if you have stated, is perhaps more important than focusing on on nutrient additions? Would that be correct to say or is that? Well, the problem, especially for home winemakers, is they have no way to determine what the nutrient additions are. That's true. Uh but with a you know, in a commercial winery, I I think at least having a ballpark idea of what your nutrients are is is an awfully good idea. Um

You know. I I shoot for like one twenty five, maybe one fifty. So if I'm below one hundred, then I'll add I I I never use DAP. But uh you know, like an a an amino addition. Okay, so we're talking about the the the yen, your your nitrogen parts per million. Okay. But it You know, lots of California fruit comes in at four hundred and then people throw in some nutrient anyway and the next thing you know they're they're dry, you know, the next two days. Yeah, it's like having

Gobbled up any any of the macron nutrients, the micronutrients that that could have helped them control microbiology. Right. I think that's important to end in that nutrient desert, right? Now I'm in the middle of of uh writing an expose. on the on the Foss, the wineskin. I think it's a complete piece of junk and it's very expensive.

Uh, but the only thing I mean it just it's never calibrated correctly and it'll tell you your pH is three point five when it's really three point nine. It's really a piece of junk. But I'll I'll get a FOSS scan just to get a ballpark idea of where the nitrogen is. Okay. It's the only thing that's good.

So I took us off track a little bit there. I appreciate your comments on it though. You were starting to talk about sellering, moving into that next phase of Right, right. So then then the French call it Elev. This is the word for raising horses, uh or if a child is w i is is well bred. They say he's Bian. So so we're kind of raising the wine. There really there isn't an American or e uh excuse me, an English equivalent to that, except maybe

like raising the wine. Uh it's not passive. So aging is kinda let the wine sit there. Uh but here we're we're coming in with bunch of different tools uh and uh Y you know, setting the wine up for for good microbiology and and you know, its wine trajectory, whatever that is, for early release or long aging reserve wine or uh wine's kinda like baseball.

So I think most California wineries, especially in the so called coastal, you know, twenty dollar wines, they're just hitting pop flies. They just want the wine to be fruity and they don't really care if it falls apart. Comes down in the infield. Uh table winds properly are like line drives, so they have a sort of a flat trajectory and they they get out there in the outfield and then if you really want to swing for the fences uh with wine like that, then it should be fairly reductive.

Still gaining altitude when it leaves the infield. It's the only way. So you see what I mean? Trying to make a wine that tastes wonderful when it's young and goes over the fences is sort of an attempt to defy gravity. So well there's a whole lot of tools in there and uh uh and of course a lot of it is managing oxygen at different stages. And Oak, of course. Uh and lease.

So that's what that section is about. And then the fifth section is spoilage and its treatment. So we get into VA, we talk about bread, we talk about um sulfides. Um people get really confused about the sulfides versus sulfites versus sulfates. And so I try to explain all that. And then that's kinda it for the modern winemaking, what I learned in school. And then the sixth part is postmodern winemaking and it's all about

uh all the all the things in solution chemistry that just don't work. That wine really isn't especially red wine is a s is a structured colloidal system Kind of like the difference between a consummate and a bisque. A bisque has structure and that's why it's more soulful. Uh and and so You know, it is it it's a big chapter and and gets into uh

I I think I think we've kind of covered what what we were doing. Right. It sounds a bit of an expansion of your your ideas covered in in the book and postmodern winemaking. Right. Um I loved one of your lines and just as you're you're you're starting the course. Everything I say might be wrong. Right, I say I'm not gonna tell you anything in this course that's true. Yeah. I'm a I'm a big fan of Richard Rorty. He's a postmodern philosopher. He's a pragmatist.

And and he says, truth is a compliment we pay to sentences that seem to be paying their way. So, you know, I'm... I'm offering a model that works for me. And that's all I got. It might be true. I'm sure a lot of it isn't true, but uh But it's worked for me pretty well. For well, I'm coming up on my sixty fourth vintage now and uh And I think I'm able to make wines that the ones I set out to do.

When I first drove into the Napa Valley in nineteen seventy two and it said the wine is bottled poetry. I don't know, that sure sounds like a bunch of bullshit. Stretch. But now I I think I've learned how to make the Well, I will say having had kind of the the normal didactic education from from U C Davis and someone who's tried to to learn even after school. Did a fantastic job of explaining what wine is, explaining how to think about wine making, uh, but it it really is a practical guide.

in I think you did a great job of identifying the the pain points, the the most difficult points in wine making where people don't necessarily know what to do. Uh and giving I giving people an idea of like, okay, well assess your situation, look at what your your you know, measure what you can, but then it's really a guide to how to make decisions of that. So I think

Um I'm I'm really excited that that you've made this course'cause it's it's fantastic. And you said it's about like about the individual videos, you know, they're only a few minutes long, most of them up to like twenty minutes. So I've already gone back and watched a few of them a few times. I think I think there must be close to a hundred videos. Individual videos, yeah. All together. It's something like twenty four hours.

Oh. But it's I think that's very helpful because that allows you to then go back and and re listen to rewatch what you're you're interested in. Uh I should state too that everyone that buys the course gets that that workbook from you, which is substantial. This guy right here, 550 pages. So it's that's a reference you'll use all your life.

Um and I think I'm I'm really glad that I did it. It was a lot more work than I should have did. But I learned a lot about uh videography and you know uh uh And, uh, the the original course, although people loved it, uh It's really drinking from a fire hose. If if you never get to stop. And you're getting a new idea every five minutes.

for a weekend. Mm-hmm. It kinda hurts your head. Yeah. And uh I think it's much better even if you do do the course. And I just got through doing it for the first time after the pandemic for the Winemaker magazine people. just uh two weeks ago. Um I gave him the online course too, because I know You just... You just can't get it all in one sitting and

The idea that you can then go back and especially when you actually run into a problem uh, you know, like a sulfide, let's say you just look at the section on sulfides, it's only ten minutes and and there it all is. So Um I think it's much easier to take, although people really do want me to do it in person. Oh yeah? Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean

That's always there and you're you're limited in your time and your physical presence, but having this to be able to go digitally is is super cool. So I think it's a great resource. Um it's about time to wrap this up, but Okay. Anything else you wanna to to chat about before we Anything you think we missed that's important to mention? Otherwise I got a couple last questions and then Or so I I think we're doing okay. Okay. So one sure I'm sure later I'll

Um oh yeah, my cooking show. Okay, what's this? I have uh uh on um YouTube. My YouTube channel is Winesmith1. And there's a there's about twenty-five episodes of a cooking show about called Gracious Living in the Time of Corona. And the basic idea is Hey, if you're stuck at home, What are you making a cheeseburger for? Why don't you make a duck breast? Cost about the same and there's no cork it. And uh yeah, this just simple recipes that anybody can do.

I'm a huge fan of my Phillips air fryer. Very cool. And uh yeah. Did you get into the air fryer during the pandemic? Like everyone's yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love that thing. Yeah, I've got all this other stuff, you know, I've got my Foreman grill and all these other Late night TV inventions all stacked up in my garage. I never use any of them.

Okay, one of the questions I like to ask people when they come on the podcast, uhhuh and you mentioned growing up in New New Jersey. Yeah. Uh what did your childhood smell like? What is that middle brain sense that makes you think of of growing up? Well New Jersey is very green. I mean, people think of Hoboken and they think it must smell like smoke, but uh no, uh most it really is the garden state and uh

You know, the only other place I've been that has all of those shades of green is Ireland. Um, so, you know, summer meadows and and then the You know, the smell of the first snowfall which has a little ozone in it and uh I I really missed those. To me, California smells dead. Compared to com compared to the east coast, uh m w western Massachusetts is like that too. Uh

Yeah, I I r I re and you you remember these things. Oh, I gotta tell you a funny story about the smell of my grandmother was a terrible baby. And when I was four years old, she would uh she wanted to go to the grocery store and I was I was n not an easy child to tend and so Why am I not surprised? So she used to lock me in her closet with her furs and this exposed bulb and She loved lavender sachet.

So when I go to the Anderson Valley, which I love, you know, the wines they're not like Russian River wines. They're not like black cherries. They're not fruity. They're they're full of lavender and I know what's gonna happen. I'll go up to Jim Klein's place and he'll give me his his uh ancien method Pinot Noir and I know I put my nose in that and bam, I'm back in that fucking closet.

Very cool. All right. Uh so w we will we'll provide links to the the video course. I I hope everyone can check that out'cause it's it's truly a tremendous resource and You know, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for making this so I don't have to. You're welcome. All right. Thanks, Clark. This is been. Okay, thank you for listening. If you're interested in the course, Check out the website insidewinemaking.com. Up top I have a tab called Winemaking Video Course.

You can get the link through there, make sure and use the code inside winemaking all caps, that's important. All caps that gets you twenty five dollars off the video course. And it also helps support this podcast. I'm going to take a couple minutes now to talk about details of the course itself. So this is 18 hours on demand video, full lifetime access.

Access on mobile and TV. The description is this popular six-part program provides insights into the interplay of chemical reactions that occur in wine and in winemaking. Establishing the necessary background for informed decisions on wine processing. This is a course in winemaking theory and practice and does not provide training in methods of wine and knowledge.

First, it summarizes freshman chemistry concepts of atomic structure, the periodic table, nomenclature, and polarity, and uses them to illustrate the difference between pH and Ta. That's important. So that says an introduction to chemical equilibrium. Next it considers all aspects of sulfur dioxide in wine as a case study in wine chemistry.

Next it moves from the theoretical to the practical, as it delves into crush chemistry techniques, finding, spoilage treatment choices, and explores wine's phenolic structure and reductive properties. Discussions include vine balance, ripeness, fermentation strategies, oxygenation, uses of oak, microbial stabilization strategies, and emerging winemaking technologies such as microox and reverse osmosis.

As soon as you enroll, a hard copy of the 550 page syllabus will be mailed to you containing hundreds of articles on a wide variety of winemaking topics. You will use this as a ready reference for many years to come. In the what you'll learn section, I'm gonna go over the bullets here. So you will learn principles of vineyard analogy for growing high quality grapes. Determination of harvest maturity, a system for achieving targeted pH and TA in fermentation, cellaring and bottling.

Correct management of sulfur dioxide. That's a real big one. Understanding of finding for heat and cold stability in tannin management. Methods of microbial stability and treatment of spoilage, tannin terminology, principles of phenolic extraction, structural integrity, aromatic integration, and graceful longevity.

There we go. Requirements Participants should have a basic grasp of the winemaking process. No knowledge of chemistry is required. If you've understood most of this podcast or even some of this podcast, you're going to understand this. I'm super excited to offer this to everyone. Check out the website insidewinemaking.com, the tab winemaking video course. Use the code inside winemaking, save yourself twenty-five dollars. For the podcast. Thank you so much. All right. Catch you next time.