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The Colloidal Counter-Enlightenment. Why you should read Clark Smith’s Postmodern Winemaking
May 22, 2023
When I came across this book, it captivated me instantly. It is an advanced enological manual, with emphasis on colloidal chemistry, abundant with formulas and charts, but most of all, it is a treatise on epistemology. In a broader perspective, it scrutinizes how the fallacies of modern, so-called ‘rational’ worldview can lead to naïve scientism and the adoption of practices that are plainly harmful, and eventually make things worse in many fields. Winemaking is a particularly good example for such examination. This field is vivid, emotional and illustrative, and it is relatively harmless and safe to critically examine—if the author had written such a book on healthcare, where the modern professional standards explicitly require to deny any anecdotal evidence and dismiss everything that doesn’t backed by the number of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals, he would have been immediately marginalized.
Despite our scientific institutions are in general more useful than harmful, sometimes they fail. You probably have come across the news mentioning some ‘scientific’ studies, published in peer-reviewed journals, which claimed to ‘prove’ with some randomized controlled trials that there was no difference between ‘cheap’ and ‘expensive’ wine1. Obviously, I don’t have to tell you that this ‘science’ has nothing to do with reality and simply arrogantly misleading. If you take a closer look to these publications, you will soon find out that the studies were ridiculously badly arranged (for example, a popular YouTube video2 on the matter features oddly-shaped plastic cups instead of functional wine glasses), let alone the very idea that price should be uniformly linked to straightforward organoleptic value shows that the authors had little to no expertise in the field they challenged. However, if an article is published in a peer-reviewed journal, it is considered scientific and therefore superior to anything else written outside certain institutions. These examples of aggressive ignorance disguised as science aren’t mentioned in Postmodern Winemaking, obviously because they are too ridiculous, but many others, directly connected to the winemaking process, are vividly exposed.
This arrogant nihilistic ignorance can be viewed as one of the rotten fruits of the Enlightenment, which—pushed to the extremes—resulted in a system of beliefs that the world is fundamentally material and cognizable; the knowledge should be unambiguous and uncontroversial; that we can study the whole by scrutinizing its parts and that we can find universal best practices suitable for the whole industry. Although it was useful as it helped to beat the ever-presenting human temptation to rely on supernatural, it encourages linear thinking and longing for simple universal models, partly because Newton’s physics worked exceptionally well for describing celestial mechanics, partly because the equality is a fundamental virtue of the Enlightenment, which can be inferred to universalism and uniformity. Square grids of American cities and gray blocks of Soviet paneled buildings are also among its results. In moral philosophy, that system of beliefs defined Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative.
I grew up in the former city of Königsberg, where the figure of Immanuel Kant was raised to a cult, although actually nobody read him because the writings of that kind were impossible to read by a human being, but I never liked the idea that I should judge my actions on whether or not they could be generalized to a higher law. However, Kant wasn’t Königsberg’s only philosopher. Apart from great Hannah Arendt who also spent her youth in this city, there lived a less-known Kant’s contemporary, Johann Georg Hamann, a prominent author who represented the Counter-Enlightenment movement. The opposite to hyper-rational, tremendously boring universalist Kant, Hamman avoided generalization, valued context, paid attention to subjective aesthetical and existential experience, sometimes on the edge of mystics, and the role of language in defining the way we think—a truly postmodern thinker by today’s standards. Clark Smith mentioned that he himself was taught at the university by Noam Chomsky, who definitely could be the reason for Smith’s affinity to postmodernism as the way of thought; I hope the teacher happened to have a pleasure of reading the book of his student.
The philosophers of the Counter-Enlightenment weren’t very famous during the age of rationality. It was Isaiah Berlin, a philosopher and the author of the concepts of positive and negative freedom, who was the first to draw public attention to this intellectual phenomenon, having written on the 18th century philosophers for whom the rigid frames of constrained rationality and rigorous reductionism were too tight: Hamann, Giambattista Vico, Johann Gottfried Herder and, well, Joseph de Maistre, the least likeable of the breed—all of them stand surprisingly closer to the 20th century continental philosophy than Kant and Descartes. Reading certain passages of Postmodern Winemaking, I had a feeling that they could have been written by Ernst Jünger, an admirer of Hamann and Vico and a wine connoisseur with serious tasting experience, if he had turned to the matter of wine more seriously. Given the author’s erudition, I hardly believe that it is a mere coincidence. (I’m also pretty sure that those deliberately provocative passages were included mainly for the purpose of trolling of the academic world—for example, where he used the initial ancient, not today’s conventional notion of homeopathy). What also Clark Smith shares with Ernst Jünger is the affinity to efficient machinery that doesn’t come into contradiction with the appreciation of aesthetics and eagerness to catch the transcendental. A postmodern winemaker combines the archetypes of the Peasant, the Priest and the Worker.
So what is postmodern winemaking? Let us start with modern one. Max Weber popularized the term disenchantment to describe the worldview shift from religious mysticism and folklore superstitions to scientific rationality, technology and reductionism, from the perception that the world is fundamentally fully unexplainable to the illusion that the world is already explained. Wine, of course, being simultaneously an example and a metaphor for transmutation, always had a touch of divine. The process of its disenchantment began in the middle of the 19th century by Louis Pasteur and achieved its pinnacle by the 1970s, in particular in three countries—in the United States, in the Soviet Union and in Germany, where wine became perceived as a mere commodity that could be made in a perfectly reproducible way by a refined technological process, a consumer product almost entirely deprived from its cultural and historical background and sophisticated emotional properties.
In Germany, the catastrophe of replanting valuable old vines with highly productive new clones, the new capabilities for cold stabilization and sterile filtration led to the country’s eventual poor reputation as a producer of the tons of sweet white quaffer. Germany’s Wine Law of 1971 established Brix as the one and only measure of value and allowed to use Grosslagen, the designations of origin that used the name of a most famous vineyard for the broad vicinity of it completely regardless soils and expositions—don’t confuse it with entirely opposite Grosse Lagen, the vineyards within the later unofficial classification devised to overcome the deficiencies of the law.
In the Soviet Union, a name of a wine became synonymous with its ‘technological recipe’: for example, Crimea’s prominent Red Stone Muscat Blanc made by Massandra originally had a terroir designation in its name as the Red Stone is a name of a particular rock, but from a certain time it had been made from the Muscat Blanc grapes with a high Brix value regardless of the vineyard’s location. Then they began to vinify it at different wineries owned by Massandra; these wineries had very different equipment (for example, some had stainless steel tanks and some had only concrete tanks without cooling), they were run by different chief winemakers. The company effectively began to counterfeit their own top product. This approach is still widely practiced by them—when I had a conversation with one of Massandra’s top managers, they genuinely didn’t understand why I was so embarrassed about it.
In the United States, winemaking was dominated by the UC Davis school of thought, which virtually denied any influence of soil apart from water retention, and even the mere existence of the phenomenon of minerality in wine. Extensive hanging time and the related overripe style were popular. Bigger was better. Moreover, back on those days it was considered that oxygen can produce only adversary effects on red wine, and fully protective winemaking was practiced even for high-tannin varieties. ‘Scientific’ approach successfully prevented many flaws that troubled winemakers of the past, but drastically reduced complexity, longevity and overall aesthetic appeal—‘commercial’ wines that we can refer as ‘modern’ became undistinguishable from each other and simply boring. If you are particularly interested in the history of California wine, you can find more about it in the book of Jon Bonné The New California Wine, where he exposes the evolution of the region’s style to the ridiculousness of 28 Brix in Cabernet.
As an opposition to wine commodification driven by reductionism in the late 20th century, the biodynamic and Natural Wine movement emerged. We can fairly describe Biodynamics as a mixture of as organic agriculture, astrology, homeopathy and occult rituals. By no means it is a return to traditions—quite the opposite, it is a cult created anew in the 1980s by Loire winemaker Nicolas Joly who happened to come across an early 20th century book written by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian esotericist and occultist. Biodynamics not only guides a winemaker by the astrological calendar, but obliges him or her to perform even more absurd practices—to bury horns stuffed with cow manure in a pit for a year in order to collect some vital energy from the sun, then dissolve that manure in water stirring it clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on the purpose of the preparation, to charge the water with that vital energy. That’s how Preps 500 and 501 are made, and they are essential for obtaining the biodynamic certification. In contrast to Biodynamics, the Natural Wine movement has no certifications and standards, but its followers generally have more or less extreme Luddite views, with particular aversion to yeast inoculation and the means of microbiological control. As the result, ‘natural’ wines frequently feature some type of microbiological spoilage, or even all types at once.
Smith’s concept of Postmodern Winemaking suggests a better answer to reductionism in winemaking and commodification of wine than Biodynamics and Natural Wine. The first fallacy of a reductionist is the conviction that we should disregard any traditional practices for which we don’t have definitive explanations, preferably with known chemical equations. The irony is that in the 1980s we didn’t have chemical equations for many enological phenomena, but now we have them—the faculty of UC Davis shouldn’t have been that arrogant back then. Postmodern Winemaking highly values advanced scientific knowledge, but exposes and rejects naïve scientism. It combines a very advanced level of academic enology with the empiric practices proved by tradition and backed by own careful observations. It also pays a lot of attention to subjective experience and aesthetics, to the cultural and emotional aspects of wine.
To equal ‘anecdotal evidence’ with no evidence is also a fallacy—some observations are hard to quantify, let alone reproduce in a controlled environment. In the late 1970s, in UC Santa Cruz a group of young scientists played with an analog computer and discovered some intriguing phenomena which they called strange attractors; they noticed how in chaotic dynamical systems defined by differential equations sensible to boundary conditions some complex patterns can emerge. The group is regarded as founding fathers of Chaos theory, an interdisciplinary field that explores nonlinearity and emerging complexity—how things can interact with each other in the ways unpredictable from the reductionist point of view, and how tiny deviations in initial conditions can result in huge outcome differences. An example of such kind of nonlinearity in winemaking is the practice of Syrah and Viognier coextraction in Côte-Rôtie. When I happened to attend winemaking courses, I asked my instructor, a Montpellier graduate, about the local belief that separate vinification didn’t work as well as if they would have been vinified together, and he answered that this practice wasn’t backed by science and one should definitely vinify these varieties separately. Well, from Clark Smith’s book I learned that now we know that a chemical compound called quercetin found in the skins of some white grapes, including Viognier, dramatically facilitates the extraction of anthocyanins, which in turn are necessary for graceful tannin polymerization, which is needed for silky mouthfeel and aromatic integration. Even tiny 3% of Viognier in a blend—a typical proportion for the region—can make a big difference. Previously we had only anecdotal evidence for that, because things like texture and aromatic integration, which are defined not by the concentration of chemical compounds but by the colloidal structure, are painfully difficult to measure. But now we have the explanation for the centuries-old practice. Although the principles of Chaos theory are clearly seen throughout the whole book, the Santa Cruz group is never explicitly mentioned—to not overload the reader, I believe. However, it seems that Smith’s favorite California appellation is Santa Cruz Mountains which is adjacent to the group’s workplace and which produces Chardonnays with remarkable minerality—due to complex nonlinear effects related to biodiversity in soil. If you are eager to go further in getting rid of a reductionist mindset, you should pay attention to the wonderful book by James Gleick that is called Chaos: Creating a New Science, which describes many aspects of the matter in the captivating and entertaining way.
The book Postmodern Winemaking consists of four parts. The first and the longest one, Principles, is mostly focused on colloidal chemistry in winemaking. Tannins, anthocyanins and aromatic compounds in red wine, having different electrical charges, tend to aggregate into tiny beads called colloids. They define structure, texture and aromatic integration in a very literary sense. Colloids don’t pass through sterile filters. To form a pleasant mouthfeel, graceful aromatic integration and longevity in a bottle a wine needs oxygen exposure during élevage, because tannins have to undergo oxidative polymerization—what is also called a vicinal diphenol cascade reaction. During this process, anthocyanins work as a terminator for a tannic polymer chain. The relationship between red wine and oxygen are highly nonlinear—the initial microoxygenation enhances the ability of a wine to absorb oxygen during aging and withstand oxidation. There is a simple machine called the Warburg apparatus for measuring the reductive strength of a wine. Have you ever seen it at wineries? If you have, please let me know.
A chapter dedicated to oak aging is called The Seven Functions of Oak—can you name at least five? There a lot of useful information on the chemistry behind the influence of Q. alba, Q. robur and Q. sessiflora with various degrees of toast, but I find particularly interesting the author’s intention to demarginalize chips, staves and cubes—a quick reminder that postmodernism doesn’t equal to traditionalism.
But it is not limited to colloids and tannins. Perhaps, the most controversial chapter in this part is called Speculations on Minerality, and there is nothing of coquetry in this title. It is one of the most interesting chapters also. Minerality has been a highly controversial topic for decades, and the author picked the just right tone to be taken seriously. You probably heard many times that you can’t perceive soil as a spicebox for a wine, but, according the chapter, it seems that at least in certain cases you fairly can. But there is a lot more—and I won’t deprive you of the pleasure of reading it by yourself.
The second part, Practices, is dedicated to people, their attitudes and personalities. Most of them can’t be called postmodern winemakers; instead, the author investigated mavericks. He generally doesn’t advocate for their practices and attitudes, but quite the opposite—sometimes he is fairly open that the oddness of some of his heroes originates not from valuable insights, but from the lack of training (the chapter Winemaking’s Lunatic Heroes) or from susceptibility to the most outlandish ideas (the chapter about Randall Grahm). But what is remarkable is that Clark Smith, covering the projects he would never join himself, writes with deep and genuine respect for these people—they put their own fortunes and lifetimes at stake in the pursuit of knowledge, at least creating valuable data for future studies.
The third part, Technology, is devoted to machines. Jon Bonné in his book The New California Wine mentions Clark Smith as a wine scientist and a founder of Vinovation, a manufacturer of reverse osmosis equipment. For Bonné, Clark was not an evangelist of artistic approach to winemaking, but more of an anti-hero whose machines contributed to the degenerate overripe style of Napa Cabernets—however, I should mention that Bonné’s book was published before Smith’s one. Reverse osmosis techniques have their fair share in Smith’s book, as well as pressing equipment, filters (and their shortcomings) and a new technology called Flash Détente that combines thermal vinification with vacuum extraction. As a byproduct, it unexpectedly proved a previously dubious anecdotal evidence that the wine incorporates the aromatics of the vineyard’s surroundings. Isolated in a condensate created by the machine, this distillate was called ‘air-oir’ by the stunned inventors—the details about the aromas they managed to isolate are incredible.
The conclusive part, Philosophy, examines institutional beliefs. How we can judge the wines of the New World if we don’t have any standards of typicity for them? What technologies should be legally allowed in winemaking, and why? Why did so many people make the question of yeast inoculation an existential one? The part also contains a chapter on Biodynamics, and I approached it with anxiety—given the author’s provocative passages earlier in the book. But there was no need to worry: it turned to be a brilliant essay on epistemology, on how we obtain and verify knowledge, and how ridiculous ideas may eventually lead to valuable discoveries. He scrutinizes every biodynamic practice, once again, maintaining utterly respecting attitude, refraining from mockery and not excluding any possibility. But Preps 500 and 501 are yet beyond the limits he can tolerate—they, after all, are perfect Russell’s teapots. But, in contrast to Natural Wine Nonsense (it is a title of the book’s most merciless chapter), Biodynamics are, after all, consistent. There is only one piece in the book that I resist to accept—Liquid Music: Resonance in Wine. It proposes a suggestion that certain sparse alcohol concentrations make wine substantially more pleasant than the rest of the spectrum. To be honest, it seems quite implausible to me, and I suspect some noise was mistaken for a signal in the presented chart—but I would be glad to acknowledge that I was wrong if I could get my hands on a reverse osmosis machine and experience the effect myself.
However, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Postmodern Winemaking by Clark Smith is probably the most significant book on wine I ever read, although I read a lot and it is rather difficult to impress me; I was disappointed by much more wine books than I enjoyed. It is impossible for a person who isn’t a practicing winemaker to memorize all details of this work at once, and I suppose that rereading it periodically once in several years may happen to be very beneficial to any person in the world of wine. Similar to a good postmodern novel, like The Name of the Rose, it contains many layers and can be enjoyed by many audiences—different readers will find it fascinating regardless how deep they dive.
Postmodern Winemaking, Clark Smith, University of California Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-520-27519-5
Ilya Zabolotnov
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