Clark Smith is a winemaker and Senior Enologist for WineSmith Consulting and Wines. He is the Founder and Coordinator of the International Smoke Taint Collaborative Working Group, President of Redwood Chordsmen Barbershop Harmony Chapter, Santa Rosa, and Coordinator for Sonoma County Youth Harmony Day Camp featuring Deke Sharon.
Clark has dedicated four decades as an author, winemaker, inventor, professor of wine technology, and founder of four prominent wineries. In 2018, he was named among the 48 Most Influential People in the Wine Industry, in 2016 named the Wine Business Monthly Innovator of the Year, and in 2013 the Wine and Spirits Magazine named Postmodern Winemaking the Book of the Year.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Clark Smith describes the harmonic combination of wine and music
- Why music can enhance or diminish the flavor of wine
- How is the tannic aftertaste useful to Barefoot Chardonnay?
- The adventure of your palate while drinking JaM Cellars’ Butter Wine
- Clark plays a musical example that changes the astringency of tannin
- The importance of creating the musical aesthetic first to enhance your wine
- Discovering the musical ambiance of Meiomi Pinot Noir and Kendall-Jackson Cabernet Sauvignon
In this episode with Clark Smith
How do you create an environment harmonized by wine? Is it possible to recreate a please-displease scale of emotions based on musical choices and the glass in your hand?
According to Clark Smith, the effects of pairing music and wine is evident after a matter of seconds. Through his research, Clark understands the link between musical emotions and the possession of the flavor of the wine. Are you ready to immerse your senses in this episode?
Drew Thomas Hendricks and Clark Smith, winemaker and Senior Enologist for WineSmith, open up the cork in this episode of the Legends Behind the Craft podcast to discuss the emotional composition of pairing music with wine. Clark talks about how music brings out the different textual components of wine, the steps to begin your harmonized musical-wine arrangement, and together they sample a musical playlist with wine.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
- Barrels Ahead
- Drew Thomas Hendricks on LinkedIn
- Clark Smith on LinkedIn
- Who Is Clark Smith
- Wine and Music Pairing – A companion site to A Practical Guide to Pairing Wine & Music
- Dwight Furrow on LinkedIn
- Beauty and the Yeast: A Philosophy of Wine, Life, and Love by Dwight Furrow
- Barefoot Cellars Chardonnay
- JaM Cellars’ Butter Chardonnay
- Meiomi Pinot Noir
- Kendall-Jackson Grand Reserve 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon
- Dr. Jeff Daiter and Josh Daiter on Legends Behind the Craft
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Barrels Ahead.
Barrels Ahead is a wine and craft marketing agency that propels organic growth by using a powerful combination of content development, Search Engine Optimization, and paid search.
At Barrels Ahead, we know that your business is unique. That’s why we work with you to create a one-of-a-kind marketing strategy that highlights your authenticity, tells your story, and makes your business stand out from your competitors.
Our team at Barrels Ahead helps you leverage your knowledge so you can enjoy the results and revenue your business deserves.
So, what are you waiting for? Unlock your results today!
To learn more, visit barrelsahead.com or email us at hello@barrelsahead.com to schedule a strategy call.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Legends Behind the Craft podcast where we feature top leaders in the wine and craft beverage industry with your host Drew Thomas Hendricks. Now let’s get started with the show
Drew Thomas Hendricks 0:20
Drew Thomas Hendricks here. I’m the host of the Legends Behind the Craft podcast where I talk with leaders in the wine craft beverage industry. See I’ve got a special experiential tasting, put together by Clark Smith on pairing wine and music. Today’s episode is sponsored by Barrels Ahead. At Barrels Ahead, we work with you to implement a one of a kind marketing strategy. One that highlights your authenticity tells your story and connects you with your ideal customers. In short, we help wineries and craft beverage producers unlock their story to unleash their revenue. Go to barrelsahead.com today to learn more. I’m super excited to talk today with Clark Smith. Clark is a winemaker for his own brand WineSmith and a consultant to hundreds of winery clients. He’s made wine for 61 vintages including 14 in the southern hemisphere. In addition to wine, he has half a century of musical credentials as a folk singer songwriter, choral tenor, and barbershop quartet baritone in 2016, wine business monthly named him Innovator of the Year and listen among the 48 most influential people in wine. Clark’s revolutionary book postmodern winemaking was wine and spirit magazine’s 2013 Book of the Year. And today, we’re talking with Clark about his new ebook, A Practical Guide to Pairing Wine & Music. Welcome to the show, Clark.
Clark Smith 1:37
Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. Drew, thanks for the invite.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 1:41
It’s a pleasure to have you here. And it’s a it I am. I’ve been waiting for this all week. So we are walking through for four wines that you’ve set up for us along with music, and we’re gonna kind of chat and kind of see what the how wine is paired with music, then I’m gonna play with your head. Yes, I can’t wait. So before we start, give us a little background of on you and how, how this wine and music pairing has evolved?
Clark Smith 2:06
Well, it It all started in 1992, I was a consultant for the Benziger family. And that was back when Glen Ellyn Chardonnay was just growing by leaps and bounds and we had a lot of money. And so we had a huge staff, we had a rep, in, in all 50 states and seven Canadian provinces, we had 57 reps, and 40 winemakers. And we would all go out in the woods every three months or so to do something called quality symposium where we would, you know, press the envelope and think outside the box. And so I was one of the hired screwballs that would come in and try to make people’s heads a funny shape. The other guy that did this was guiding Don Blackburn. And he and I, both educated in France, and we were not big fans of the Davis aroma wheel. The idea is that wine cannot be understood the appeal is it is what we call an emergent property of the whole, you can’t understand wind by looking at its pieces, you have to look at the whole line. And the day was opinion was that then you couldn’t design statistical experiments that where you can show whether an effect was was real behind certain in certain criterion of, of doubt. So he wanted to prove that wasn’t true. He said, You can do experiments, you can do holistic experiments, you, you just you have to be smart about it, you have to figure out how to do it, it’s not impossible. And so he poured three wines, it was a Beaujolais Nouveau, a period of war and a big bad Cabernet off the Benziger estate. And he played three pieces of music and he asked us to pair them up. Now there’s six ways you can do that. And so that if it was a random effect, then there should be 16% in each box, but we actually ended up with 86% of respondents all in one box. Really, and and it was, it was a Mozart divertimento, which is kind of a silly like piece. And everybody paired that with the nouveau Beaujolais and then there was a friends list thing and a lot of French horns and violas and stuff and everybody paired that with the piano. And then he played Carmina Burana, the the opening of the Carl or opera, which is, you know, kind of brings up, you know, being dragged through hell and beaten with teens and stuff, very dark fuse. And that went with cabernet. And, you know, maybe that could have been just an intellectual exercise. But what really blew our minds is when he asked us to taste the Beaujolais with the Camino baronne piece. And it tasted horrible. So and it was so good with the divertimento, so just in a couple of seconds when completely transformed, and then he says, Okay, now let’s try the divertimento with the Cabernet and that was equally horrible. So that’s where it all came from. I never dreamed this up myself. I did write about it in the last chapter of postmodern winemaking, which is called Liquid music. And I have come to believe that wine really is liquid music. And it’s processed. Similarly in the brain, we, we it’s a new science that we call cognitive enology. And we’re sort of piggybacking on all the work that musicians have done. There’s a school of thought called cognitive musicology. A whole lot of brain scans and stuff that show that that harmony and dissonance are very important, buried in our sensory perception. And one works the same way.
So, after I published post modern winemaking, I’ve been teaching a class of fundamentals of modern wine chemistry since 1984. Then people said, Okay, well, that’s the basics. Now you got to talk about the postmodern view. And I said, Well, it isn’t one thing. Every winemaker will come up with a different interpretation. It’s a reaction to modernism. And in particular, the idea that wine is a chemical solution. It’s not, it’s a colloidal suspension, and that changes everything about how we look at wine. So what we decided to do was to have a roundtable discussion with 100, winemakers and they all brought a wine. So we’d pour 10,000 glasses over the course of a weekend. And just talk about stuff. Talk about biodynamics talk about minerality just a lot of the things that were in the book. And then we decided it didn’t seem like we could figure out people say never become a jazz musician or a winemaker unless you have to. And you know, there’s no money. So why are we doing this? What what is the appeal? And so we decided to invite Dr. Dwight Furrow to come in. He’s a philosophy professor at Mesa College down in San Diego. And he became one of our leaders, and we would give him the whole Sunday morning to look at what is the appeal of wine that’s different from other beverages, that causes people to throw their lives away? In a you know, it’s only it’s very difficult, and there’s no money in it. Why would we do that? And, and so he finally ended up writing a book called Beauty and the yeast, which is his, his condensation of what, what we gathered from those several years of conversation about why wine makers lose their minds. So then, he got hold of me last April, and he said, let’s write a short little book that explains how you pair wine and music. And so we did. And it just got out on as an e book about a month ago.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 9:38
And where can people find that ebook? That’s,
Clark Smith 9:41
well, what you want to do is go to pairingwineandmusic.com. And there’s a link to the book.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 9:50
Okay. I think he had it. I think he had the cover queued up for us. Yes, yes. Because I definitely want to get into the secret between why music and kind of how how wineries can leverage that. And ultimately taste through these and see see it and see the proof, proof, right? Experiential proof.
Clark Smith 10:09
Well, this is the website, you get here from pairing wine and music.com. Okay. And this is the cover of the book. So it kind of sets it all. And here’s where you can go to buy it, it’s 999. But even if you don’t buy the book, you can go to these playlists that we’ve set up for a couple dozen different wine types here. And those will take you to Spotify. For example. Here’s a well I’m gonna I’m gonna use this later the Mac old style of Chardonnay sort of fun. Oh, Chardonnay, and you’ve got a whole downloadable playlist here. So
Drew Thomas Hendricks 11:10
pastic everyone has access to this? How awesome
Clark Smith 11:16
is right, yes, it’s totally free. You have set up a Spotify content that’s free. And then what we what what the book is about is how do you make your own playlists? How do you and your friends, you got this bottle of wine you’re going to have for dinner and you sit on the sofa for a few minutes and create your own playlist. So the book tells you how to do that. And then we’ve got some other applications for you. It’s actually fairly easy to take a single wine. You have to figure out what the emotional modality of the wine is. For example. The way to ruin a Cabernet Sauvignon is to play a Polka Cabernets. They’re kind of manic depressive they they like dark angry music. They like they like the doors and they like Beethoven’s Fifth D minor part and they and they like Metallica. So we’ll play around with that a little bit later. But
Drew Thomas Hendricks 12:31
why would you pair with a Polka White Zinfandel? Why is infidel on Polka there we go guys.
Clark Smith 12:40
You know sort of earned a pokey she’s really happy go lucky kind of wine. Like it.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 12:49
So I can’t wait to dive into this if we want to. This is This is incredible. Now going forward, though you’ve you’ve worked with wineries like we’ve talked in our pre show, we were talking about some of the work you’ve done with wineries in their tasting rooms, optimizing their playlists,
Clark Smith 13:05
yeah, restaurants to have a whole chapter on each of those, that your problem in a restaurant is that you’ve got people drinking all different kinds of wine. And so you can’t use really, this exclusionary music that will make one wine tastes great. And something else tastes terrible. And we should get to that I
Drew Thomas Hendricks 13:32
want to Yeah, I
Clark Smith 13:33
don’t know. So let’s just understand I talked about because, hey, look, anybody that’s out there that’s watching this at this point and hasn’t actually tried it. If I were you, I would be extremely skeptical that there’s anything to this. And it isn’t until you actually have the experience that you know what I’m talking about. But anyway,
Drew Thomas Hendricks 13:56
we’ll put all the wines that we’re drinking today in the show notes. So if you want to set up your own little experiential tasting along with this video, you can oh yeah, just
Clark Smith 14:05
pause this thing go out to the store. And those are. Those are four easy to find ones.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 14:13
Yeah. So what are we starting with here?
Clark Smith 14:17
Well, I think the first thing I want to do is go ahead and demonstrate this effect so that you can you can see it and we’ve got this is the Barefoot Chardonnay. Yep,
Drew Thomas Hendricks 14:31
I’ve got it right here. All
Clark Smith 14:32
right. So tell me tell me what you see here. I see us well
Drew Thomas Hendricks 14:43
see a strong yellow color. Nice bright fruit.
Clark Smith 14:47
Yeah, it’s kind of gold versus Apple. And there’s no oak. No. And then I want you to pay particular attention. To the astringency the tannic harshness here. Okay, so this one has some sugar.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 15:09
Mm, yeah, there is a little residual on there for sure.
Clark Smith 15:13
And that would be really annoying if it weren’t for the fact that it also has what we call hard tannin. And that’s from it’s the same thing. You know, he tried to get your last nickels worth out of a tea bag, you wrap the string around the spoon and kind of smash it, you know, you get this kind of 10 tea bag tin. And it’s to me it’s made by Gallo they know what they’re doing. And I think you’ve got the right balance here of sugar and astringency so that the wine finishes clean. Does very simple one. So what we call the yummy style, it’s the
Drew Thomas Hendricks 16:05
picnic shard.
Clark Smith 16:07
Yeah, I think wine is like the movies. Okay. You want to figure out what the winemaker was trying to do. And in this case, it’s like a Disney comedy. You know, just like Netflix you got you got the stuff to make you smile. And then you have the action adventure films where you have action adventure wines, and the the butter over there as an action adventure wine. Oh, sort of the wild style where this one is the yummy style. And then I don’t make either one of those kinds of wine I make is basically dramas and foreign films. They don’t make you smile, and they don’t blow you away. They just kind of make you scratch your head. Stop things and make it go. And Alright, so we think of this stuff.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 17:04
The verifier is a very, very acceptable wine. I mean, I love it. I love it. But it’s not it’s there’s nothing wrong. Love is a very safe, it’s a nice safe Chardonnay. Yeah, free. Okay, clean, well made. It’s it’s like it fits the style. It’s exactly what you expect.
Clark Smith 17:24
And that astringency, you know why that’s there is they’ve got to press the Jesus out of out of those grapes. So they can make something that’s six bucks on the shelf. They’ve got to get very good yields, and some press pretty hard. Okay, so now let’s taste the butter. So now I got
Drew Thomas Hendricks 17:49
the bet the show the people there got the better Chardonnay here, which is going to be a little bigger. I would assume.
Clark Smith 17:57
That’s the whole point of it is to make something big.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 18:01
Yeah, you can see the color now is I mean, it’s it’s a substantially darker golden color. Yeah. Then then the barefoot
Clark Smith 18:09
and of course there’s lots of butter in the nose and also a lot of toast. And then a lot of alcohol, it’s a little bit bitter in the back. And if you really look for it, there’s actually some varietal character like pineapple. But it’s very tropical notes on it. Yeah, but just buried underneath all of that oak and in the butter, which is that’s the same thing as the, in the movie theater. They put this artificial butter on on the popcorn. So it’s basically the smell of a movie theater. Yeah. And it’s called diacid. Teal is made it comes from bacteria. So it’s been the same bacteria that make buttermilk. Hmm. Okay, now tasted. And what you’re going to see here is a different kind of 10 and this is not hard. 10 And, like we have the other one. It’s it’s very drying on the front half of the tongue and there’s also kind of a dead spot in the middle. That’s oak tannin. We call it parching. numbing, tannin. Okay. Yeah. I think it plays a balancing role here. If it wasn’t there, this one would be so it would be climbing you know, just be hard to drink because it’s so fast. So you have that kind of relieving of tannin there.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 19:41
And there yeah, there’s more going on in the palette than just kind of bright fruit and apples you get you get that buttery taste to get a little bit of a toasty kind of finished.
Clark Smith 19:51
Really manufactured wine. It says very little about the origin of the grapes.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 19:57
Night but if you’re looking for a buttery Well, the name says it all. Yeah, yeah.
Clark Smith 20:03
The advertising is very good. I hate ones like that, but they’re very popular. Okay, so now what do you have a favorite of these two? Between the two? I
Drew Thomas Hendricks 20:16
kind of have to admit I’ve had not had barefoot in a long time. I was kind of surprised. I liked the Barefoot one. You know, their Pinot Grigio was really good, isn’t it? I haven’t, I haven’t had it since Gallup took them over. Oh, I was while back. Yeah. I did myself there. Okay.
Clark Smith 20:33
Uh, now when we did this experiment for a bunch of winemakers and we also included that crazy sociably I was talking about we had 64 winemakers and only three of them preferred the fruity style. And then we played with their heads. And this is how we did it. So what I want you to do is just maybe taste each one of them real quick. Just so you really calibrate on what that astringency is like, where it is and how intense it is. And now let’s see if I can can change.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 21:57
Not quite hearing it.
Clark Smith 22:45
So what do you see? Pardon? What did you see? What did I see? I
Drew Thomas Hendricks 22:51
feel like the fruit came out a little bit more on the barefoot.
Clark Smith 22:54
Yeah, yeah. And how about the astringency? Well, I turned off the music.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 23:02
Yeah, you turn off the music, but I was comparing it to the last tip I had, um, I would say I mean, this comedian. Tasted about the same but I felt like it had a little more of a round mouthfeel to
Clark Smith 23:14
Yes. Yes. Yeah, it kind of It doesn’t taste hard and grippy that way. But How about how about the butter? The butter thing denser. Yeah, it really amps up the tannin and so that’s because this is not a good piece of music for butter. Butter and butter is not a happy go. Lucky one. All right. Now let’s try another piece here. That is designed to do the opposite. And you might even try. Go ahead go ahead and put the put the barefoot in your mouth. Okay, and then watch what happens to the astringency when I turn on Ella Fitzgerald doing St. Louis woman yo it instantly gets more harsh. It did the butter How about tropical fruit? Oh there you go.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 25:00
Doing that half the time in the evening, when I’m playing my Discover Weekly Spotify playlist in the white I’m drinking, it might be doing my mornings a disservice
Clark Smith 25:11
it can be. So here are the outrageous claims, oh, I guess you can’t, I gotta share my screen again
so the first one, you will be given the tools to enhance the experience of everyone you drink for the rest of your life. And all you have to do is get good at recognizing what the emotion in the wine is. Everybody knows how to do that with music, you can tell a happy song from a sad song from an angry song from a sexy song. Winds are like that tip. Once you get the hang of it, you can match them up pretty quickly. So now, back to we were talking about restaurant tours. So they have this problem that people are going to be drinking a whole bunch of different wines. So what we do is we go in there, they’ve got their ambience, they’ve got their menu. And then they need to determine sort of background music that works with with the theme of the restaurant, in the family restaurant or it could be, you know, a singles, pick up bar kind of thing or now Italian restaurants are already doing this may have figured out that Andrea Bocelli goes great with the Italian Pinot Grigio, Kiante and Barolo. It’s, it’s, and that’s why, you know, there’s a high suicide rate among Italian waiters because they’re just get so sick of chili. And one of the playlists we’re working on now is a Bocelli. Free Italian background music. That’s funny. So we call those anthems now, so then all you have to do as a buyer, once you’ve got your playlist is never buy a wine, except inside the environment that you’ve created with the music.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 27:43
Oh, I see. Set the environment first. And rather than matching the music to the list, make your list match your anthem.
Clark Smith 27:51
Yeah, somebody comes in with a bottle of wine. Turn on the background music and make sure it tastes right. Within that, that mold that the restaurant amplifies. Now, tasting room managers have the opposite problem. They they don’t get to choose the wines. So what you what you have to do is take everything you got and then start playing songs. We did this for the Pernod Ricard group down in Australia, we had 30 winemakers and we spent a week going through 175 songs to find the ones that tasted good with everything. Mm 24 wines. And so we call those anthems then they’re going to be different for everyone maker. When I when I worked with Blackstone, they they make sort of bombastic but somewhat shallow wines. And they work great with Hollywood movie themes like Star Wars and you know, all that London Symphony stuff. My wines, I’m my wines are pretty geeky and Euro centric. They like Gershwin. They like Aaron Copland, they like Samuel Barber. But they also like, and this was kind of startling to me. Somebody said try him with George Jones. You stopped loving today, you know, just incredibly sad, you know, songs for pathos and in my face great. Joseph. So that revealed to me that I’m exploring that dimension, I guess because it’s really not my nature I’m and you generally pretty upbeat. But, you know, exploring sadness and grief, I guess is what I do with my wine.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 30:08
You know, you got to express your emotions.
Clark Smith 30:11
So if what I’m getting at is, is this is a pretty inexpensive story sort of psychoanalysis for whatever’s going on in the winemakers aesthetic. Hmm. Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It showed me some stuff about myself. That’s, that’s pretty
Drew Thomas Hendricks 30:33
interesting on that. So on that sort of Blackstone, so you set up their own playlist? So yeah, we’re
Clark Smith 30:41
facing room manager had put together some personal favorite music of hers. And it was just all wrong.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 30:49
Do you see that often at the tasting room managers just kind of play what they like and
Clark Smith 30:54
yeah, sure. And so we, we made a playlist. And then we did an experiment over the summer. And every other day, we would play our playlist against her playlist.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 31:12
Oh, my Yeah. Also
Clark Smith 31:14
dating days. And when we analyze data at the end of the week, we had to increase their sales by 40%.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 31:21
That’s incredible. When he told me about that in the pre show, I I couldn’t believe that 40% That is that is a showdown. That’s a block.
Clark Smith 31:31
Well, you can see from the two wines you just tasted Oh yeah. It was most shocking really.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 31:38
way it was definitely the elephant’s job and the in the butter. The butter changed a lot more for me, maybe I was just kind of in the rhythm there. But for that, that particular song with those two Chardonnays It was like night and day between the Beach Boys and then Ella Fitzgerald.
Clark Smith 31:56
Yeah. So that now you know what I mean by an exclusionary music. A piece that’s designed for one wine and it makes everything else taste terrible. In a race restaurants and tasting rooms, we need to have inclusionary music that kind of works with everything.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 32:20
Now what’s what’s what’s the hardest wine to match with the music? No, you have some kind of Food Wine periods out there like you get artichokes aren’t just terrible to match with a wine. Is there? Is there a music or a wine that just doesn’t? Doesn’t seem to lend itself?
Clark Smith 32:36
Artichokes are interesting. I actually like artichokes after taste of sweetness. Okay. I just get a lot of melons, kind of like if you get if somebody flashes a green light. Or I’m sorry, as somebody flashes a red light, then the after image will be green. And soon the bitterness of our artichokes creates this after taste of sweetness that kind of fun to play around with. Sure. Um, I don’t know I’m, I’m sort of undefeated. We haven’t really hit the wall with something that we just couldn’t pair.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 33:20
Because it’s such base. I mean, it’s based emotions and feelings that are universal
Clark Smith 33:25
between what I think I think is really interesting. Another chapter in my book is called Harmony stringency. And it looks at all the different ways that researchers have looked at astringency. Most people think it’s just the concentration of tannins but as you’ve just seen there’s a lot more
Drew Thomas Hendricks 33:45
so we’ve got we’ve got another parent that prepaid here
Clark Smith 33:50
so you got the Meiomi Pino there.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 33:55
Yep. And I’ve got the Kendall Jackson grand reserve cab. Pino and a
Clark Smith 34:01
cow. Okay, cool. Well, let’s do the same thing here. You know, taste the Pino and tell me what you see and particularly pay attention to the stringency.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 34:13
Sure, so we got that got the Meiomi Pinot Noir. Now it’s typical with Naomi it’s way darker than expected Pino to be.
Get a lot of just round red fruits. No, like not a lot of peanut Earth. Just a lot
Clark Smith 34:34
of cherries and a lot of spice.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 34:37
Cherries spice. It’s definitely that Naomi style, just deep dark colors. A little bit of a very round palate, almost a little bit of a sweetness on the palate as well. Not a lot of acidity.
Clark Smith 34:57
A little tan Great Garnet.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 35:05
I mean that is not is definitely not a old world Pinot Noir. It’s a new world Pinot Noir with. Okay, a real
Clark Smith 35:16
No, but yeah. Okay, now let’s do the cat. So the cat we got to go
Drew Thomas Hendricks 35:29
with um
Clark Smith 35:33
Did color
Drew Thomas Hendricks 35:36
a little bit of oak on the nose there?
Clark Smith 35:37
Why don’t you? Why don’t you hold up the bottle?
Drew Thomas Hendricks 35:39
Oh, yeah, let me um you’re freezing there Clark. So we’ve got the Kendall Jackson grand reserve cap and then they the cab itself currents. A bit of spice on the nose very smooth palate to that, is that what you’re getting there? Um, let’s just start the cat. Let’s just start the read from start from the start because I didn’t get much of what you’re saying. So just tell me up for the mailman. We’ll take over.
Clark Smith 36:13
Okay, so, Alright, so now you have a Meiomi Pinot Noir and it Kendall Jackson grande reserve. Cabernet.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 36:21
Yes, we do. I’ve got them right here in front of me. Okay.
Clark Smith 36:25
These these wines. These general categories have completely different emotional modalities. So why don’t you just tell us what you make of the Meiomi.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 36:37
So as it says to the Meiomi it’s a it’s a dark red color. Well darker than I would expect from a Pinot Noir but definitely in line with the Meiomi brand style. It’s got a real it’s got some very nice cherry, lotta cherries and little spice and almost like black cherries, not so much red cherries, like it’s a fruit than you get with maybe a burgundy and type of Pinot Noir.
Clark Smith 37:02
Right. Right. It’s much cleaner than a burgundy complex
Drew Thomas Hendricks 37:08
and just a just a jammy kind of cherry fruit palette, which is a it’s a very approachable Pinot Noir.
Clark Smith 37:17
Well, bit of a what do you see and may have the best stringency
Drew Thomas Hendricks 37:22
it’s not too as to me it doesn’t taste too astringent, compared to some Pinot Noirs but there’s a little bit of a grip in the backpack.
Clark Smith 37:29
Okay. All right, now let’s go over to Cabernet.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 37:36
Okay, so for the cab cab here. Definitely, I’m being Cabot’s darker color. Got currents got a lot of that bridle Cabernet. Aromas on the nose. A little bit of oak. Yeah. Little spiciness to it. Probably coming from the from the barrels. Currents. A little bit of an earthy, kind of a right to it. Pallets nice a little a lot more tannin. A little more grip all the way through the palate. It’s a more more complex wine.
Clark Smith 38:12
Yeah, with way more tannin. Alright. Alright, now let’s see if I can screw with the
Drew Thomas Hendricks 38:18
yellow suit you got
before in the Pinot Noir it brought out some of the more negative than before but more more of an empty Yeah. The fruit dropped out it became rich and round. And the Cabernet became very thin and unpleasant almost. Yeah. Oh, it’s
Clark Smith 39:22
very harsh. Yeah, Karen is don’t like hopeful romantic music. So we’ve got a whole you know, good long playlist for each of those on Spotify site. So like I said, there’s there’s 10 things you can do if you want. You don’t want to do that work. You can just download one of those playlists on your phone and just go ahead and have dinner. But if you’ve got a specific wine or maybe one that we haven’t got a playlist up for yet, then the book tells you how to use iTunes genius stuff. Once you find one piece, then you’ll get suggestions. You’ll get suggestions for Spotify or iTunes genius or, or even Pandora. And you know, you just, you know, you spend the 99 cents and drag the winners over into a playlist on iTunes. No,
Drew Thomas Hendricks 40:21
that’s that’s a great, that’s great. I was very, I have to say that read the read tasting comparison. It was eye opening between the way that the Pinot Noir changed when you started playing Greensleeves braces. And what happened to that Cabernet was, I was shocked. Yeah, I am 100% convinced you have something going on here for sure.
Clark Smith 40:49
And, you know, I just want to point out that the people will talk about this without actually frying it. They’ll say, Oh, I can’t happen. It’s particularly wine professionals. Because if you’ve been tasting wine, like I have for 40 years, not thinking about the environment in which it’s happening. suddenly realizing that, you know, a lot of things like I thought I knew for sure, just named so. And so there’s resistance in the professional community. But if you don’t have a dog in the fight, it’s almost instinctive and people pick it up right away.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 41:30
Mm hmm. No, I would think so. So sorry, I’m sorry. Cabernet stuck in my throat there. Um, so we were so a couple of weeks ago, I had on Jeff and Josh Daiter on my show. They they’re doing an inventory cellar management program. And I don’t know if you’ve talked to them, but they were talking about sinking their cellar management thing with Spotify for say, when you pull it out of wine in your cellar. Oh, it’s Jeff and Josh Daiter. There. It’s a father son team based out of Canada. That’s coming up with a cellar management thing. I’ve got a I would think that conversation between you two is is needed. If you haven’t talked to them.
Clark Smith 42:15
How do you spell the last name? Daiter.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 42:22
And it’s, um, InVintory. InVintory. Wines is their cellar management program. And I know that they’re super interested in what you’re doing. They probably already kind of learned your work through postmodern winemaking. But it’s this is this was an eye opener. Thank you so much for walking us through this.
Clark Smith 42:44
Well, it’s a great pleasure, I really appreciate the exposure. And I hope that people when they come up with playlists, this will send them to us and we’ll stick them up on the on Spotify. Oh, and
Drew Thomas Hendricks 42:59
that’s the idea too. So you want to see this? You want to I mean, this is something expanding that you can like suggest songs for the different titles and create literally,
Clark Smith 43:09
you know, we haven’t got all the wine types there are on there. So if you’re a winemaker in Iowa and you develop a lot Crescent playlist, actually we are we do have one of those. But let’s just say petite pearl or era mela or, or you know, Snake River VNA, or whatever. And you want to you’ve put together a playlist that you think works with that wine, then just let us know. And we’ll make it part of a growing inventory of platelets.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 43:38
What a great community out for. I love that. So, so Clark, where can people find you as we’re kind of wrapping down here?
Clark Smith 43:48
Oh, well, my main website is called whoisClarksmith.com. Oh, like that. And you know, we’ve got a wine store. And that’s where you go to the consulting link and a lot more stuff on wine and music. There’s there’s several. We’ve done this on NPR a couple of times, and then some articles in The Chronicle and all that. And, of course, the books. So yeah, that’s, that’s Grand Central Station.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 44:21
And number one, Christmas. Christmas holidays is this ebook, which would make it
Clark Smith 44:25
Oh, yeah. Let me let me show you about that. What you want to do this, this is a great stocking stuffer. So you just this year, um, ice cream. So it’s an ebook? How are you? How are you going to stuff a stocking with an e book? And the answer is, you just write us and we’ll personalize this happy holidays and then you print it out and roll it up a little ribbon and put in
Drew Thomas Hendricks 45:00
So there you have it, guys, if you’ve got a wine lover, or your got some of the works in the tasting room and you want them to level up their, you know food, wine music, this e book’s a perfect gift.
Clark Smith 45:10
Yeah, I think you’re gonna have a hard time finding a more interesting gift for 10 bucks. Thank you, right. Well, Drew i I can’t thank you enough.
Drew Thomas Hendricks 45:23
Oh, thank you for this very, very enlightening. I think I’ll be seeing you next week at the wine Expo. One Expo up in Sonoma.
Clark Smith 45:31
Oh, yeah. Yeah. There’ll be a great tasting too. Yep. Well, Clark, thank
Drew Thomas Hendricks 45:37
you so much.
Outro 45:38
Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Legends Behind the Craft podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.