Who makes WineSmith?
No wine ever has a single "winemaker". A wine is made like a film, by a large team over a long period.
Here we have selected some interesting people involved in bringing you the WineSmith experience.
Clark Smith has been in the California wine industry ever since dropping out of M.I.T. in 1971. After a decade
cooking in various restaurants and six years in retail wine shops, he graduated UC Davis in 1983 and founded with
the Giguiere family the R.H.Phillips Vineyard, where he served as winemaker for its first seven years. In his role
as Senior Enologist for our family's wine production consulting firm Vinovation, he patented
alcohol adjustment and other enological applications of reverse osmosis, which he developed into an international
enological network. In 1997, he became a disciple of the élevage techniques of Patrick DuCournau and Thierry
Lemaire of OenoDev of Madiran in southern France, which developed
into a post-modern school of winemaking he calls Practicing GrapeCraft [grapecraft.com]. He also edits the
controversial web magazine, winecrimes.com, which provides an open forum for writers to air their views regarding new winemaking techniques.
Dr. Susan Mayer-Smith comes to us after working twenty years in the south of France, where she earned her PhD in
Psychology and directed the Centre Cuturel de Marseilles, a clinic for neighborhood training in the arts and the
reinsertion of depressed persons. She moved to California in 2001 where she married Clark. As a result of her
immersion in psycho-sensorial therapeutic techniques practiced in France but unknown in the U.S., she has
dedicated herself to the establishment of the American Vittoz Society. Susie and
Clark promote WineSmith wines through personal relationships with hand-picked clients.
Brian Smith joined brother Clark as Co-owner in 1998, and now serves as our family winery's General Manager
and CEO of our consulting firm, Vinovation. His background in Systems Science Engineering
earned him in 1991 the position of developing training programs for the U.S. Army Chemical Weapons Disposal
Program and safety management as well as parallel Russian programs to demilitarize chemical weapons, thanks
to which most of the world's stockpiles of nerve agents have been safely destroyed. His son Christopher has
joined our winemaking team, and the success story of his younger brother Brooke, a survivor of Rasmussen's
syndrome surgery, has been featured on the Discovery Channel.
Julio Soto is as kind and careful a soul as you ever will meet. He began wax dipping our wines with the '93 Cabernet Franc.
He developed the special diagonal look to draw the eye to the hand-done appearance and to accentuate the ésprit d'élan
symbolized by our label's dancing cat. A fine teacher, he has just completed his degree in education.
Peter Burford is our A product of Sacred Heart College and Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia, Peter
has held top winemaking positions for a decade and a half throughout the world, from Australia's D'Arenberg Winery to
Alexander Valley Vineyards in Healdsburg, California, Renwood/Santino Winery in California, and one of Asia's largest
wineries, the Chateau de Loei in North Eastern Thailand. He has overseen our general production operations since 2001,
and besides overseeing the production details of WineSmith, also makes some of California's finest
Barbera under his own label, Burford and Browne.
Bill Amatneek, WineSmith's newest teammate, signed on as a cellar hand and asked to be involved with our WineSmith
wines as a special charge. Imagine our surprise to learn that besides his careful attentions to the maintenance of
our darlings, he played string bass and 5-string banjo in folk, bluegrass, and jazz groups most of his life for the
David Grisman Quintet, Darol Anger, Kate Wolf, the Chambers Brothers, Peter, Paul and Mary, and many others.
His book Acoustic Stories strings together captivating tales of his music experiences.
The Lepeltier family live in Saint Herblain near Nantes in the Loire Valley.
They use beeswax to make the easy-to-cut wax seals for our bottles, and we carry it back in our suitcases
when we visit them. The wax melts at 110oF, providing assurance that your bottle has not been warehoused
improperly (Many are!).
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