Clark has been in the wine business since 1972 when he dropped out of MIT and got a job in an Oakland, California wine shop. He went on to complete the BS and MS programs at UC Davis, built R.H. Phillips in the ’90s, and founded Vinovation in 1992, providing high tech services and consulting for over a thousand wineries, originally centered around the reverse osmosis VA and alcohol adjustment techniques he invented.
In 1984 he began teaching a short course at UC Davis called Fundamentals of Wine Chemistry, which continued for 24 years and was one of their most popular courses, attended by everyone from home winemakers to seasoned professionals. In the early ’90s, he began to see cracks in the theories he’d been taught at school and began to focus on French winemaking aesthetics and techniques.
Clark has been a guiding influence in the wine production side of the business, which, as growers, we could never navigate on our own. In 2011, he published Postmodern Winemaking.