(Wine-Searcher) - Manipulation is a much-maligned word, suggesting that the winemaker is somehow cheating. Clark Smith believes we should just get over it.

Accusing a winemaker of manipulation is like calling your wife a whore because she's sleeping with you.

To dishonor our craft is both insulting and naïve. Winemaking is, after all, just a form of food preparation – the ultimate slow food. Chefs are supposed to manipulate things. It's what we do.

So why is it so cool when Wolfgang Puck shows us on TV how he freezes ripe brie so he can grate it, yet the internet trembles in horror whenever some high-tech gadget is mentioned in connection with wine? Why do wine lovers feel so betrayed?

To begin with, food and sex are naturally touchy subjects, because they involve things we put in our bodies, with strong social agreements of safety and consent. We feel ill done-by to learn of arsenic levels in wine, until we learn of the vastly greater amounts in broccoli, nuts and rice.

But there is something else. To be sure, all wine is highly manipulated. Those aren't grapes in that glass. Yet no wine is as manipulated as any beer, and you don't see brewers catching any such flak.

I find that, as the queen of beverages, wine is held to a standard of moral purity not applied to beer and spirits. While these beverages today are technologically dependent, wine maintains its strong connection to the ancient past. When grapes are crushed, little more needs to be done for wine to result.

It isn't supposed to contain ingredients. Flavoring of beers, spirits, even ciders draws scant attention, but hint that a commercial yeast may impart a strawberry note (if only it were that easy!) and all hell breaks loose.

In this age of runaway technology, of ozone holes, meltdowns, fracking sinkholes, species extinctions and polluted oceans, wine is supposed to be the one pure un-messed-with thing that technology hasn't corrupted. And thanks to much PR on the part of the Europeans, is supposed to derive its character its place of origin. Vins de terroir exalted over vins d'effort.

The relationship between winemakers and wine lovers, once idyllic and sweet, has taken on aspects of a bad marriage. Honest communication is absent, and in its place are fibs, long silences, and persistent, self-sustaining complaints.

The "M" word is an emblematic case, which perpetuates itself in many ways. The accusation is generally hurled at wines with too much oak, Mega-purple additions, crude tannins from a bag and other incompetence. But the cause is misidentified. The problem here is lack of skill and training.

In the best cooking, the hand of the chef is invisible, a guiding principle nowhere more central than in wine. Aromatic integration into a soulful single voice requires a well-formed structure of fine, stable tannins. Oak is like cosmetics – ideally invisible in its enhancements. Proper presentation of terroir requires great effort.

Critics who have never actually made wine can have no idea how much skill and attention goes into invisibility. The fallacy is to demonize manipulation instead of ineptitude. The paradox, the tangled knot they have tied, is that when detractors excoriate our work, young winemakers tend to shun the education they need to do the work properly.

The "M" word's definition reveals the double standard built into this noxious term:

ma•nip•u•la•tion (noun).

1. Treatment or operation with, or as if with, the hands, or by mechanical means, especially in a skillful manner.

2. Shrewd or devious management by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one's own advantage.

A synonym for the first definition is "artisanality", the essence of what's expected from a winemaker. Sounds good, no?