Parker’s nose can be predicted and plotted?

Manuel Camblor pointed me some time ago to this article originally published in Forbes.com. It can be read at: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4217030/

MaJesus I think this article opens an interesting line of research for you... :-))

Digital Dionysus
Leo McCloskey claims he has divined the secret to making great wine
By Tomas Kellner (Feb. 08, 2004)

It was a cheap stunt, but effective. Leo McCloskey lined up a dozen vintners from the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville, Calif. in the corporate tasting room and asked them to rank the contents of ten bottles. When they’d finished swirling, spitting and recording their verdicts, McCloskey pulled out a sealed envelope. Inside was a list of the same wines ranked by a computer system he’d programmed to determine quality. The list matched dead-on the Mondavi judges’ winner and loser.

The gimmick was vintage McCloskey. He’s used it dozens of times to drum up business for his Sonoma, Calif. wine consultancy, Enologix. ";We have mathematically defined wine quality,"; he says.

Which is something akin to reducing love to an algorithm. Just how it’s done is a closely guarded secret. McCloskey, 53, allows that he breaks wine chemistry down to such molecules as the anthocyanins that give wine color, the catechins that give it some bite and the esters that impart aroma (and thus taste). By tracking such elements he can tell vintners how to blend grapes to get the best taste scores. He pools the data inside a cluster of Unix servers in his office and sells online access to clients. For as little as $600 a month, depending on how many cases they produce, they can nab data on the quality, aging potential and treatment of their grapes in order to manage their crops.

McCloskey says his predictions have a fair degree of correlation with ratings by such authorities as Robert Parker and Wine Spectator. ";We can tell the winemaker what he’s got fermenting in the barrel long before the market knows,"; says McCloskey. In December he was already crunching results for cabernets from the 2003 harvest.

The idea for Enologix dates to 1984, when McCloskey and his wife, Susan Arrhenius, were working on their doctorates in chemical ecology at UC, Santa Cruz. Acting on a hunch that the chemicals in wine might be linked to its price and quality, McCloskey asked the head of the math department to build a statistical model. He spent the next decade working as a vineyard manager and consultant, collecting data from clients’ cellars and testing his theory. He even patented a piece of his analysis for measuring alcoholic esters, called ";enzymic assay for acetate ions.";

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