LEO McCLOSKEY takes a mouthful of South African cabernet sauvignon, then spits it into a sink. “Not bad,” he says. “I like it better than the other.”

But in his laboratory in Sonoma County, tastebuds are not to be trusted. Sure enough, after consulting a lab analysis of the same wine, his face darkens. “It’s too high in complex anthocyanins. What’s good about the wine now will have changed in two years. You can’t tell that by tasting.”

Welcome to the strange world of Enologix, a tiny technology-driven consulting firm founded by Mr McCloskey that has divided the American wine industry like never before. Some call Mr McCloskey a genuis; others say that his methods are turning wines into bland, homogenised McCabernets for the ignorant masses.

The National Post in Canada declared this week that Mr McCloskey had “reduced the romance of wine drinking to binary code”. Last week The New York Times quoted the general manager of Ravenswood, a vineyard in Sonoma, as saying that he had stopped using McCloskey’s technology because, “when everybody tries to hit the same sweet spot, it’s like making soda pop”.

Mr McCloskey, 56, takes the criticism well. “I consider myself an artist,” he says, “who some might say has turned to the dark side.”

The reason for the hysteria is on his computer screen: data comparing the chemistry of the South African cabernet sauvignon with that of 1996 Château Lafite, acclaimed by Robert Parker Jr, the influential American wine critic.

The data show that the South African wine has 50 per cent more complex anthocyanins. Mr McCloskey has spent ten years building his database of 10,000 wines, and the key parts of their chemical make-up, so that his clients’ wines can be compared in such a way.

Working with two mathematicians, he devised the algorithms behind the process. Mr McCloskey is well connected to academia: Susanne Arrhenius, his Swedish-born wife, counts two Nobel laureates for chemistry in her extended family.

With Enologix software, his clients can tinker with their wines during production to mimic the critics’ favourites.

Enologix held a symposium in Sonoma to advise clients on how to deal with this year’s cooler weather. The upshot? An astonishing 39 client wines scored 90 points or higher in a recent issue of Parker’s The Wine Advocate.

But some object to Californian grapes being manipulated essentially to please two men — Parker and James Laube, of Wine Spectator. And there is outraged talk about the destruction of terroir, the French term for the mysterious quality of wine that evokes the climate and ecology of its place of origin. But Mr McCloskey says: “The consumer is not concerned with terroir. He doesn’t need it; he needs quality first. He wants to make sure the wine is worth whatever he’s paying for it.”

He is a firm believer in the American system, pioneered by Parker and Laube, of scoring wines out of 100 points. He notes that the British did the same in 1855 with their classification of Bordeaux wines based on average trading prices.

Even the French do it, in a less mathematical way, with their grades of Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée.

But for wine enthusiasts who grew up with critics’ metaphors about old shoe leather, freshly mown grass and musty cigar boxes, the numbering system seems hopelessly unromantic.

Even less romantic is the Enologix software that can predict the scores of wines based on samples from grapes on the vine. “It’s like an insider stock tip,” Mr McCloskey says. In some cases, it can result in an entire crop being dumped.

“One third of wine is art, one third is science and the other third is weather,” his friend Sam Spencer said. “You can’t control the weather, so you might as well bolster the rest of it as much as you can.”

CAN COMPUTERS MATCH THIS?

“It’s an unusual wine . . . with intense, slightly cheesy damp straw character. This is Vouvray in its bone dry, most savoury incarnation and although it’s extremely challenging, it also has a lot of intellectual appeal.”
Jane MacQuitty, Magazine
Source: wineanorak.com

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