Fifteen years ago, at the height of wine critic Robert Parker’s influence and fame, WIRED magazine wrote an article about Enologix, an obscure company in northern California started by a man named Leo McCloskey who audaciously claimed to be able to use statistical analysis to predict wine scores based purely on the chemistry of the finished wine. Enologix had already been in business for six years prior to the article’s publication, but the coverage in WIRED rocketed Enologix to controversial prominence in California wine.
As the landscape of wine criticism has broadened and diversified in the past 15 years, with...