Wineries crush the grapes; she crunches their data

Wine and data have long run on different clocks — one by harvest time and the other by dashboards.

Increasingly, those two very different worlds are finding reasons to come together — something Atlantan Cathy Huyghe has made the focus of her second career.

A two-time Harvard graduate, Huyghe spent years traveling the world writing about the wine business — its politics, its people and the forces shaping an industry that’s a blend of artistry and agriculture.

Along the way, she noticed something: Wineries were awash in customer data, but they weren’t necessarily using it to understand their customers or to respond to an increasingly difficult marketplace.

She stopped writing about the problem and decided to try to solve it.

Pairing wine and data

In 2016, Huyghe co-founded Enolytics, an Atlanta-based software company that analyzes wineries’ own customer data to help them boost sales and revenue, retain wine club members and make smarter business decisions.

It’s an unusual mission for someone who came to wine as a journalist rather than a technologist. But what she saw as a writer for Forbes and other major publications was an industry sitting on enormous amounts of information without always knowing how to turn it into action.

“Nobody gets into wine to do data,” she said.

People get into wine for the lifestyle, the land, the taste, the stories and the experience, Huyghe said.

Her premise is that technology — including artificial intelligence — can help wineries preserve those things by becoming more personal, not less.

With the proper data in hand, a tasting room employee, for example, can call up a concise history of a returning customer’s purchases, spending habits and communication preferences even saying hello.

No human could retain all that information on the hundreds, or even thousands, of people who may file into a tasting room, Huyghe said.

That ability matters more in an industry facing declining consumption and changing consumer habits. Wine now competes not only with beer and spirits but with ready-to-drink cocktails and a growing moderation movement reflected in Dry January, Sober October and other shifts in how some consumers approach alcohol.

Rob McMillan, a longtime wine industry analyst, predicted the sales slump that now has wineries of all sizes looking to cut costs and manage expenses. He said the wineries weathering the downturn better are concentrating not simply on spending less, but on finding and keeping customers.

“The ones that are doing better are the ones that are focusing on what will bring in new customers,” McMillan said. “They are thinking more about how to please the customer.”

That is a problem Huyghe believes can be solved with better use of the wineries’ existing data.

But she didn’t arrive at that conclusion from behind a computer screen.

An entrepreneurial joint venture

The idea for Enolytics began taking shape during her years of reporting on the wine industry when she traveled to New Zealand with her husband, Chris.

She was interviewing winemakers about sauvignon blanc and the remarkable dominance of the grape in Marlborough. She approached the conversations as a journalist, asking about the people, the history and the forces that had shaped the region.

Chris, a nuclear physicist and engineer, was thinking about it differently. He was interested in the ratios, the variables and the science underneath what the winemakers were telling them.

She was looking at the story; he was looking at the system.

The difference in their perspectives became part of what made the company possible. Huyghe could see the human behavior and business questions buried inside the wine industry. Chris could see the technical possibilities.

Both had imagined an entrepreneurial life together as an encore career after they retired.

Instead, the encore arrived about two decades ahead of schedule.

After studying the idea for some time, Huyghe recalled the moment they decided to go forward:

“We looked at each other, and each told the other: ‘I would bet on you.’”

They were all in, putting their own money into the launch of Enolytics.

Early trials

Their first challenge wasn’t finding data. Wineries already had plenty of it — from wine clubs, tasting-room purchases, online sales, email campaigns and reservations. The harder part was persuading wineries to invest in using that data differently.

McMillan, who has known Huyghe for about 25 years, remembers the difficulty. He described the company’s early beta version as “pedestrian” and said wineries were reluctant to make a significant investment in technology when they were accustomed to putting their money into such tangible as wine presses and tasting rooms decor.

That began to change, he said, as wineries became more focused on reaching customers beyond the traditional face-to-face experience.

Wine professionals didn’t necessarily see themselves as technologists. Enolytics had to find someone inside a winery willing to become an advocate — the person who would take responsibility for understanding what the data could do.

“One person to say we’re going to do this,” Huyghe said.

Once that happens, she said, technology can help distinguish among enthusiastic customers, loyal ones, passive ones and those at risk of drifting away.

The machine does the remembering; the salesperson does the talking.

“I personally think it is not going to replace people,” she said. “I do think it is going to make salespeople’s jobs more informed and more efficient.”

For Tracy Chastain, wine club manager at Testarossa Winery in Los Gatos, California, the appeal of Enolytics was practical.

Her department had dropped from two employees to one, and she needed to become more efficient. She called on Huyghe’s company for help.

“What used to take hours and multiple spreadsheets now takes minutes,” Chastain said.

She said the winery’s direct-to-consumer and wine club team has since grown back to two people and is hiring a third because Enolytics’ software has uncovered enough sales opportunities to justify another employee pursuing them.

The technology didn’t simply eliminate work. It revealed more work worth doing, Chastain said.

McMillan said Enolytics has evolved through the years. What emerged, he said, is information that is “good, needed and useful,” as well as hard to replicate.

He credits Huyghe and her husband with continuing to refine the product rather than standing still.

“They have done a good job of understanding their product, refining it and refining it, learning from mistakes and moving forward,” said McMillan, author of an annual report on the state of the wine industry and executive vice president of Silicon Valley Bank’s wine division. “They are one, if not the top data provider, right now.”

Taking the lead

Working together as spouses and business partners hasn’t always been easy. Huyghe said there was a particularly difficult period a couple of years ago when the boundaries between marriage and business became blurry.

Eventually, Chris Huyghe stepped back.

He told her he wanted her to be the face of the company and that the ultimate decisions belonged to her. He remains an important technical sounding board, but the couple now has a clearer understanding of who makes the final call.

Today, Enolytics remains small by technology-industry standards: six employees, roughly 200 paying customers and annual revenues in the seven figures, according to Huyghe. She and Chris have chosen to bootstrap rather than rush toward venture capital.

The company is based far from California’s vineyards, but Huyghe sees Atlanta as an asset rather than an oddity. She points to the city’s technology ecosystem, including Atlanta Tech Village, where her company is based, as a source of the engineering and technology expertise Enolytics needs.

Eventually, Huyghe believes Enolytics’ technology could someday expand to help other segments of the alcohol industry. But for now, her attention remains on the industry she spent years documenting before deciding she wanted to help shape its future.