Huyghe is the co-founder and CEO of Enolytics, a data-driven business intelligence provider to beverage alcohol companies around the world.
Renowned wine connoisseur, award winning journalist and entrepreneur Cathy Huyghe is visiting the Center for Life Enrichment tomorrow to teach Highlanders the differences in Pinot, wine grapes.
Huyghe got her start in the wine industry by taking part in a program called 365 Days of Wine.
“I became a parent to twin boys, 16 years ago,” Huyghe said. “They did not drive me to drink, though. I wanted to make wine a pleasurable part of my day. The first wine project that I started was called 365 Days of Wine, where I would take a least a sip or a glass of a different wine every single day for 365 days. That is how I learned about different wines, and it was sort of a blog.”
Huyghe is the co-founder and CEO of Enolytics, a data-driven business intelligence provider to beverage alcohol companies around the world. She is a columnist for Forbes about the business and politics of the wine industry, and she writes for Inc about mindfulness practices for entrepreneurs particularly in the hospitality industry. She is a featured commentator for the “Reign of Terroir” episode in the Netflix series Rotten, which has been nominated for an Emmy award. Enolytics is a featured protagonist in a Harvard Business School case study in business analytics.
“What happened is that I wanted wine to be a part of my everyday life,” Huyghe said. “Every glass is different, so it maintains my interest. Wine has been a passport for me to get around the entire world. Along the way, I recognized that there was a business opportunity. As a writer, I was covering business and technology for Forbes. I was basically writing about the business of wine. My swim lane was basically technology and innovation.”
After realizing the opportunity of data analysis with wines, Huyghe started Enolytics.
“I built this runway of networks and relationships of the wine world and started using that to forge this business opportunity,” Huyghe said. “We work with a lot of wineries. We do e-commerce, because there are a lot of people buying wine online. COVID was actually good for wine and the e-commerce business. The second way we work is with sales data.”
As a journalist, Huyghe was shortlisted in 2019 as the Louis Roederer Columnist of the Year for her Forbes column on the business and politics of the wine industry, and she won the Born Digital Wine Award in 2020 for Best Interview for her article on misogyny in the wine industry. Her writing has also been seen and heard on the BBC, the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, NPR and WNYC. Her first book, Hungry for Wine: Seeing the World through the Lens of a Wine Glass, won the World Gourmand Award for Women in Wine in 2016. In the Wall Street Journal, wine columnist Lettie Teague described it as “personal and political, with tasting notes.”
Huyghe said the goal of the book was to figure out how a bottle of wine got to a table.
“I can basically replicate this idea all over the world,” Huyghe said. “At some point, I would like to go back and do Hungry for Wine: California, or Hungry for Wine: Italy, or France. I think it is such a vibrant way to get to know the landscape of wine. There are so many pictures that are coming to mind of the people that I wrote about even though I was writing about wine. Since I am a writer by trade, it seemed like a natural affinity for me, to get to know who are the actual people who put the wine on my table.”
When it comes to Pinot Noir, the black wine grape, Huyghe will delve into the love-hate relationship at the CLE.
“People have a love-hate relationship with Pinot Noir,” Huyghe said. “What I hope comes out of this class is by tasting through a whole range of Pinots from around the world, that people will see that all of the wines are really different. I want the people in the class to get more familiar about the grape and the diversity of the grape. Hopefully we will open peoples’ eyes to different experiences and expressions of the wine.”
A two-time graduate of Harvard University, Huyghe established a special interest group in 2009 called Harvard Alumni in Wine and Food. She also served as President of the Harvard Club of Georgia and continues to serve on the Board of Directors for the Harvard Alumni Association. She has worked in restaurant kitchens in Paris, Las Vegas and Berkeley, California for world-renown chefs Alice Waters, Thomas Keller and Jean-Pierre Vigato.
Huyghe lives in Atlanta with her husband, their twin boys and their Bernese Mountain Dog named Karma.
The class is scheduled for Aug. 27, from 3 – 5 p.m., at the Lecuter Hall in the Peggy Crosby Center. It costs $40 for members and $50 for non-members.
For more information, visit clehighlands.com.
By Christopher Smith