Business books of the year

12 December 2007

Rohatyn, 79, who was US ambassador to France from 1997 to 2000, might reflect that Wall Street today is a very different kind of jungle. Cohan has written a fascinating book which deserves to be read by anybody with an interest in financial history, the City and the characters and psychology of the great titans of business.

How to put the wine snob in his place
Super Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted
By Ian Ayres
John Murray, £16.99

Jon Ashworth

Among the many Christmas perils is the wine-snob – the family friend or relative who drones on for hours about the hidden nuances of that special Bordeaux. It takes a brave person to challenge the efficacy of their palate. So bravo to Orley Ashenfelter, the Princeton economist who had the temerity to create a mathematical formula to work out the best vintages. Ashenfelter enraged wine aficionados world-over by suggesting that all that sniffing and spitting is really just a sham: it all comes down to maths.

Decades of weather data from France’s Bordeaux region supported the obvious – low harvest rainfall and high summer temperatures produce the greatest wine. Ashenfelter reduced this to a formula: wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature - 0.00386 harvest rainfall. By plugging the weather statistics for any year into this equation, Ashenfelter can predict the general quality of any vintage. Critics were quick to dismiss Ashenfelter’s wine theory as “absurd”, although Michael Broadbent, former head of Christie’s wine department in London, says he has found Ashenfelter “remarkably on the mark”.

Ashenfelter’s work is recollected by Ian Ayres, a professor at Yale. The title immediately invites criticism. Wall Street, with its ranks of amassed computing brainpower, did not predict the sub-prime fall-out. But for number-crunchers, Ayres’ book provides entertaining holiday reading. If nothing else, use the book to cite Ashenfelter’s wine theory next time you are cornered by the family wine snob. Maths has its uses.