The Wine Show: episode two – pairing wine with music

Can music affect the way you taste wine? Even more specifically, can music influence the way wine is produced? In this episode, wine’s relationship to art, science and emotion is carefully explored. Joe Fattorini visits a Chilean winery which relies on very specific lullabies in the cellar. Gizzi Erskine meets up with a famous rock musician who views winemaking as another art form – and even Matthew Goode admits during his wine tasting in Italy that heavy Danish thrash metal would indeed affect the way wine tasted in his glass.

I have always considered wine to be an art form and I love conducting wine tastings that involve ‘cross-dressing’. No, not in that way – I love mixing one art form with another. Wine with art, jazz, literature, classical music; the list goes on. Wine, like all art forms, can be experimental, creative or technical, but ultimately it is meant to be fun and enhance the world around us.

I have to admit, wine and music is my favourite sensory combination. However, can music really influence the way we taste?

Experiments have been conducted to show how music influences wine shopping behaviour by scientists North, Hargreaves and McKendrick in 1997. Accordions were played over the speakers of one wine shopping aisle in a big supermarket which resulted in a significant increase in French wine sales that day. The next day the same experiment was carried out with German oompah bands over the same aisle, and not surprisingly, there was a surge in Riesling!

As farcical as this might seem, a range of experiments have consistently shown that when people hear music it represents more than just sound waves hitting the ear drum. Rather, when this information reaches the cortex, the braininterprets these sounds. In particular, hearing a specific piece of music activates related pieces of information.

But can we go even further with this idea? Specifically, could music influence the taste of wine? Or as Joe mentions in the show, how would listening to Danish thrash music affect wine tasting versus Wagner? An experiment undertaken by Heriot Watt University proved quite significantly that if the music playing in the background is powerful and heavy then people had an increased perception that the wine they were drinking was powerful and heavy. Similarly, if the music playing in the background is subtle and refined then people tended to perceive that the wine they were drinking is subtle and refined. The music shifted people’s perception of the wine by an average of thirty-seven percent! We may be more emotional than we think when it comes to our wine preference.

Joe’s expedition to Chile raised a possible even deeper connection between wine and music. Can music influence wine production? In the cellar at Montes, Joe sees rows of barrels being serenaded by Gregorian chants.

It is not unheard of for winemakers to use certain types of music within their vineyards, cellars and wineries to help enhance yeast fermentations, wine maturation as well as their worker’s concentration!

‘The secret lies in the vibrations, the waves,’ says Hylton Appelbaum, owner of DeMorgenzon winery in South Africa. At his winery he plays Baroque and early classical music from the Age of Enlightenment twenty-four hours a day, with speakers placed in the vineyard, winery and cellar spaces. ‘In our analysis, the music seems to give us phenolic ripeness with lower sugars. The consequence is ripe fruit and lower alcohol,’ he adds.

When it comes to this physical relationship between music and wine, Joe and the two Matthews’ open-ended conclusion that we ‘don’t know for sure’ definitely seems to be valid.

The idea of wine being interconnected to a sum of factors is taken to a whole other level at the second Chilean winery Joe visited, Vina Vik. Their quest is to make the best wine in the world based on a unique concept of ‘holism’. I will let Joe guide you through that Chilean Disneyland tour – it is certainly worth a watch. Jeremy Paxman would be proud!

This post first appeared on Great British Chefs in association with The Wine Show.