CAN MAKING YOUR WINE LISTEN TO MUSIC IMPROVE ITS FLAVOR?
Source: www.theguardian.com.
Posted: by Trevor Baker. Thursday 15 May 2014
Photograph: Alamy
It's the latest bonkers trend to come out of the viticulture industry - and although, yes, it's almost certainly nonsense, it's no stranger than a lot of ideas kicking around in the wine world.
What would happen if you took a bottle of wine out of the cupboard and, before drinking it, made it "listen" to your iPod for a couple of days?
A bodega in Murcia, Southern Spain, has decided to find out. The tasting notes for Barahonda's "59h 35m 3s" report that it's made from Monastrell, Petit Verdot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. It spent 10 months being aged in American and French oak. And, after bottling, it was played a selection of music for 59 hours, 35 minutes and three seconds.
"The project came out of the idea that when a pregnant mother listens to music it influences the character of the baby," explains Sonia Garcia of Barahonda. "Therefore we decided to play music to the wine when it was in the bottle to soften and sweeten the tannins." Whatever you might think about the, erm, "science" behind this, the tunes chosen by Lara López, director of Spain's national alternative music station, Radio 3, seem to have done the trick. The wine's very nice, with tannins that have clearly been caressed into a silky smoothness by her well-chosen mix of Fatoumata Diawar's Mali-folk and Sigur Ros's stirring Icelandic pastorals, among other hip choices.
Does Barahonda really believe that the wine would have turned out differently if they'd played Slayer and Sir Mixalot instead? Surely not. It's just a fun bit of marketing, along the lines of that wine that came out in perfume bottles last year, isn't it? Probably. But nobody should underestimate the ability of winemakers to believe the most extraordinary things when it suits them. Just look at the success of Biodynamics.
The biodynamic agriculture system, invented by philosopher Rudolph Steiner in 1924, has made major inroads into viniculture in the last 20 years, and it's still growing. In 2004 there was an article in Fortune magazine detailing some of the prestigious wineries that were fans, including Domaine Leroy in
Burgundy and Château de la Roche-aux-Moines in the Loire. In May last year the UK got its first, officially certified biodynamic vineyard, Sedlescombe in East Sussex.
At the end of last year wine critic Jancis Robinson reported that, according to a study written by organic wine expert Matthew Waldin, "5-7% of the world's vines are now organic or are in conversion to organic viticulture, and of them as many as 30% could be subject to some form of biodynamic techniques". This might not sound much to those who know of Biodynamics as, essentially, organic farming with some new-age frills. But, to be officially accredited as biodynamic by the main regulatory body Demeter, it's not enough to vaguely follow the movement's broad principles of treating the vineyard as an organic whole. You also have to treat the soil of the vineyard with a series of nine bizarre preparations, some of which sound like something you'd hear being read out by the prosecution at a medieval witch trial.
One, for example, involves burying a cow's horn full of manure, leaving it all winter, then digging it up, heavily diluting the sludge inside and "dynamising" the resulting mixture, (stirring it in a special way, homeopathy-style) before spraying it around the vineyard. This has to be done according to a strict time-table based on the movements of the moon and the planets.
As strange as this all sounds it's difficult to argue with the success of the biodynamic producers. Many respected critics, including Robinson and The Guardian's David Williams, are fans of wines made using these techniques. Indeed the critics are often inadvertent participants in the biodynamics movement, as many producers and even supermarkets organise tastings based on a lunar calendar invented by Maria Thun, a follower of Steiner. Adherents believe that wine tastes best if you drink it on what's known as a "fruit day", when the Moon is passing through the constellations of Aires, Leo and Sagittarius.
Is any of this more rational than playing your cellar the first Nick Drake album on repeat? Perhaps they're both just signs that the producer in question is applying an extraordinary level of detail to the production of their wine, leaving absolutely nothing to chance. Unfortunately most of us, after buying a bottle, are unlikely to check what's going on with the moon before drinking it. We can, however, make sure that we only drink wine in bars where the music playing is impeccable. Who knows what effect an unfortunate blast of Black Eyed Peas, Robin Thicke or any other uncool choices might have on those delicate tannins?
MUSIC TO DRINK WINE BY: VINTNER INSISTS MUSIC CAN CHANGE WINE´S FLAVORS
Source: www.sfgate.com
Writen: by Clark Smith
Photo: Photo By Craig Lee
Which goes better with a fine Napa Valley Cabernet: Mozart or Metallica?
Until recently, I would have said "Mozart, of course." But I have since had a life-changing experience: I paid attention to the latest theory from wine industry provocateur Clark Smith. Now I may never taste wine and listen to music the same way again. Beware: If you read this article, the same thing may happen to you.
Music influences the way wine tastes. This seems obvious, and is the reason professional tastings are done in silence. If food, glassware, ambient temperature, perfume and the people sitting next to you all influence the taste of wine, why wouldn't music?
Smith, 56, isn't content without experimentation. His premise is that different music makes some wines taste better and others taste worse, and the great majority of tasters will agree with the "right" and "wrong" pairings regardless of their taste in wine or music. Moreover, it's not possible to record a generic "music to drink wine by" CD because a song that might make Pinot Noir taste great can make Cabernet Sauvignon taste awful. You have to pay attention to individual music and wine pairings.
He's only getting started, but he already has made some surprising, counterintuitive discoveries in an area of wine taste-testing that didn't even exist until he created it.
"Just about everybody who hears about what I'm doing is either completely baffled by what I have to say or they think it's so obvious that they don't see any point in talking about it," Smith says.
Smith - an MIT dropout who drifted to California to become R.H. Phillips' founding winemaker - is never satisfied to accept the status quo.
As founder of Santa Rosa's one-stop wine consultancy company Vinovation, Smith has helped drive many of the technical advances like alcohol reduction and tannin removal that, depending on where you stand, have either improved California wine or stolen its soul. He's an unabashed technologist - he sells some of his wines in a "micro-oxygenation three-pack" - yet he talks about wines having melody, and he's a mysticist who still believes in the ancient Greek idea of separating thoughts and activities into Apollonian (logical) and Dionysian (intuitive).
Smith spent months with various tasting panels sampling 150 different wines with 250 different songs to find harmonies and discordances. He has worked up a set of some of the most convincing examples that he is beginning to present to industry groups.
He's not the first winemaker to think about the wine-music connection. Smith was exposed to the idea by Don Blackburn, a French-trained winemaker now at Emeritus Vineyards in Sebastopol, who made a brief presentation in 1998 at a symposium called "Focus on Chardonnay." Then the winemaker at Bernardus in Carmel Valley, Blackburn poured three different vintages of his Chardonnay and played 10 different pieces of classical music.
"I had 4 of the 10 pieces of music where all the groups - French and American tasters - agreed that it worked with one wine in particular," Blackburn says.
Blackburn was interested in synesthesia, in which people experience one type of sensation with a different sense. Famous synesthetes include composers like Duke Ellington and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who experienced musical notes as colors.
But Smith felt something else going on. He wasn't experiencing music as flavor; he believed the music was changing the flavor of the wines.
Moreover, the more Smith worked with alcohol reduction - the technology for which he is most famous - the more he thought about wine and music.
The reason is his theory of "sweet spots." When reducing the alcohol level of a wine from the "natural" level produced by fermentation, it's possible to create a finished wine with any percentage of alcohol you choose: 14.2, 12.7, whatever. But Smith says (and demonstrates convincingly) that only a few specific alcohol percentages - "sweet spots" - actually taste good, and the only way to know which work is to make test reductions and taste them. He compares the sweet spots to musical chords - a particular percentage of alcohol tastes harmonious, while just 0.1 percent more or less alcohol tastes dissonant (like Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn's feedback riffs, for you punk synesthetes.)
As with his wine and music pairings, he uses science to answer a non-scientific question: "Which is more delicious?"
For his demonstration, Smith plays different music with three red wines - a Beaujolais, a Carneros Pinot Noir and WineSmith's Crucible Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. (For details of his presentation, see "'Enter Sandman' with Cab? Road testing Smith's theories" at right.) Most tasters agree on the results: Pinot Noir is good with Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik," but Cab isn't. Smith postulates that Cabernet is best with what he calls Dionysian music, or music of darkness. Hence, Metallica is a good choice with that bottle of 1961 Bordeaux you've been saving.
He has even found a piece of music (the North Water Street Tavern Band's polka-like "Milorganite Blues") that made Sutter Home White Zinfandel taste better than any of the reds, including his own $100 Cab.
Smith has only a few guidelines so far for music and wine pairing.
"Never play polkas with anything," he says, unless you really like White Zinfandel.
"Red wines need either minor key or they need music that has negative emotion. They don't like happy music. With expensive reds, don't play music that makes you giggle. Pinots like sexy music. Cabernets like angry music. It's very hard to find a piece of music that's good for both Pinot and Cabernet."
Smith may be onto something here, but typically, pronouncements like "Cabernet tastes better by firelight, in a cave" aren't quite scientific enough for the academic community.
"I know how Clark usually does things," says Ann Noble, professor emeritus of sensory science at UC Davis, and inventor of the wine aroma wheel used in wine analysis. "He doesn't vary the order. The experiment (of changing the perception of wine's flavor by changing music) might not be replicable. But it's an extremely interesting experiment. The question is, is it a one-off phenomena?"
Noble says she'd like to see the experiment performed on subjects in the middle of an MRI, to see what's happening in the brain as they taste.
"But it's hard to get research grant money for MRIs, and wine tasting isn't a hot area for brain research," says Noble.
Smith's spiel for the wine-music interaction effect involves cutaway slides of the brain and explanations of what function different parts of it play in processing music. But he doesn't actually know, physiologically, why Cabernet tastes significantly better with the Doors'"People Are Strange" or the overture to Carmina Burana, than with Mozart or the Beach Boys.
Smith postulates that wine tasting requires the same logical processing areas of the brain as listening to music. A slice of brain research that particularly interests him is a study published by Anne J. Blood and Robert J. Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal in 2001. Blood and Zatorre showed that when subjects listen to music they enjoy (different from Smith's experiments because the subjects chose the music), they activate pleasure centers of the brain - the same areas of the brain that react to, their abstract states, "euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex and drugs of abuse." In other words, good music can make us feel the same as a good duck confit - and wine probably fits in there as one of those three euphoria-inducing stimuli, if not all three. (Blood and Zatorre did not respond to a request for comment on Smith's theories.)
Petr Janata, assistant professor of psychology at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis, mentioned similar, more recent, research that says the areas of the medial prefrontal cortex responsible for identifying familiar music overlap with those for sensing odors - and aromas play a huge role in our perception of flavor. The medial prefrontal cortex is also activated when we make judgments about whether we like something or not.
Could the brain be crossing signals between wine and music? Maybe, Janata says - it's possible that the brain might have "difficulty identifying the source" of the familiar sensation.
Until Smith gets huge grant money and decides to give up winemaking for sensory research, all he has are a few interesting phenomena. Yet the idea is compelling, and the implications for restaurants are immense: What if the music playing makes the Pinot Noir taste sour? And how can a restaurateur choose between orderly music that makes the Riesling delightful and threatening music that makes the Cab profound? Is the world ready for the Steakhouse of Darkness?
Restaurateur Pat Kuleto has always considered music a crucial part of establishing the right mood for his establishments, including San Francisco's Boulevard and Farallon and St. Helena's Martini House. Kuleto carefully controls the overall sound level and gives the restaurants suggested CDs. But he's never taken it to the level Smith has, such as Smith's suggestion that sommeliers only taste wine while they're listening to music that will play in the restaurant during dinner.
"In a restaurant, you're really playing with people's psyche. Music is messing with your psyche," says Kuleto, who also owns an eponymous winery in St. Helena. "You're changing people's mood. What mood you're in changes your palate. I think there's absolute truth to what you're talking about, but it's part of a bigger picture."
Tasting rooms might also take an interest. How can wineries that make several different kinds of wine ever come up with a playlist?
"This is why Muzak is such a profitable company," says Dan Fredman, a wine industry consultant and music fanatic. "They establish the atmosphere in companies, and it changes throughout the days, from mellow in the morning to more lively in the afternoon, when people need a pick-me-up."
Fredman speculates that if Smith's preliminary research - like avoiding Mozart with Cabernet - gains attention, Muzak might develop music for wine tasting. Craig Root, president of St. Helena tasting-room consultancy Visitor Management Resources, already does that, but not based on flavor profiles.
"For me, choosing music for a tasting room is demographics," Root says. "I tend to lean toward jazz that's not frenetic and classical music, especially in the morning. In the afternoon, when younger people come in, maybe blues and classic rock."
Of course, no matter how convincing Smith's findings get in the future, just as plenty of diners order Cabernet with spicy seafood dishes no matter what the sommelier says, there will always be plenty of wine lovers who simply refuse to worry about finding the right tunes for their wine. "I don't want to think about it," says importer and blues singer Kermit Lynch. "I did a tasting once of different shaped glasses. But I stopped before we finished. That's how I feel about this - I didn't want to know about it. I don't want to have different glasses all over the house. I want to just use one glass."
And yet, even Lynch couldn't help speculating.
"Let's say you're going to listen to a Mozart piano, violin and cello trio," he says. "Do you choose a Muscadet, light and crisp? Or say you're going to listen to one of Beethoven's late quartets, among the most soulful of all music. Is that the time to pull out the 1929 Romanee-Conti?"
I don't know. Neither does Smith. But open that bottle, turn on the iPod and let's find out.