What is Oenosthesia?
What you listen to when you’re drinking wine can change the way you perceive its aromas, flavours and textures. It’s not synesthesia, it’s what Dr Jo Burzynska calls, Oenosthesia, and it’s something everyone can tune into. If you’re a wine drinker or professional interested in how music can shape and enhance the wine drinking experience, subscribe to Oenosthesia for access to Jo’s newsletter and website. The name combines the Greek words ‘oenos’ – meaning wine – and ‘aesthesis’ – from ‘sense perception’, with a nod to aesthetics and a play on the sense-crossing phenomenon of synesthesia.
Every month Jo shares a themed main newsletter with paid subscribers, in which she offers fascinating insights into cutting edge research - including her own - on how music and wine interact. Written in an accessible style, in these newsletters Jo draws from the worlds of wine and music, sensory science and psychology, art and language. Themes explored might range on how bass can boost your wine’s body to the best sounds to accompany Champagne. Jo also shares regular wine and music matching recommendations, and you can join Jo for a chat, or video tasting. Super Sonic Subscribers also get a one-on-one session with Jo, which could be used to assist wine drinkers and music lovers in pairing up their favourite styles, or businesses for a short professional consultation - anything wine and music goes!
Who is Dr Jo Burzynska?
Jo Burzynska is a wine writer and judge, and sound artist and composer, with a PhD that investigated the effects of sound/music on the wine drinking experience. Her 25-year parallel careers in both areas converged 15 years ago with her discovery that the sensory synergies between wine and sound she’d personally perceived were widely shared.
Since opening this portal into a rich and fascinating multisensory dimension of common experience, Jo has worked extensively in exploring combinations of wine and music. She’s run sound and wine matching workshops internationally, for consumers and professionals. She established the world’s first ‘wine and sound’ bar at The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery in Christchurch, New Zealand (named in the CNN’s Top 10 of the “world's best multisensory restaurant experiences”). As a multisensory artist and designer, she’s created multisensory installations and degustations that blend wine and sound, and worked with leading drinks brands on immersive events. Jo then formalised and expanded her wine and sound research through a PhD at UNSW in Sydney, Australia, conducting studies with experimental psychologists at Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory and wine scientists as the University of Adelaide. For this she received the Dean’s Award for an Outstanding PhD Thesis.
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