Connecting wine and music through the senses
Personal associations, shared resonances, and some science behind the synergies
I always felt something special happened when you brought a certain wine and piece of music together. As a professional wine writer, sound artist, and composer, I initially assumed these connections were a very personal product of my deep engagement with both. However, through a series of palate, ear, and mind expanding revelations that started 14 years ago, I discovered that the synergies I had been experiencing were more powerful, nuanced, and widely shared, than I’d ever imagined. A portal was opened up into a rich and fascinating multisensory dimension of common experience. My careers consequently converged and I started my ongoing journey of audio-gustatory exploration, insights from which I am sharing in this Oenosthesia Substack.
That sound influences our impressions of flavours and aromas, has now been widely demonstrated by numerous rigorous studies. You don’t need to be a synesthete, an opium smoker, an expert taster, or musician to encounter this, as it’s the product of a perceptual trait that’s universal. All you need is to pay attention in order to become aware of the sometimes strong sensory shifts that often occur when we taste something while listening to music. When it comes to wine, the complexity of its aromas and flavours makes it appear particularly sensitive to sonic influence.
Wine and imagination
Wine and music have long been coupled on a basic level through simply often being consumed together: from the Bacchanalian festival to the modern bar. I, like many people, am often to be found wine glass in hand, leafing through my record collection to find the perfect vinyl for the moment. In the past I paid little conscious attention to how the two might interact. Now I realise, what we sip as we select might guide what ends up on the turntable, and certainly what’s playing will shape how the wine will taste.
Associations between wine and music extend to the way they combine in the imagination. The two are regularly linked in poetry; mingling in the wine mythologies of Dionysius and Bacchus and the sweet voices of classic Greek poetry, to the verse of the Romantics and Symbolists in which wine sings of creative inspiration. Regularly invoked as a Muse, as a transformative elixir, wine has been regarded as able to lubricate the imagination. This is something acknowledged by the writer and composer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, who back in the 19th Century, took this a step further in suggesting some light-hearted pairings between different wine and musical styles of his day.
“If it really is of benefit to pour spirituous libations on the inner wheel of imagination … then one could logically postulate certain principles with regard to the various potions,” Hoffman suggests. “For church music, for example, I would advise an old wine from the Rhine or from France; for serious opera a fine burgundy; for comic opera champagne; for canzonettas a fiery Italian wine.”1
Hoffman’s matches were ostensibly conceptually-based. However, the resonances between wine and music that I’d felt intuitively did not appear limited to the imagination. My first eureka moment came with the creative connections highlighted through the acute sensory focus of a series of winemakers, which confirmed that the interactions could actually be felt in perceptual experience. This was around 2007, when I heard about the wine and music matching tastings of the winemaker Clark Smith. Building on previous observations of fellow winemaking colleagues, Smith demonstrated how the tasting experience of a wine could apparently be quite radically altered when accompanied by different pieces of music.
Inspired to conduct informal experiments on myself, I was both shocked and intrigued to discover just how much music could shift my own perceptions of specific characters in the wines I was tasting. This posed a direct challenge to my aim for consistent judgment in my role as a wine critic and judge, and I was extremely relieved that I’d always intuitively conducted my professional tastings in silence. However, it opened up possibilities of employing my own sensory specialisations to shape wine and music experiences for a wider audience.
The science of sound and wine
Soon after this, I came across a recently conducted empirical study by the music psychologist, Adrian North. It had been previously shown that music could be used to influence wine purchasing behaviour, for example, playing French or German music resulted in shoppers buying more of that country’s wines; and classical music, rather than pop, leading to more expensive purchases.2 However, similar to the personal observations of Smith’s tastings, this study showed that the music that people listened to when they were drinking wine appeared to influence their perception of its taste.
Participants were given a red or white wine to taste with four pieces of music selected for their individual connotations of the dimension of “powerful and heavy”, “subtle and refined”, “zingy and refreshing”, and “mellow and soft”. North found that “participants appeared to perceive the taste of the wine in a manner consistent with the connotations of the music”, for example, the rating of a wine as “powerful and heavy” was significantly higher when the “powerful and heavy” music was played.
From this fairly simple initial study, later published as a peer reviewed paper, North suggested what might be at play was a symbolic transfer of the emotional connotations of the music onto the perception of the wine.3 However, studies that followed conducted by experimental psychologist Charles Spence, of Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory, indicated something more complex might be behind how music changes the perceptions of a wine – in what could sometimes be surprising ways.
What Spence proposes are behind these effects is a phenomenon called crossmodal correspondences; defined as “a tendency for a sensory feature, or attribute, in one modality, either physically present or merely imagined, to be matched (or associated) with a sensory feature in another sensory modality”.4 For example, in taste and audition, high pitches have been found to be associated with sourness/high acidity, and furthermore, high pitches make things taste more sour. Crossmodal correspondences have become a fast-developing area of scientific study in psychology and neuroscience since fMRI scans enabled scientists to look inside the brain, where they discovered a high level of neurological interconnectivity between the senses.
Spence conducted the first crossmodal studies exploring music and wine.5 These have found a high level of agreement in the matches people make between certain wines and specific works of music, and that this compatibility enhances the overall experience. Music has also been found to influence the sensory experience of a wine’s aromas, flavours, and textural elements. When I started my own research, very little was known about what musical features might be influencing these perceptual changes, or the kind of aesthetic and emotional experiences people were having when these occurred.
Exploring Oenosthesia
Excited by the potential of exploring the sensory synergies between wine and sound, from 2009 I increasingly came to integrate sound and taste within my work. I ran sound and wine matching workshops, where I discovered both wine professionals and the general public appeared equally susceptible to sound’s shaping of the impressions of a wine. As my experience grew, I went on to establish a ‘wine and sound’ bar at The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery in Christchurch, New Zealand, where I curated a wine list designed to harmonise with the month’s sound exhibition and the music playlist I compiled for the bar.
I’ve also worked extensively on creative crossmodal art projects that combine wine and sound. My first was, Oenosthesia, a soundscape I created from recordings of the wineries and vineyards of Campania in Southern Italy that was designed to complement three local wines from the region.6 The name combines the Greek words ‘oenos’ – meaning wine – and ‘aesthesis’ – from ‘sense perception’, with a nod to aesthetics and a play on synesthesia, the latter being the rare neurological condition in which stimulation through one sense triggers an experience in another. I’ve also gone on to compose music for individual wines and styles, with Oenosthesia becoming the general name for my work with wine and sound.
These early forays into wine and sound led me to observe that many mappings between their characters had yet to be officially confirmed, and that my specialisations in wine and sound put me in a strong position to explore this. So in 2016 I decided to formalise my research and embarked on a PhD investigating the effects of sound and music on the sensory perception of wine characters and the aesthetic and emotional responses these combinations generate.
Much of this recent research has been published in academic journals, but in this Substack I’m seeking to share this in an accessible form. Given the huge scope for applying these findings to enhance the multisensory wine drinking experience in the restaurant, bar, or home, I also offer practical guidance on how we might best blend wine and music. So do stay tuned to Oenosthesia, and join me in this ongoing exploration of the intriguing harmonies between music and wine.
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Areni, C. S., and D. Kim. ‘The Influence of Background Music on Shopping Behavior: Classical versus Top-Forty Music in a Wine Store’. Adv Consum Res 20 (1993). North, A. C., D. J. Hargreaves, and J. McKendrick. ‘In-Store Music Affects Product Choice’. Nature 390 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/36484.
North, A. C. ‘The Effect of Background Music on the Taste of Wine’. Brit J Psychol 103 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02072.x.
Spence, Charles, and Cesare V Parise. ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Crossmodal Correspondences’. I-Perception 3, no. 7 (2012): 410–12. https://doi.org/10.1068/i0540ic.
Spence, Charles, Liana Richards, Emma Kjellin, Anna-Maria Huhnt, Victoria Daskal, Alexandra Scheybeler, Carlos Velasco, and Ophelia Deroy. ‘Looking for Crossmodal Correspondences between Classical Music and Fine Wine’. Flavour 2, no. 1 (2013): 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-2-29. Spence, Charles, Carlos Velasco, and Klemens Knoeferle. ‘A Large Sample Study on the Influence of the Multisensory Environment on the Wine Drinking Experience’. Flavour 3, no. 1 (2014): 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-3-8.
Burzynska, Jo. ‘Assessing Oenosthesia: Blending Wine and Sound’. International Journal of Food Design 3, no. 2 (2018): 83–101.