There’s nothing better than
pouring yourself a nice glass of red in the evening and relaxing after a hard
day in the office. If you really want to make the most of this post-work treat,
Ideal Wine Company advises you to put on some music so you can enhance your
wine drinking experience.
Enhancing the experience
Wine is a wonderfully complex
drink. Different vintages possess a variety of flavour combinations, allowing you
to embark on a unique journey every time you drink a new wine! You can enhance
your wine drinking experience by engaging with your other senses as you
consume, in order to really highlight the unique traits of your tipple. Increasingly,
wine aficionados are pairing wine with music!
A number of writers, bloggers,
merchants and experts are now teaming standout wines with classic tracks. Blogger
Daniel
Levin recently wrote a piece where he suggests bottles to drink with
Prince’s greatest hits! He argued that Achaval-Ferrer's 2013 Malbec
Mendoza goes well with Prince’s iconic ‘Purple Rain,’ due to the
vintage’s silky smooth texture and hints of dark fruits and purple flowers.
Explaining the trend
A recent
Guardian article explains that there is a certain method to the madness of
teaming wine with music. The piece states that music can serve as a “vivid and
apt” way of “communicating a wine’s character and appeal,” adding that “much
depends on your frame of reference.” The Guardian gives two examples of how
various styles of music can express the character of different wine varietals.
The articles notes that this
could apply to the overall structure of a wine. Say a vintage contains high
acidity levels; the writer suggests that as the wine could be described as
sharp, it could go well with high pitched music. The articles goes on to say
that this could also apply to the overall feel of a wine. The writer argues
that “a light, elegant, high acid wine such as Mosel Riesling really does seem
to have, to me at least, spiritual kinship with a Mozart string quartet.”
Scientific evidence
There is evidence to suggest that
wine really does taste better when you drink it to music. A study
from experimental psychologist Professor Charles Spence, who is the Head of
Crossmodal Research at Oxford University, indicates that that the link between
taste and sound may be more ingrained within the human psyche than experts
previously believed.
The research found that human
beings really do see sweet and sour flavours as high pitched and bitter tastes
as low pitched. Spence and his partner Qian Wang found that playing low pitched
music while supping on “high pitched wines,” or the other way around, can
really impact how we interact with the vintage. Spence and Wang added that this
research is rudimentary and doesn’t yet have the ability to shed light on key
structural wine components such as alcohol level, oak, viscosity and tannins.
Try it yourself
In other words, if you consume a
great vintage with the perfect song, it may be able to enhance your wine
drinking experience! But how do you find the right combination? How about you
do a little experimenting? If you buy the
Chateau Pavie 1998, a full-bodied, powerful Bordeaux red, from Ideal Wine
Company, research the vintage and see which song you think goes with this
wine’s unique character!
