GrapeCrafter

What serendipity. Jo Diaz had cooked up on her own an idea about pairing the jazz piano and bluesy vocals of Alacia Van with a pile of Petite Sirahs, and invited me along without any notion of the work I’ve done on the subject. It was her notion that we could pair each of the 15 wines with a different selection.

I told her this wasn’t likely to work. Either we would see no good pairings at all, or there would be groups of emotional modalities which would cluster around one song or another.

Monday was a truly remarkable day organized by Jo and Jose Diaz of PS I Love You and well recounted by Ken Paxton's Reign of Terroir. My own account has been delayed by the necessity of a redeye flight to Charlotte immediately thereafter and a combination of intensely working the market and being jetlagged out of my mind ever since. Still, with the others blogging, I should at least give you the link from here to my research on wine and music, with a followup report on this fascinating day promised shortly.

I am on the hot seat this week for Pamela Heiligenthal’s forum called Vino Exchange at Enobytes.com.

It will be a free form, multi-topic discussion where I take questions on any subject. I’ll field questions on wine technology from my usual shy perspective. I’ll also discuss my recent decision to license out the Vinovation service business and devote myself to characterizing and chronicling for Appellation America all 307 U.S. and Canadian appellations. Thus we will be able to discuss what regional diversity I’m encountering and the factors that cause wines to express themselves differently in different regions.

Readers should feel free to log on and observe or contribute. Come help make it interesting!

Clark:
I am one of the owners of a winery in Paso Robles, and we are planning a wine and live music pairing at our tasting room in October. We are family run and many of the members of our family have been in the music business in one way or another for many years (I am a composer myself). Our tasting room is centered around music, with lots of memorabilia, and a built in stage for live performances by jazz acts as well as the "Family Band" - a 6 piece group made up entirely of our family members.

We have a lot of fun at our tasting room and thought it would be great to do a wine and music pairing on a big festival weekend in town. We will have people sit and we will pour each of our wines one by one, and the family band will perform a different live piece of music to pair with the wine (they will also get some paired appetizers as well). Because we have no scientific basis on the choice of our songs we will be approaching the event with an air of fun and experimentation as opposed to doctrine, but we'd love to learn more about the topic.

Readers of the recent SF Chronicle articles on the work I’m involved in concerning the resonance of wine and music have written me to ask whether I think the effect is in our perception or some physical effect the musical vibration has on the structure of the wine.

Top of my head, I would say that in my demonstration, I find that at least part of the effect is strictly mental, which may indeed involve physical manifestations in the brain, but not necessarily in the wine itself. You can do an experiment to confirm my finding, by tasting wine while you play different pieces of music to yourself in your head. If you find this difficult, you can use headphones. Either way, the astringency effects of harmonic resonance vs dissonance are
quite apparent.

I confess I’ve been holding out on my readers about an intriguing area of research Susie and I have been pursuing lately, that of the relationship of wine and music. My wife, Dr. Susan Mayer-Smith, a French-trained clinical psychologist who holds two music degrees and was awarded first chair flautist for the Chicago Symphony at age 19, has been working with me to explore the GrapeCraft core notion that wine is liquid music.

At Vinovation many times daily we conduct “sweet spot” trials to determine the proper balance points for alcohol in the wines our 800 California clients bring us, and we always find the same two things. First, the points of harmony (roundness, softness, sweetness) and dissonance (harshness, disjointedness) arrange themselves in a very nonlinear fashion. You don’t find balance throughout the 13%’s with lower alcohols being thin and salty and higher alcohols hot and bitter. Instead you get dialed-in radio stations: specific points of harmonious balance just a tenth of a percent away from terrible wines.