Wine and music: a match made in heaven

music for wine

It’s right after dinner time on your apartment; you have a glass of red wine in your hand. You sit down on your couch and put vinyl on – it’s a scene that has been replicated to infinity in film and television to show the elegance and the savoir-faire of a character. In that thin line between cliché and religious experience, the wine and music are an inseparable combination, like salt and pepper, like peanut butter and jelly.

For restaurants that rely heavily on wine to rise up the numbers at the end of the month, or for wine cellars that are specialized on them, music can be a key way to take the customers to the top of the wine tasting experience.

Many studies show that music influences the way we perceive the wine, in its acidity, sweetness, astringency or even length. In one of the studies, the participants drank wine listening to four songs, and the result was that the music they listened to affected directly how they perceived the wine. In this way, they catalogued the wine in different ways depending on the song they were listening to. Carmina Burana by Orff made the wine taste powerful and heavy, Waltz and the Flowers from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky made it subtle and refined, Just Can’t Get Enough by Nouvelle Vague turned it into zingy and refreshing, and Slow Breakdown by Michael Brook enhanced the mellow and soft flavors of it. This change on how the drinker perceives the wine can be key in regions with a particular wine, due to the fact that all the research that has been done so far suggests that the music that we associate to a region or a country conveys a specific flavor that is also associated to that region, and by that intensifies the sensation of authenticity.

At SoundMachine, we believe the best options to intensify the experience of drinking wine are classical music in the case of more traditional businesses, and jazz for those who are slightly more modern. The experiments that have been made in these areas show that when the participants drank wine with good music, their sensational experience was of “outspoken delight, bodily harmony and relaxation.”

Getting the music right can make your customers more comfortable with wine, drinking more and coming back more often to repeat the experience. Try SoundMachine for free for 30 days, with all the music licensed for business, by clicking here.