Music influences the perception of taste. Wine often changes its taste and flavor when the other senses come into play. A growing multitude of wineries design acoustic predispositions for their structures, optimizing the internal diffusion of music and the choice of background music that best represents them. It is always very important not to separate the combination of music and wine from the surrounding environment. Both, music and wine, stimulate our senses in complex ways. Wine and music act on us by finding hidden, sometimes unpredictable, multi-sensory pathways.

The sound message must correspond to coherence criteria, otherwise it is decontextualized from the surrounding environment and creates dissonance.

The use of sounds and music not consciously chosen penalizes the product or the entire service offered. The value of sounds is not tangible but today, more than ever, emotions dominate behavior in the sales process. If your goal is that of:

•make your cellar unique and exclusive for customers and visitors

•create the right atmosphere to better decant the taste of the wine

• enhance the emotional values of tastings to increase their value

•sound a professional presentation videoSound design is a creative project of sound communication that is achieved thanks to a sound professional able to relate to the multiple forms of contemporary communication.

The idea is that through music it is possible to better perceive the characteristics of wines, a tasting in which hearing, taste and smell must be used together. The search for the right musical background, in fact, has given rise to some curious research with scientific ambition on how the perception of wine is transformed by listening to different pieces of music. Among the different musical genres, the one we most often find combined with food and wine is jazz. There are numerous studies on how music can influence a wine; the most relevant one was conducted by the team of Prof. Adrian North of Harriot Watt of the University of Edinburgh. The research was carried out to understand how music could change the perception of taste buds during a wine tasting. The survey involved 250 students, Prof. Adrian North analyzed them by making them drink a Montes Alpha 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon and a Chardonnay and giving them a scorecard. A red wine and a white wine paired with a “Carmina Burana” by Off, the “Waltz” from “The Nutcracker” by Tchaikovsky, “Just can’t get enough” by Nouvelle Vogue and finally “Slow Break down” by Michael Brook ; four completely original and different pieces of music that have placed their influence on wine. In fact, the students’ opinions were collected only five minutes after the end of the tasting with background music.

Music had a predominant role in the evaluations because it was reflected in the evaluations of the students who classified them as powerful (Carmina Burana), refined (Waltz), lively (Nouvelle Vogue) and soft (Michael Brook). In Great Britain some English magazines of the sector have drawn up their classification to combine wine and music: for Merlot the most suitable background would be a piece by Lionel Ritche, for Chardonnay those by Robbie Williams and Kyle Minogue, while for Cabernet Sauvignon the hard notes of the Rolling Stones would be more suitable Some British magazines in the sector have discovered that British wine producers are evaluating the possibility of inserting instructions on the labels of their wines for choosing the best soundtrack to give the tasting the perfect atmosphere to elevate the flavors and the aromas of their wine.

Performing musical pieces during meals dates back to the Egyptians, was then taken up by the Greeks and Romans and has continued until today, passing from the courts of all latitudes to the scenarios of worldliness and then moving to the most refined cultural meetings.

In recent years, experiments to improve wines with music have multiplied. The biologist Karin Mandl believes that the scientific basis has not yet been ascertained, but studies are intensifying and some researchers from the University of Florence have studied the link between music and nature with the hypothesis of scientifically affirming that “grapes are better where the vine listens to music”. This is how the Suono&Vigna project was born. Two Austrian food and wine experts, Markus Bachmann and Thomas Koeberl, studied the effect of classical music in the cellar and patented the SonorWines project, believing that music and particularly that of Mozart have extraordinary effects on wine. In particular, during the fermentation, it would be “miraculous” during the performance of the Salzburg master’s Symphony No. 41, which would make the wine “better and more refined”. The project is already implemented in some estates and with the music of Mozart

other composers are also performed, including operettas and waltzes.Thomas Koeberl believes that music causes the value of sugar to decrease and glycerine to increase: this increase would cause “the so-called mouth feeling, the wine becomes drier, more mature, the flavor more round, rich and dense”.

Researchers from Scotland conducted research and came to the conclusion that listening to music affects the taste of drinking wine. The theory is based on the fact that music stimulates specific areas of the brain; therefore, when we drink wine and listen to music, these areas of the brain influence the taste we perceive from wine. Scholars from Edinburgh have also developed a “musical wine card” and detected improvements in taste of up to 60 percent with some pairings, such as tasting Cabernet Sauvignon with music by Jimi Hendrix, Chardonnay with songs by Robie Williams and Tina Turner, a Sirah with Puccini and Enya or drinking Merlot while listening to “Easy” by Lionel Ritchie and Sitting on the dock of the bay by Otis Redding