It’s 5 p.m. on a Thursday and you need your own personal happy hour before the usual Friday event with friends. Your head is stuffed with too much nonsensical information and echoes of yammering voices. Somewhere there is a soothing glass of wine beckoning, but the last thing you want to do is sit in a noisy bar. Where to go?
Go home. Home, that wonderful safe place of refuge and rest; your personal asylum; that native and eternal dwelling place of the soul. It’s the shelter that holds your most prized possessions: your wine collection and the stereo. Oh — and your favorite chair.
And now, the moment of truth: which bottle of wine and what tunes do you play? Or shall you resign yourself to the music and let the “shuffl e” of the stereo or the iPod make the choice? Like food and wine pairings is there such a thing as music and wine pairings?
Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, the eighth-oldest higher education institution in the United Kingdom, announced last year from a study that playing a certain type of music can enhance a wine’s taste. It found people rated the change in taste by up to 60 percent depending on the melody heard. The researchers said cabernet sauvignon was most affected by “powerful and heavy” music, and chardonnay by “zingy and refreshing” sounds.
They conducted supermarket research that suggested consumers were fi ve times more likely to buy French wine than German wine if accordion music was played in the background and of course, German wines outsold the French if hearty polkas from an “oompah” band were played. A university representative said the study could lead retailers to put music recommendations on their wine bottles.
John Abbott, winemaker and founder of Abeja Winery in Walla Walla, is way ahead of the researchers and feels strongly that music and wine pair together. Abbott was pairing music and wine on tasting note handouts from his early days as a winemaker for Canoe Ridge in the 1990s. Some people say they smell in color; Abbott feels he smells in music.
Abbott feels young, unrefi ned wines need tunes that are a bit more hard-edged and raw, where aged wines need more soothing and mellow music, and he leans toward soothing music as wine ages in the cellar. Abbott’s personal selection of music and wine pairings? The 2005 Abeja cabernet sauvignon, showing notes of brambleberry, shaved chocolate and lustrous tannins, with U2’s album Boy. And he prefers Dire Strait’s Espresso Love when enjoying a 2005 Abeja merlot.
Abbott says at Abeja they listen to a lot of Mark Knopfler’s guitar in the cellar and feel it helps the wines age. There are also evenings he will crack a bottle of red table wine and throw on Van Halen or Tool and let the wine and music battle it out.
In my own sanctuary and collection of wine and eclectic music, where I hide from the elements of ring tones and gab, I fi nd a bold, yet supple cabernet sauvignon with layers of black ripe fruit and cocoa is completed with Luciano Pavarotti belting out the aria, Nessun Dorma, from the final act of Puccini’s opera Turandot.
Any sultry song sung by Patsy Kline or the ’70s girl rock band Heart goes well with a locally produced merlot that shows fl avor notes of chocolate-covered cherries, nutmeg and a deep nose of autumn leaves. I play Annie Lennox’s Little Bird or Whiter Shade of Pale as I sip on a viognier with its nose of fresh pears and a long fi nish of cotton candy. A Bordeaux-style rosé? Nothing else will do but the warbling of the little French sparrow Edith Piaf.
A well-chilled, crisp and grassy-toned sauvignon blanc makes me yearn for some honky-tonk from country artist Alan Jackson. Yee-Haw! When the album Laundry Service by Colombian/Lebanese singer-songwriter-belly-dancer Shakira comes up, I have been known to reach for the zills (finger cymbals) and shake and shimmy while balancing a glass of spicy and inky-colored syrah.
Which wine pairs the best with the dark and gothic heavy-metal riffs of Brian Hugh Warner — also known as Marilyn Manson? Well — that’s a pairing I haven’t decided on — yet. Instead, I skip the wine and make a Bloody Mary. That’s when I know I have had a really bad day.
