Abstract
For years now, wine writers have been tempted to describe certain wines in terms of musical metaphors and analogies. Until recently, however, it has never been altogether clear how widely shared, and hence meaningful, such surprising cross-sensory connections really were. A growing body of scientific evidence, however, now shows that regular consumers (i.e. non-experts) do reliably match certain wines with particular pieces of music (under conditions of forced choice). When questioned, people also feel that certain wines go well with specific pieces of music, while others do not. As such, it can be argued that describing wines in musical terms can potentially provide useful information concerning the likely sensory, descriptive, analytic and/or hedonic properties of the wine. While some commentators have sought for an explanation for such crossmodal matches in terms of synaesthesia, here we argue that crossmodal correspondences—the associations that the majority of us share between tastes, aromas, flavours, and mouthfeel characteristics on the one hand and particular properties of sound and music on the other—offer a more satisfactory explanation for what may be going on. In particular, we highlight how structural, statistical, semantic and affective correspondences could all play a part in explaining the affinity that so many of us feel between wine and music.
Highlights
For years wine writers have been tempted to describe certain wines in terms of musical metaphors and analogies
As the research that has been reviewed here has hopefully made clear, the majority of people appreciate a natural affinity between certain pieces of music and particular wines
The fact that the majority of us agree that bitter is lower in pitch, while sweet and sour are both higher in pitch, and the fact that this is merely a feeling suggests, in our view, that what we are looking at here is better conceptualized in terms of crossmodal correspondences, rather than synaesthesia
Summary
Rather slow (adagio) stronger crossmodal associations were typically obtained by Crisinel and Spence for basic tastants rather than for odorants/flavours. The results revealed that participants chose the adjectives female, good, young, gentle, sweet, narrow, day and fast significantly more often for the Sauvignon Blanc and old, smooth, sour, night and slow significantly more often for the Malbec One can imagine this type of results inspiring composers to come up with new wine compositions that somehow match higher level descriptive or analytic characteristics of the wine. Given the higher level matching mentioned above, such as male/female and young/ old, one could imagine how there would be robust crossmodal correspondences between vocal sounds and wine This is, undoubtedly another important area for researchers interested in the links between music and wine to explore in the coming years
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