Can Music Change the Way Your Wine Tastes?

Apr 5, 2015

(WSJ) - I WENT WINE SHOPPING recently in New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen was playing on the store’s sound system—naturally. The Boss is an inescapable musical presence in his home state. Why not in a wine shop? But maybe because “Glory Days” isn’t one of my favorites (my tastes, Bruce-wise, tend toward “Thunder Road”), I found the music distracting. Instead of focusing on the Chablis selection, I was rifling through alternate Springsteen tunes in my head. Was this really what the retailer wanted me to do?

Several studies produced over the past couple of decades demonstrate how music can influence the wines people buy—and even how a wine’s taste is perceived. A 1999 study by members of the psychology department at the University of Leicester, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, analyzed 82 wine buyers in a suburban English supermarket. The team found that when shoppers heard French music in the store, French wine outsold German wine by a ratio of five to one. Likewise, when German music was playing, German wines sold well. (No mention was made of California wines, but maybe Beach Boys music was hard for an English supermarket to track down.)

Adrian North, now head of psychology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, coauthored this study. In 2010, he conducted another while he was a professor at the Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, that combined drinking wine and listening to various types of music. Professor North recruited 125 men and 125 women, all under age 25, to drink Chilean Cabernet and Chilean Chardonnay while listening to four types of music.

The music ranged from powerful and heavy to mellow and soft, played briefly while participants tasted the wines. For readers who might want to try this experiment at home, the powerful and heavy music was Carl Orff’s cantata “Carmina Burana”; the subtle and refined piece was Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers”; a Nouvelle Vague cover of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” fit the “zingy and refreshing” category; and “Slow Breakdown,” by Michael Brook, was the mellow and soft selection.

It turned out the music did have a measurable impact on the impression of the wine: When lively music was playing, the group overwhelmingly found the wine to be lively, and when powerful music was playing, the wine seemed powerful as well.


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