How do you unwind after a stressful week? If you answered ‘pop a bottle of wine and throw on some tunes’, you wouldn’t be alone. Each activity – drinking wine and listening to music, is fun and has merit on its own, but what is it about the combination of the two that unlocks the ability to relax, unwind, and let our guard down, like few other simple pleasures do?
It turns out, this is not a coincidence. There is empirical evidence that shows what people taste when evaluating wine and how much they enjoy the experience, can be influenced by the music they are listening to. And interestingly, it’s not good enough to play just ANY music, playing the ‘right’ music at the ‘right’ volume is also important to maximizing one’s enjoyment when tasting wine.
How do we know this? There is a 2015 academic journal titled ‘Wine and Music (II): can you taste the music?’ set out to prove the claim that ‘wine tastes better with music’ and the results of their study are fascinating. The article introduces the term ‘Crossmodal Correspondence’, which means there are associations between seemly unrelated sensory dimensions, like the sweetness of wine and pitch of music. Think about all the potential combinations of wine taste dimensions and music audio dimensions, and you’ll start to understand that pairing wine and music is not quite as easy as it seems.
But lucky for you, you’ve got teams at both First Bottle Wines and Last Bottle Wines who are obsessed with wine and music. It’s their job to taste wine and find the best deals from around the world for you, and they do it while crankin’ killer tunes pretty much all day. The First Bottle office even has a proper record player. Classy. Both sites offer an amazing wine each day and not only suggest food pairings like you might expect, but also suggest music pairings. So what are you waiting for? Give one of our wine and music pairings a try. Drop us a comment on our Instagram and let us know if you felt a vibe. And don’t forget the food pairing either, if you want to experience true ‘Nirvana’.
