Why playing music to wine may not be a cockamamie idea

By erika_szymanski
Posted on April 12, 2014
When is a train like a jazz tune? When someone tries using them to improve wine quality. Recently, Wine-Searcher ran a piece on Juan Ledesma, a Chilean winemaker using waterproof speakers submerged in the barrel to – infuse? – his malbec and cabernet as they age. If you believe that some kind of spirit inheres in all living things even through their killed and processed forms, and also believe that music has spiritual effects, then it might also be logical for you to believe that music has some kind of metaphysical effect on wine that transmutes through its spirit into its physical form, affecting both the taste of the wine and, perhaps, the spirit of the person who consumes it.

Fair enough logic. But when I think about music, I think about trains. Trains and music, both, are sources of vibrations which at least theoretically affect on wine quality. What kind of an effect has been a matter of speculation and maybe a little superstition or wishful thinking, but not much research. A few years ago, a winemaker contacted me to ask whether his barrel room being under a railway overpass – and, consequently, being subject to the rumbling vibrations of frequent passing trains – might have some kind of softening effect on the tannins in his reds.

Had he consulted what turns out to be a century-long history of winemaker interest in train-derived rumblings, from  he would have found as much or more worry about negative effects as positive. His spiritual predecessors, 1920′s London wine merchants, hoped that their wines stored in barrel under the city’s railway arches would mature faster and to good effect.

Sixty years later, a great vinous uproar occurred when the French government proposed a new TGV route to transgress Vouvray in the late 1980′s, not only for fear that vineyards might be destroyed but that vibrations from the train might disrupt cellaring wine. (The not-entirely-equitable solution: a tunnel under the vineyards and anti-vibration mats under the tracks.) The TGV folk purportedly did their own research and found that passing trains had no effect on wine quality, but they never published any details from their studies. Playing music to wine could be dismissed as new-aged nonsense and worrying about trains as old-timer technology resistance.
Read more: http://blog.seattlepi.com/wellredwhiteandrose/2014/04/12/why-playing-music-to-wine-may-not-be-a-cockamamie-idea/