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Austrian winemaker trials fermentation by music
Wine lovers may soon detect notes of Mozart or hints of Haydn in their glass if one Austrian’s eccentric idea catches on.
Winemaker Markus Bachmann, a former French horn player, has created a tiny speaker that can be inserted directly into liquid, exposing fermenting grape juice to a mixture of classical, jazz and electronic tunes.
He believes the soundwaves positively influence the maturing process, stimulating yeast cells to move around so they absorb more sugar, resulting in better-tasting wine with a lower sugar content.
“The wines get more fruity, and they mature earlier. All the flavours stand alone much better,” the 44-year-old said.
Bachmann has teamed up with six Austrian producers to make a 31,000-litre test batch of musically-influenced Sonor Wines, including a 2010 Pinot Blanc infused with Mozart’s 41st Symphony and a 2010 Zweigelt exposed to a selection of arias.
Working with Bachmann, winemaker Franz-Michael Mayer played waltzes and polkas performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to his Semillon for three weeks and said: “I get the sense that it tastes different, good.”
“I’m so convinced that I’m ready to continue next year,” Mayer added.
Scientists however, remain sceptical. Werner Gruber, a University of Vienna physicist, dismissed Bachmann’s method as “rubbish”.
“Yeast and fungi don’t have opinions. They really don’t care if AC/DC, Madonna or Mozart is played to them,” Gruber said.
Undeterred, Bachmann insists his idea is the next big thing in winemaking, but refuses to have the small, sound-infusing gadget photographed or filmed.
Lucy Shaw, 09.03.2011
A good idea but not a new thing to link Music and wine – Aurelio Montes in Chile has plays Gregorian pipe music to the wines in his barrel cellar -and has done for years- firmly believing it helps with a more gentle maturation process. In 2008 he commissioned a study at Herriott Watt University showing how the genre of music influences the way people taste and linking different varietal preferences to different genres of music …http://www.decanter.com/news/wine-news/485822/montes-music-makes-wine-reach-parts-it-otherwise-couldn-t-reach
I can understand that music can alter mood and hence perception of flavour but think it’s stretching it to suggest it can alter fermentation and even more so maturation.
As a professional musician and composer, as well as a wine enthusiast I think there may actually be some scientific basis for enhancing the wine by piping music into the fermenting fruit. Music piped into the vats would create sound waves which might be able to stimulate the fermenting wine on a molecular level. I suspect any sonic vibrations will have a similar effect depending the frequency utilized (it would follow that lower frequencies with wider sonic waves would produce more stimulation. I also assume altering the wave shape…i.e. square wave vs. sine wave, etc. would produce a different effect. I do, however doubt that the yeast will have any preference for Mozart over Wagner, or Metallica for that matter.