Interest in the pairing, or matching, of wine with music goes way back, with commentators initially using musical metaphors merely to describe the wines that they were writing about. More recently, however, this has transformed into a growing range of multisensory tasting events in which wine and music are deliberately paired to assess, or increasingly to illustrate, the impact of the latter on people’s experience of the former. Initial isolated small-scale and often anecdotal reports of music changing the taste of wine have since evolved into numerous large-scale experiential, and often experimental, events. The results of the latter (at least those that make it into print) typically demonstrate the robustness, not to say ubiquity, of such crossmodal effects. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to suggest that the explosive growth of such events is revolutionizing wine marketing. In this talk, I want to take a closer look at this emerging field of research, considering how the insights from such events are increasingly starting to influence experiential wine marketing, not to mention in-home consumption, often via sensory apps. In order to stay relevant to today’s and, perhaps more importantly, tomorrow’s, wine consumers, the wine marketers will need to ride the experiential multisensory wave that is currently sweeping through the drinks industry.
Presenting author: Charles Spence – Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Oxford University, UK