Wine tasting has always been described as a multisensory experience. We look at the colour, smell the aromas, feel the texture and acidity, and finally interpret what happens on the palate. But there is another sense involved in almost every social drinking experience that receives considerably less attention: hearing.
Think about the last time you drank a glass of wine at a restaurant, wine bar or dinner with friends. There was probably music somewhere in the background. We usually treat that soundtrack as decoration, something capable of changing the atmosphere of the room but completely separate from what is happening inside the glass.
Research suggests the relationship may be much more interesting.
A growing body of experimental work indicates that what we hear while drinking wine can influence how we describe its flavour, how sweet or acidic we perceive it to be, how powerful or delicate it seems and even how much we enjoy drinking it. Researchers Charles Spence and Qian Janice Wang reviewed this phenomenon and concluded that auditory surroundings can affect hedonic, descriptive and sensory evaluations of wine.
And the implications extend beyond tasting.
Experiments have suggested that music can influence which country's wine consumers choose in a supermarket and how much they are prepared to spend on a bottle. Meanwhile, some winemakers have taken the relationship between sound and wine even further, experimenting with music not just during tasting, but inside vineyards and cellars themselves.
So perhaps the playlist playing while we drink deserves considerably more attention than we think.
In this post:
- Wine Is Already a Multisensory Experience
- Can Music Really Change What Wine Tastes Like?
- The Science of “Sonic Seasoning”
- When Powerful Music Makes Wine Feel More Powerful
- Can Music Make Wine Taste Better?
- The Strange Experiment That Changed Which Wine People Bought
- Why Classical Music Can Make Us Spend More
- From Mozart to Metallica: What Should We Actually Play?
- Music Inside the Winery
- When Winemakers Play Music to the Barrels
- Can Mozart Actually Influence a Vineyard?
- What This Means for Restaurants, Wine Bars and Wineries
- Final Thoughts
Wine Is Already a Multisensory Experience
We rarely experience flavour through taste alone.
Before wine even reaches the mouth, the brain is already collecting information. The appearance of the bottle, shape of the glass, colour of the wine, surrounding environment and aromas all contribute to the expectations we form about what we are about to drink.
Music introduces another piece of information into that process.
Research into what psychologists call crossmodal correspondences shows that humans tend to associate apparently unrelated characteristics across different senses. Higher-pitched sounds, for example, can become associated with certain sensory characteristics differently from lower, heavier sounds. Similar relationships have been observed between sound, aroma and taste.
That does not mean music physically adds sugar or acidity to wine.
Instead, the brain is interpreting several sensory signals simultaneously, and the auditory environment can direct attention towards particular characteristics already present in the drink.
The wine in the glass stays the same.
Our experience of it may not.
Can Music Really Change What Wine Tastes Like?
This is where things become fascinating.
Spence and Wang divide wine perception into several dimensions. There is the sensory experience,sweetness, acidity, fruitiness and length. There is the descriptive experience, whether a wine seems powerful, refined, fresh or soft. There is the hedonic response, essentially, how much we like it. And there are more analytical judgements involving characteristics such as perceived quality, balance and price.
Music appears capable of interfering with several of these simultaneously.
Research reviewed by the authors found that appropriate musical accompaniment could alter ratings of characteristics including sweetness, acidity, fruitiness and length, with changes of up to around 20% in some experiments.
Another experiment produced an even more striking result.
When participants listened to music characterized as “powerful and heavy,” they subsequently rated wines as more powerful and heavy. Music characterized as refreshing or mellow could push descriptions in those respective directions instead. In one experiment discussed by Spence and Wang, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana increased ratings of wines as “powerful and heavy” by around 60%.
The obvious question becomes: how can something entering through our ears change something supposedly being evaluated by our tongue and nose?
The Science of “Sonic Seasoning”
One explanation is sometimes described through the idea of sonic seasoning.
Just as salt can emphasize certain characteristics in food, particular sounds may direct our attention towards specific characteristics of whatever we are eating or drinking.
High and low frequencies, tempo, timbre and musical intensity can generate associations that the brain subsequently transfers towards the tasting experience. Higher sounds may be associated differently with sweetness or freshness than darker, lower-frequency sounds, for example.
There is also a much simpler mechanism: music changes our mood.
If a piece of music makes us feel relaxed, excited or happy, those emotions do not necessarily disappear when we evaluate everything else happening around us. Our enjoyment of the environment can partially transfer towards our judgement of the wine.
This helps explain why finding the theoretically “perfect” musical pairing may not always be necessary.
Sometimes the best wine soundtrack may simply be music you genuinely love.
When Powerful Music Makes Wine Feel More Powerful
The work of psychologist Adrian North provides one of the clearest demonstrations of the phenomenon.
Participants tasting wine while listening to different styles of music changed the language they used to describe what was inside the glass.
As Forbes reported in 2025, North's work found that playing heavy music while participants tasted a white wine generated 32% more references to heaviness compared with tasting the same wine in silence.
The liquid had obviously not changed.
What changed was the context through which participants interpreted it.
This creates a fascinating possibility for wine pairing. Instead of pairing wine exclusively with food, perhaps we can think about pairing wine with sound.
A powerful Cabernet Sauvignon might interact differently with dark jazz than with bright acoustic pop. A fresh Sauvignon Blanc might feel different beside light, energetic music than beside something slow and heavy.
The soundtrack becomes another ingredient in the experience.
Can Music Make Wine Taste Better?
Changing perception is one thing.
Actually making somebody enjoy the wine more is another.
Yet there is evidence for this too.
In one experiment reviewed by Spence and Wang, 26 participants tasted three expensive wines costing roughly £150–£400 per bottle. When the wines were accompanied by appropriately matched music rather than silence, participants' liking increased by approximately 5%.
Five percent may sound small, but the implication is remarkable.
These were already expensive wines. Music was not simply being used to disguise an unpleasant €4 supermarket bottle.
The environment could apparently enhance the enjoyment of something that was already supposed to be excellent.
Researchers have also observed that when people believe a piece of music matches a wine, they tend to enjoy the overall tasting experience more. One proposed explanation is “processing fluency”: when two sensory experiences feel congruent, the brain may find the combined experience easier and more pleasant to process.
In other words, a playlist does not necessarily have to make a Chardonnay sweeter.
Sometimes it simply needs to make the entire moment feel right.
The Strange Experiment That Changed Which Wine People Bought
Perhaps the most surprising effects appear before the bottle has even been opened.
In a famous supermarket experiment, researchers alternated stereotypically French and German music around a wine display.
When French music played, customers purchased more French wine.
When German music played, the pattern shifted towards German wine.
What makes the experiment especially interesting is that consumers did not necessarily believe the background soundtrack had influenced their choice.
Music was functioning almost like an invisible contextual cue.
And this opens the relationship between music and wine to an entirely different field: marketing.
Why Classical Music Can Make Us Spend More
Music may influence not only which bottle consumers choose, but also how much they spend.
Research reviewed by Spence and Wang found that shoppers purchased more expensive wine when classical music was playing in a wine store compared with Top 40 music. Similar effects have been observed for spending on food.
This makes sense when considered alongside the wider psychology of retail environments.
Classical music carries cultural associations with sophistication, tradition, luxury and refinement. Those associations can subtly change the frame through which customers evaluate the products around them.
Suddenly, the playlist inside a wine shop is not simply background entertainment.
It becomes part of the positioning of the products themselves.
A store selling premium Barolo, Burgundy or Champagne while blasting random chart music may therefore be creating a completely different psychological environment from one using carefully selected jazz, classical or ambient music.
The wine has not changed. Its context has.
From Mozart to Metallica: What Should We Actually Play?
This is where the subject becomes more complicated — and much more interesting than simply saying “classical music is good for wine.”
Master of Wine Susan R. Lin, whose research has examined the influence of classical music on perceptions of non-vintage Brut Champagne, told Forbes that combinations of pitch, tempo, articulation and timbre can be associated with particular sensory characteristics.
If someone wanted to emphasize perceptions of brightness and freshness, for example, faster tempo, higher pitch and brighter timbres might make sense.
But Lin also makes an important point: personal preference matters.
If Metallica makes somebody significantly happier than Beethoven, then Metallica could potentially create the more enjoyable drinking experience for that person because mood itself influences perception.
This means there probably isn't one objectively correct “wine playlist”.
The more interesting approach is matching musical character with wine character.
Uncorked & Cultured suggests lighter classical and jazz settings around light whites, deeper jazz or R&B around richer whites, acoustic music around lighter reds and bolder rock or jazz around full-bodied reds. These should be treated as pairing suggestions rather than universal scientific rules, but the concept fits the broader research on musical congruency.
Music Inside the Winery
The relationship becomes stranger still when we leave the tasting room.
Some winemakers are experimenting with sound during wine production itself.
Forbes reported several examples in 2025, including wineries in Italy, Chile and elsewhere that expose wine, cellars or even vines to music and other sound.
This is where a clear distinction is important.
There is substantial experimental literature supporting the idea that music can alter human perception of wine. Claims that playing music directly to barrels or vines physically improves the wine are much less established scientifically.
Nevertheless, the experiments are fascinating.
When Winemakers Play Music to the Barrels
In Puglia, winemaker Pasquale Petrera has experimented with what he describes as music therapy in his cellar.
Instead of simply playing conventional songs, the environment includes natural sounds such as birds, running water, wind, rain and waves. The idea is that sound vibrations could influence movement within the barrel and potentially contribute to processes associated with oxygenation and maturation.
Further north, near Lake Garda, the Olivini family has reportedly used classical music in its cellar since renovations in 2018. Winemaker Juri Botti has suggested that vibrations could stimulate yeast particles, potentially acting as an extremely subtle form of movement for wines spending extended periods on their lees.
In Chile, Montes has gone even further, using Gregorian chanting in its cellar for years and incorporating acoustics into the design of the space.
Are these effects proven?
Not convincingly yet.
But they reveal how seriously some producers are beginning to think about the relationship between sound and wine.
Can Mozart Actually Influence a Vineyard?
Perhaps the most extraordinary example comes from Tuscany.
At Paradiso di Frassina in Montalcino, Carlo Cignozzi installed more than 120 speakers around the estate, exposing the vines themselves to Mozart. Forbes reports that Cignozzi associates the lower frequencies with beneficial effects on the plants and believes sound may also discourage certain pests.
It sounds almost like science fiction: a Tuscan vineyard listening to Mozart while Brunello grapes mature.
And scepticism is justified.
The scientific case for sound physically improving vines or wine remains considerably less developed than the evidence showing that music influences human sensory perception. Forbes itself notes the limited amount of conclusive scientific research around these winemaking claims.
But as an experiment in the intersection between agriculture, acoustics and sensory experience, it is difficult not to be fascinated.
What This Means for Restaurants, Wine Bars and Wineries
This research has implications far beyond somebody choosing Spotify music for dinner at home.
Imagine a winery offering several tasting rooms where the same wine is paired with different soundscapes.
Or a sommelier presenting a tasting menu where every wine has not only a food pairing but a musical pairing.
A wine bar could gradually change its soundtrack alongside the progression of its menu: lighter sounds around aperitivo and sparkling wines, deeper and warmer music as customers move towards structured reds.
Wine shops could think about music as carefully as lighting, bottle placement and interior design.
And wineries could create Spotify playlists specifically designed around individual bottles.
There is already evidence that multisensory wine events can be powerful. Spence and Wang discuss large experiential experiments, including an event involving around 3,000 participants, where changes in sensory ratings such as fruitiness and sweetness of approximately 15–20% were documented under manipulated environmental conditions involving sound and colour.
This transforms the playlist from background decoration into part of the product experience.
For a wine brand, that is a fascinating opportunity.
A QR code on the back of a bottle could theoretically say:
“Don't just drink this wine. Listen to it.”
Final Thoughts
Wine and music have more in common than might initially appear.
Both are deeply connected with memory, emotion, culture and expectation. Both can feel completely different depending on the environment in which we experience them. And both are extraordinarily difficult to separate from personal preference.
The scientific evidence does not suggest that playing Beethoven magically changes the chemical composition of a Cabernet Sauvignon.
What it does suggest is arguably more interesting.
Music can change us while we are drinking it.
It can direct our attention towards sweetness, freshness, heaviness or fruitiness. It can influence how much we enjoy a wine. It can change the language we use to describe it. And outside the tasting experience, background music can even influence which bottle consumers choose and how much they are willing to spend.
That makes the soundtrack of a wine bar, restaurant, cellar or tasting room much more than background noise.
The right playlist does not simply accompany the experience.
It becomes part of the experience.
So the next time you open a bottle that doesn't taste quite the way you expected, perhaps don't reach immediately for another wine.
Change the music first.
