Fantastic article from a sommelier (Cal Fussman) about wine tasting, and especially about wine and music pairings!
Here is an extract: (read full article here)
"...That was how I found out about La Turque, a wine made by Guigal in the Rhône region in France. Tasting a $400 wine when you've been cutting your teeth on $20 bottles will widen your eyes. But for me, this wine was bigger than that. La Turque opened my ears. It made me hear music. As I drank, Edith Piaf was singing "No Regrets" right out of that glass, and believe me, she was in her prime.
That might sound a little loopy. But people have found crazier ways to describe the taste of wine. I've heard praise for the "barnyard odors" in a glass of burgundy. A sommelier once asked me if I had picked up "brussels sprouts" in the bouquet of a red wine from Chile. And a wine magazine editor once assured me that there was "a hint of Tasmanian black pepper" (my italics) in a glass of Shiraz. I could never get excited talking up brussels sprouts, and describing wine with adjectives like metallic, nutty, tart, floral, and woody just wasn't me. So I began to correlate wine with music, and to this day the melodies have stayed with me.
As the months passed, I scribbled comparisons between wines and songs on scraps of paper constantly. I tossed these notes in a box along with pictures of some of the many wineries I visited when the opportunities arose and I could coax more expense money out of the editor.
Ella Fitzgerald singing scat is wonderful champagne.
Luciano Pavarotti is a great Barolo.
Pick up a Robert Weil Riesling Auslese and you might hear Sade singing "The Sweetest Taboo."
I once observed a woman in a supermarket checkout line buying a couple of bottles of mass-market California Merlot and asked her if, by chance, she happened to like the music of Barry Manilow. "I do," she replied. "How did you know?"
I once brought my wine-to-music theory to the home of Monte Lipman, chairman of Universal Republic Records, and it wasn't long before everyone was discovering Joe Jackson's voice in a glass of fine California chardonnay.
Edith Piaf was singing "No Regrets" right out of that glass, and believe me, she was in her prime.
The beauty of learning wine by music is that you're never ignorant. You have an opinion that's as good as anyone else's. If a sommelier brings you a wine list and you have no idea what to order, you can always say, "We'd like a bottle of Louie Armstrong singing 'What a Wonderful World.'" Suddenly, the pressure has been reversed. (He's right on track if he brings you a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy burgundy.) Stick to the music and you'll never get bogged down in a conversation with some wine geek that includes the phrase malolactic fermentation."
