Don't Have Sex to Sousa

If only I’d known when I posted my last entry about White Burgundy and Fall Out Boy!

Suddenly, everyone in the wine world seems to be talking about Clark Smith who — along with his wife, Dr. Susan Mayer-Smith — has been conducting "research" into the relationship between wine and music. The owners of GrapeCraft Wines, she (Susan) holds a PhD in clinical psychology while he (Clark) states on their website that his "claim to fame" is having been fired by Alice Waters, then goes on to talk about his own "Svengali-like charisma."

I want to make it clear right up front: I have not tasted the wines from GrapeCraft. For all I know, they may be nigh to ambrosia. But come on. . . .This musicology thing — on which they presented a paper at the 13th annual Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference, and about which Clark was interviewed by the host of Day to Day on NPR — seems to me to be based more on savvy marketing principles than real science.

Smith’s thesis is that a wine’s flavor will be "dramatically affected" by the music a drinker listens to as he or she sips. Cabernet Sauvignon, he says, requires "music of darkness," but might be ruined by a light chamber quartet. Pinot Noir calls for Mozart, while white Zinfandel will be improved (you’re not going to believe this one. . . .) by a good polka. Sweet Chardonnay must be served to the Beach Boys. Yeah, well, I wish we all could be California Girls.

Back when I was in graduate school, I once ran into a woman at a party who had recently received a $150,000 grant from the NEA to study The Sopranos and measure the show’s impact on society as well as evaluate its relationship to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. (I’m 100% serious about this.) I remember being torn between envy and derision. My husband at the time, a carpenter, was simply admiring. "What a scam," he crowed. Indeed.

That there is a relationship between music and wine is all but indisputable. Also between music and food, music and learning, music and sex.In fact, I’ve long contended that people eat more (and taste less) in cacaphonous environments, which is why I wouldn’t consume a morsel in a shopping mall — not even if Julia Child herself rose from the dead and appeared at Eden Prairie Center to prepare Coq Au Vin.

We play Mozart to children because it is complex and mathematically structured, so it helps the brain develop connections in a similarly synthesized way. And we don’t make love to marching band music (please keep it to yourself if you do), but rather to Marvin Gaye, k.d. lang, Leonard Cohen, and Sting.

In other words, I’m not saying the Clarks are wrong — they’re only pointing out what musicians have known since they worked for emperors and kings.

Earlier this month, I wrote about the M. Chapoutier Belleruche Côtes-Du-Rhône 2005 and said it was "as balanced as Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony," with a nearly metrical composition of sugar, acid, and fruit. I’m sure the description occurred to me because of the inherent shared qualities of great music and fine wine. But the fact that someone is making a name by pointing out the obvious strikes me as ridiculous — the sort of whimsy only the NEA should support.

As for that concert I attended, I’m quite regretful now. It occurs to me that Fall Out Boy’s The Carpal Tunnel of Love was literally screaming out for a good Shiraz.