My wine and music pairings, part 1

Warning: this is a quirky, minutely personal journey down memory lane. 

It doesn't start that way, but it is.

The way of the world in our epoch is to scientize everything, to make objective and incontrovertibly true as many things, as many processes, as possible.  We who love wine know all about this tendency; it's the basis of most of our polemics, with the heroes (depending on your point of view, ironically and Heisenbergly enough) of terroir and things natural vs. the villains of manipulation and internationalization, of money money money.  Or so it seems.

Photo: St. Triphon, patron of vines and vineyard workers.  Position on MOX?

And so there they are arrayed against one another, the likes of Jonathan Nossiter, Nicolas Joly, Hubert de Montville, Franco Ziliani, Alice Feiring and Francis Boulard vs. the likes of Michel Rolland, Riccardo Cotarella, Robert Parker, James Suckling, and Craig Smith.  To me at least it boils down to a version of "Whose wine is it anyway?"  A small-town wrangle.

All of which can be very interesting and, yes, it is important for the future of winemaking and enjoyment.  Maybe not as important as climate change but important.

Still, wine isn't reducible to chemistry and marketing strategies.  From the drinker's side it's about refreshment, sociability, commensality and, yes, memory.  Wine is the ultimate aide-memoir; it played its part in revealing the stream of consciousness method to James Joyce.

Joyce.  Drink, memory.

Music plays the same role.  Whenever you hear a particular song from your younger days, you experience a rush of emotions, sights, and scents.  The song may be idiotic ("Wipe Out" anyone?), but it doesn't matter.  The "recollection of emotion in tranquillity" is the important thing here.

And if you combine music and wine -- what are your pairings?  What music seems to call for which wines?  What would you choose to heighten the intensity of the feeling, the recollection of scenes and people at key moments in your life?  What combination of music and wine would help explain you to yourself?

I have a few examples in mind.  The music is the starting point, the emotional touchstone.  The wine is the element that deepens and extends the feeling, bringing past and present together as surely as the communion cup does.

If it's consecrated, you must drink up.

Here are some of my favorite songs, or types of music in general.  Most evoke specific people and places and states of mind.  What do you think of the pairings?  What would yours be?

Astral Weeks by Van Morrison

After all these years (since 1968) I think this is still my favorite album.  Its unified intensity, its elliptical lyric style, and the fact that Van was living in Cambridge, Mass. then -- it's been emotional background music most of my life.  It reminds me of when my wife and I were engaged, and we were ecstatic with first deep love and fear.  "Ballerina" is the song that sums it up best for me: on a rainy St. Patrick's Day evening, after a Doors concert in Boston, I walked back into Marcia's life after a seven-month breakup.  "Ballerina" captures perfectly that moment, that emotion, that sense of wonder in the renewability of things. 

The wine to accompany this album?

What could it be but a Burgundy?  I still recall the taste and perfume of a 1967 Clos de Vougeot that I drank in the mid 70s.  A complex wine for a complex set of emotions, which only grow more so as time goes by.

Well, it could be an aged, botrityzed Chenin Blanc from the Loire, something with a golden color and an earthy sweetness that recalls those bright autumn afternoons as the red and orange leaves fell around us on Commonwealth Avenue and we felt like we were "goin' to heaven / in another place / with another face."

Download 14_st. Louis Blues.wma

(April 1930 cut) by Louis Armstrong

Odd but true: since I was 13 or so, this cut of St. Louis Blues has been probably my favorite recording of any song.  Period.  (Although Armstrong's Dallas Blues and West End Blues come pretty close.)  What transcendant joy it expresses, what swinging energy, what brilliant playing -- a disciplined spiritual ecstasy.   Louis was the founding genius of America's true classical music, jazz.  Every time I hear it -- thousands of time by now -- the same joyous power of it hits me.

What's a wonderful wine that lifts me up and that I never get tired of?  Not expensive and rare but democratically available to everyone? 

Not Beaujolais -- tastes too manipulated to me, not a good pairing.  But something like that -- a Pinot Nero from NE Italy or a Frappato from Sicily.  Restrained, even elegant, but not a wine just for rich guys.

Gutbucket Blues

All those rural blues shouters with their raw emotions and tales of poverty and disappointed love, the rough playing, their sense of time and place -- it calls for a strong, rough red with its own powerful sense of time and place.  Bandol. Or Aglianico di Basilicata.

Offenbach

Obvious, this:  pink Champagne, bien dosé.  Merry indulgent wine for merry indulgent music.

Running out of time -- behind in my work.  I'm listening to

Download radiohead_creep_1.mp3

and I'm trying to figure out what the pairing would be.  Some overreaching California Chardonnay, I think. 

 

Comments

[M.Grazia]

Terry, apprezzo molto questo tuo contributo sul legame tra musica, vino ed emozioni.
My mother was a pianist... and my first time of life was accompanied with Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann.
E, personalmente, perchè parli di un vino...esso deve suscitare in me un' emozione, proprio come la musica.
Mia madre diceva che "la musica non da il pane"... Il vino sì, pare!
Lieta di sentirti.
M.G
PS. Quella Coulée de Serrant 2003 che ho degustato ieri ci sarebbe stata molto bene con le Variazioni Goldberg ( prima versione) di Glenn Gould... Ma era una degustazione "ufficiale" e non potevo portarmela a casa... Mannaggia!

[Terry Hughes]

MG, parliamo troppo spesso dell'emozione suscitata dal vino -- stile fuori moda di esprimersi sul soggetto. Troppo vecchio mondo, forse "elitista". Sottovalutata dagli organolettisti, se posso dire cosi'.

Pero' il vino e' come la musica in questo potere di sollevare gli anni e unirci con "i viventi e i morti," se detto cosi' in italiano ("the quick and the dead" per usare la vecchia formula anglicana). E con le persone che eravamo.

Nonostante la concordanza dei nostri pensieri sul soggetto, mi sento un po' barbarico accanto le tue Goldberg Variations e Chopin, ecc. Gutbucket blues, mah !

Vabbe', i miei gusti sono onestamente rappresentati dai vini che amo. Tuttapposto. Ciao, carissima.

[M.Grazia]

Oh Terry... ma guarda che amo alla follia anche Billie Holiday e Miles Davis....Di questo spero tu conosca "Kind of blues" , con il quale in una serata potrei sorseggiarmi il vino della nostalgia... Ma qual è il mio vino della nostalgia un giorno lo scoprirai!
Ciao, squisitissimo.

[Terry Hughes]

Billie Holiday - da fogo !

Anche Ethel Waters, Ella Fitzgerald, Mildred Bailey (conosci?), Doris Day ("Sentimental Journey")...

Un giorno brinderemo alle nostre nostalgie, cara Maria Grazia.

[David J Rodriguez]

An-co-ra-an-co-ra!!
Saludos desde Puerto Rico-- hanno giustamente scoperto il suo blog--not yr usual compulsive tasting notes-- even tho y're a marketing guy! good, good stuff-- maybe I'll be up in NYC for a couple weeks next month-- like to try to meet Carlo Petrini & raise awareness about la mia piccola insola, environmental & gastronomic 'canary in a coal mine'...

(PS--opened a Mendocino county Barbera by Greg Graziano on his 'Enotria' label-- a little too new-oak-cedary, let's see if it opens into something better tomorrow-- while listening to a stream of tangos which calls for a deeper, rougher Malbec, or even Tannat de Uruguay...)

[Terry Hughes]

Thanks for the kind words, David. "Usual compulsive tasting notes." I like it. Too many of these guys feel like they have to emulate Parker with their 100 point systems and all that crap. Bobbo wannabes. Who the fuck cares about that?

Look me up when in NY. Ciao.

[East Village Wine Geek]

What a great post! Music and wine both carry with them a sense of mystery and emotion that can tailor itself to and individual. When I think of drinking a touriga nacioanl from Portugal or some crianza from Spain I want to be sipping to the sounds of Camaron De La Isla or The Patrick Wolff Trio. Miles always comes to mind when I pop a nice, deep Rhone. The food the pairs with These wines just screams Autumn and Bitch's Brew. And who can forget Allison Krauss. A hot summer day, maybe some oysters or shell fish with a mango slasa on the side and a cold bottle of vermentino with some Allison Krauss and Ubion Station in the background. It all just kind of fits in my quirky head.

EVWG

[Terry Hughes]

Thanks for the props, EVWG. Of course, I have no idea who you're talking about, as my last musical update was about 1985 (too much Human League, maybe).

But, yes, the point is the same and the wine stimulates memory. Imagine Homer strumming his lyre and singing his song and all the nobles of Sparta getting tipsy, reliving the good old days at Troy...