A Practical Guide to Pairing Wine and Music

A Practical Guide to Pairing Wine and Music provides wine consumers, wineries, and restaurants with the information they need to use music to enhance the experience of wine. The influence of specific musical selections on how we experience wine has been confirmed by numerous scientific studies. The right music can enhance one's experience of a wine. The wrong music can detract from the experience.

This book explains how to choose the right music for any wine and for any occasion. The book is suitable for novice wine lovers as well as seasoned experts to enhance their enjoyment of any wine.  It also provides guidance for restaurateurs and winery tasting rooms to select background anthems, as well as advice to winemakers to anchor their styles’ emotional modalities from vintage to vintage. Playlists for numerous wine types are provided as examples. Because wine and music pairing is guided by our emotional responses to music and wine, A Practical Guide to Pairing Wine and Music includes a discussion of how to identify and characterize those emotions and use them to find good matches. A brief history of wine and music pairing is included as well.

Dwight Furrow is Professor of Philosophy at San Diego Mesa College and writes on aesthetics, especially the philosophy of wine and food. He is the author of Beauty and the Yeast: A Philosophy of Wine, Life, and Love. He received his PhD in philosophy from University of California, Riverside in 1993 and has wine certifications from The Society of Wine Educators and WSET (Wine and Spirits Educational Trust).

Winemaker for his own WineSmith brand and consultant for hundreds of winery clients, Clark Smith has made wine for half a century. His musical credentials include six decades as a folksinger/songwriter, choral tenor and Barbershop quartet baritone. His 2007 presentation to the Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference has been widely cited, and he has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, on CNN, and twice on National Public Radio.  His seminar “Liquid Music” was introduced to the music press at the 2008 Lollapalooza in Chicago.   His revolutionary book, Postmodern Winemaking, was Wine & Spirits Magazine’s 2013 Book of the Year.