“Enters the ear, stays in the head” Can Music change the rating of wine tastings?

Britta Niklas reports on the results of her wine tasting at the Blaupause

This article is based on a presentation that was given at the annual conference of the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE) in Ithaca, USA, in June 2018. At the “Blaupause”, which was one of several events to celebrate the 50th birthday of Ruhr University Bochum in 2015, the IEE was allocated one table on the five-kilometre stretch on Universitätsstraße, and the IEE Team asked diverse guests (randomly) to take part in a wine tasting.

IEE staff, offering Wine and respective questionnaires

With this experiment, I wanted to find out whether participants rank the wine of a region higher than wines of other regions while listening to matching music of the region.
Regarding the background of the experiment, there is a growing body of very inspiring literature dealing with the question of whether what we listen to can change what we taste. Spence (2015a) found, that many sensory experiences (crispy, crackly, …) largely depend on associate sounds.

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These so-called cross-modal effects result from multisensory integration, meaning that our brains try to integrate inputs from different senses that belong to the same food or drink (Spence 2015b). Wesson and Wilson (2010) found that there are direct neural connections between the ear and the nose; and found that loud sounds may be able to suppress the olfactory function.

Against this background, the question of whether even background sound can impact the perception of taste and flavour of food and drinks arises.

Especially when it comes to Wine tastings, it is hard to determine objective measures (Lecocy and Visser, 2006).

Price information is seen to be the most important determinant for the rating of wines (Brochet, 2001 and Plassmann et. al, 2008), but when no price information is available, other influences, like sensory ones, affect the tasting experience. Spence et al. (2013) ran an experiment with the London Symphony Orchestra, where people rated wines 10-12% higher when matching music was played. Piqueras-Fiszman and Spence (2015) added to this result and found that the right match of music and food/drink makes the taste more authentic. Based on this, the hypothesis that matching music has a positive impact on the judgement of a wine was derived.

In order to test for this, the IEE Team offered 4 white wines and 4 red wines of similar quality (according to expert ratings) from the countries of South Africa, Germany, France and Spain (for white wine only) and Argentina (for red wine only). During the wine tasting, matching music of the respective regions was played (or not) in the background, but this was not indicated to the participants. They also did not get any information on prices or expert ratings, but the country of each wine was repeatedly indicated and visible. Participants then had to compare the 4 white or 4 red wines and rank them from 1 to 4 with 1 being best and 4 being worse.

The questionnaires were analysed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis between the highest rating for a regional wine and the respective matching music, statistical tests and logistic regression, with the highest rank for a regional wine as dependent and the respective music as independent variable. Gender was added as additional independent variables and the results for the ranking of wine with and without matching music were compared. Age was also added as an independent variable, but this result is only illustrated in one case here.
Figure 1 below shows the descriptive statistics for the ranking of white wines from 1-4 for each region, without taking the match of music into account, with Germany ranking best, and Spain worst.

Figure 1: Ranking of all white wines, irrespective of music played

White wine

Comparing the ranking with and without matching music, participants ranked South African white wine significantly differently (higher) when matching music was played (see figure 2 below) and the correlation between the highest rank for South African white wine and the matching music was positive (0.1902).

Figure 2: Ranking of South African white wine with and without matching music

For South African wine, in comparison to all other countries in the sample, even the “odds ratio” was significant and positive (2.338), which means that the probability that participants give the highest rank (1) to South African white wine increases by about 2.4 times when South African music is played.

German wines were also ranked higher when matching (German) music was played (see figure 3 below) and the correlation was still positive (0.0143) regarding matching music and the highest ranking for German wine, but less strong compared to South African wine. Males reacted stronger on German music than females.

Figure 3: Ranking of German white wine with and without matching music

For French white wine, the correlation between the highes rank for French wine and matching music was also positive (0.1651), but there was no significant difference between the ranking with and without matching music. Surprisingly some women reacted negatively to French music. This holds especially for women of the age groups 31-45, 46-60 and above 60.

There was no significant difference between the ranking with and without matching music for Spanish white wine, but there was again a positive correlation (0.119) between matching music and the highest rank for Spanish wine with women reacting more positively to Spanish music.

 
Red Wine

For red wine, results differ. Figure 4 shows the descriptive statistics for the ranking of red wines from 1-4 for each region, without taking the match of music into account, with South African wine ranked best, Argentinian wine second and French and German wine equally ranked 3.

Figure 4: Ranking of all red wines, irrespective of music played

Even if South African wines were generally ranked best, there was a significant difference between the results with and without matching music, with South African music leading to worse results. There was also a negative correlation between the highest preference for South African red wine and South African music (-0.253).

For Argentina, there was only a small negative correlation (-0.081) between the highest ranked red wine from Argentina and Latin music, but there was no significant difference between the ranking with and without matching music, even if some women seem to react positively on Latin music compared to men.

For French red wine, there was a significant difference between the ranking with and without matching music and French wine was ranked a little bit worse when matching music was played. The correlation between the highest rank for French wine and matching music was negative (-0.1387) and men reacted more negatively to French music than women (figure 5).

Figure 5: Ranking of French red wine with and without matching music

For Germany there was no significant difference between rankings with and without matching music, but the correlation between the highest ranked German wine and matching German music was slightly positive (0.0038).

The results suggest that matching music seems to have a positive impact on the ratings for white wines, but did not hold true regarding red wines. One assumption is that the selected countries, France, South Africa and Spain/Argentina, are much more known for their red wines than for their white wines, so that the judgement of their withe wines is more responsive to other influences. The weather was not included as a control variable, however women always judged in a more positive way when Spanish/Latin Music was played on this sunny day.

The IEE Team enjoyed the whole experiment very much, but the whole research design should be repeated in a more professional setting (in a tasting room rather than on a crowded street) in order to make results more reliable.

The IEE Team

References:

Brochet, F. (2001). Chemical object representation in the field of consciousness. Working Paper, General Oenology Laboratory, Talence, France.
Lecocq, S. and Visser, M. (2006). What determines wine prices: objective vs. sensory characteristics. Journal of Wine Economics, 1, 42-56.
Piqueras-Fiszman, B., and Spence, C. (2015). Sensory expectations based on product-extrinsic food cues: an interdisciplinary review of the empirical evidence and theoretical accounts. Food Quality and Preference, 40, 165–179.
Plassmann, H., O'Doherty, J., Shiv, B. and Rangel, A. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS, 105, 1050-1054.
Spence, C. (2015a). Eating with our ears: assessing the importance of the sounds of consumption to our perception and enjoyment of multisensory flavour experiences. Flavour, 4, 3.
Spence, C. (2015b). Multisensory flavor perception. Cell 161, 24–35.
Spence, C., Richards, L., Kjellin, E., Huhnt, A.-M., Daskal, V., Scheybeler, A., et al. (2013). Looking for crossmodal correspondences between classical music & fine wine. Flavour, 2, 29.
Wesson, D. and Wilson, D. (2010). Smelling Sounds: Olfactory-Auditory Sensory Convergence in the Olfactory Tubercle. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience. 30. 3013-21. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6003-09.2010.