Ageing wine to music

Update: There are some interesting additions to the list of winemakers who play music to their vines/wines on the forum, with naturally the odd dissenting opinion.

Last weekend, before settling down to the business of judging more than 200 wines made from indigenous grape varieties blind with a dozen of my peers from around the world, we were given the chance to meet many of the producers who had submitted wines for this competition, now in its sixth year. It was a great start to the process of judging and I appreciated the fact that many of these producers had travelled many hours at the weekend to sit and present themselves and a few of the wines they had not submitted in the competition to us.

Pasquale Petrera, who makes Fatalone wines in Gioia del Colle in Puglia, particularly caught my attention. He referred casually to the fact that he gives his wines, mainly Primitivos, 'music therapy', yet he seemed so solid and matter of fact. Indeed he turns out to have read physics at university. Listen in the short film below to his explanation of why he believes playing the sounds of water or Bach is good for this wines.