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WINEMAKING Wine, like music, carries emotion. Just as we have happy songs and sad songs, wines have emotional modalities. White Zinfan- dels are silly, happy-go-lucky wines; Cabernets are brooding, foul and even angry. We will naturally pair up Dixieland jazz or polka with the former, but Beethoven's 5th , The Doors or Metallica with the latter. That might seem simple guesswork until you try it the other way round. Don showed me that Carl Oorf's Overture from Carmina Burana could actually make a White Zinfandel appear to have more tannin than a Howell Mountain Cabernet. The new brain toys Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Electro Encephalography (EEC) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) today allow us to observe live subjects in mid-thought. Musicologists have been quick to jump on these new tools, and their fascinating findings have birthed an army of technical papers as well as a host of read- able popular articles and books.3, 4 Wine harmony and balance can be better understood by piggybacking on this research. In 1993 I began to experiment with adjusting alcohol content. The same wine that was hot and bitter at elevated alcohol became thin and salty at low alcohol, with a balanced wine somewhere in between. At first I expected these effects would describe a smooth, nor- mal curve, but instead we found "sweet spots"—discrete points of harmonious balance separated from each other by terribly disharmonious wines. Figure 1 on page 63 shows an experiment we did using a 1999 Syrah at CSU Fresno, where 22 judges vot- ed their preferences for blends of untreated and dealcoholized components comprising 31 alcohol points between 12.5% and 15.5% in 0.1% increments. Acrolon_3.5x4.875_BW_WinesandVinesAD_Feb2011.pdf 1 2/1/2011 9:48:59 PM COMPLETE CONTROL OF YOUR TANKS TANKNET®temperature controls are easy to use, economical and can be remotely managed via mobile devices with NO NEW WIRES at the tank. C M Y CM MY CY CMY K • Calibration-free Temperature Control • Fermentation Status From Anywhere • Brix/Temp/Pump-over Tracking • Alarms via E-mail or Text • Production Software Interfaces • Cellar Temperature, Humidity & CO2 • Flexible Energy Management Tools WWW.ACROLON.COM 707 938-1300 Come see all our winery control products Wineries Unlimited Booth 704 Richmond Virginia, March 30 & 31, 2011 62 Wines & Vines MARCH 201 1 ® There was no bell curve; instead we had radio stations, with very poor wines just 0.1% away. At Vinovation we dealcoholized 2,500 wines per year for 15 years and never saw a bell curve. Something in our sensory software reacts to fine nuances of dif- ference, sorting harmony from dissonance in a pattern our judges all perceived intuitively. That sounds completely zany until you recognize that this is exactly what music does. The strong non- linearity we see in Figure 1 seems outlandish until you personally experience it. Dissonance vs. preference When I pop a cork, I like to test drive music by sampling free 30-second clips on iTunes. Matches and mismatches are apparent within seconds. A frequently asked question is, "Does it matter if I like the music?" My answer is no. There is no song I like less than Iron Maiden's "Run For The Hills," but I have to admit it's great with my Cabernet Sauvignon, which takes on a round, sweet spiciness with the track. Conversely, my favorite tunes are often awful with the wine I'm drinking. Brain imaging has shown researchers that subjects listening to a C/G perfect fifth directed the signal to the Reward System, pro- ducing a "smooth, sweet" sound. When the same subjects heard a C/C-sharp dissonance, the signal was instead directed to the fight-or-flight areas. Dissonant chords were characterized as a "rough" sound.1 My best guess is that this same mechanism routes balanced wines to our pleasure centers and unbalanced ones to fight-or- flight areas. Its function on the palate is an obvious survival mech-