A growing body of scientific evidence now shows that what people taste when evaluating a wine, and how much they enjoy the experience, can be influenced by the music that happens to be playing at the same time. It has long been known that what we hear can influence the hedonic aspects of tasting. However, what the latest research now shows is that by playing the "right" music one can also impact specific sensory-discriminative aspects of tasting as well. Music has been shown to influence the perceived acidity, sweetness, fruitiness, astringency, and length of wine. We argue against an account of such results in terms of synaesthesia, or "oenesthesia," as some have chosen to call it. Instead, we suggest that attention, directed via the crossmodal correspondences that exist between sound and taste (in the popular meaning of the term, i.e., flavor), can modify (perhaps enhance, or certainly highlight when attended, or suppress when unattended) certain elements in the complex tasting experience that is drinking wine. We also highlight the likely role played by any change in the mood or emotional state of the person listening to the music on taste/aroma perception as well. Finally, we highlight how the crossmodal masking of sweetness perception may come into effect if the music happens to be too loud (a form of crossmodal sensory masking). Taken together, the evidence reviewed here supports the claim that, strange though it may seem, what we hear (specifically in terms of music) really can change our perception of the taste of wine, not to mention how much we enjoy the experience. Several plausible mechanisms that may underlie such crossmodal effects are outlined.

The majority of the literature on sensory expectations has focused solely on those that are set by the eye, that is, by what we see. However, although we rarely think about it, the sounds we hear prior to tasting also influence both our sensory expectations concerning what a food or beverage product will taste like and our hedonic expectations concerning how much we think that we are going to enjoy the experience. In this article, we focus on the perception of beverages and consider just what information is potentially conveyed to the mind of the consumer by the sounds of opening (the packaging), pouring the liquid, and even the sounds of carbonation of a drink in a glass or other receptacle. We review the research that has investigated whether people can discriminate the temperature of a beverage, the level and/or type of carbonation, the viscosity of the liquid, and even the shape of the bottle or container by sound alone. Finally, we look at the question of whether certain beverages do, or could possibly, have a signature sound of opening, and at the opportunities associated with the modification of product sounds in beverage advertisements in order to help emphasize certain specific product or brand attributes.

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For years now, wine writers have been tempted to describe certain wines in terms of musical metaphors and analogies. Until recently, however, it has never been altogether clear how widely shared, and hence meaningful, such surprising cross-sensory connections really were. A growing body of scientific evidence, however, now shows that regular consumers (i.e. non-experts) do reliably match certain wines with particular pieces of music (under conditions of forced choice). When questioned, people also feel that certain wines go well with specific pieces of music, while others do not. As such, it can be argued that describing wines in musical terms can potentially provide useful information concerning the likely sensory, descriptive, analytic and/or hedonic properties of the wine. While some commentators have sought for an explanation for such crossmodal matches in terms of synaesthesia, here we argue that crossmodal correspondences-the associations that the majority of us share between tastes, aromas, flavours, and mouthfeel characteristics on the one hand and particular properties of sound and music on the other-offer a more satisfactory explanation for what may be going on. In particular, we highlight how structural, statistical, semantic and affective correspondences could all play a part in explaining the affinity that so many of us feel between wine and music.

People robustly associate various sound attributes with specific smells/tastes, and soundtracks that are associated with specific tastes can influence people’s evaluation of the taste of food and drink. However, it is currently unknown whether such soundtracks directly impact the eating experience via physiological changes (an embodiment account), or whether they act at a higher cognitive level, or both. The present research assessed a version of the embodiment account, where a soundtrack associated with sourness is hypothesized to induce a physiological response in the listener by increasing salivary flow. Salivation was measured while participants were exposed to three different experimental conditions – a sour soundtrack, a muted lemon video showing a man eating a lemon, and a silent baseline condition. The results revealed that salivation during the lemon video condition was significantly greater than in the sour soundtrack and baseline conditions. However, contrary to our hypothesis, there was no significant difference between salivation levels in the sour soundtrack compared to the baseline condition. These results are discussed in terms of potential mechanisms underlying the auditory modulation of taste perception/evaluation.