From the art of the drinking song to songs about drink, Stuart Walton celebrates the ways in which “wine finds its musical enunciation.”

The happiness that wine creates, once it has reached a critical mass in our system, must emerge in some expressive form—voluble chatter and laughter, but most joyously of all, in the enduring cultural paradigm of drink-fuelled singing. Even if wine has reminded us we are sorrowful, lovelorn, blue, it still finds its musical enunciation.

Franz Schubert’s Drinking Song D.183 (1815) was inspired by his fondness for the rowdy culture of Vienna’s Heurigen, taverns that served the just-pressed wine of the new harvest, fizzing and turbid, knocked back with fatty morsels, accompanied by cheap music. A setting of a philosophical lyric by Alois Zettler, the song apostrophizes the two essentials of life: “Ihr, Freunde, und du, gold'ner Wein / Versüsset mir das Leben” (“You, friends, and you, golden wine / Sweeten life for me”). There is literally no point in living without these vital amenities, as the refrain insists. Riches, power, even getting into Heaven are worth nothing, the singer avows, without his favorite people and his favorite drink.

A drinking song has to sound like something with which everybody can join in. That was the intention of the drunken fugue, a central European appropriation from the Scottish poet James Thomson, author of “Rule, Britannia!,” that concludes the Autumn movement of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons (1801). “Juh-he! Juh-he! Der Wein ist da” (“Drink up! Drink up! The wine is here”). A chorus erupts in glad-hearted song, to the emphatic rhythms and melodic lilt that drunken singing requires. Thomson had given it perhaps a little more Roxburgh razzle than Haydn dared:

set, ardent, in

For serious drinking. Nor evasion sly

Nor sober shift is to the puking wretch

Indulged askew; but earnest, brimming bowls

Lave every soul, the table floating round,

And pavement, faithless to the fuddled foot.

In 1929, yet another Austrian composer, Alban Berg, wrote a twelve-tone setting of three lyrics from the 19th century’s most committed intoxicationist, Charles Baudelaire, for soprano and orchestra, to translations by Stefan George. In the first, “The Soul of Wine,” the singer, in the persona of wine itself, recalls the ancient function of wine to console and refresh, before the hedonistic impulse kicks in to the accompaniment of a fragile tango pastiche: “Du stülpst die Ärmel – stützest beide Arme / Du wirst mich preisen und zufrieden sein” (“With sleeves rolled up, elbows on the table / You will glorify me and be content”). There isn't proper drinking unless things are getting happy-sloppy, daft as a tango in a Viennese bar.

The Anglo-American wine-drinking song

The Anglo-American popular song tradition has frequently been uneasy with wine, which wasn’t native to either culture until well into the postwar period. There is strawberry wine, elderberry wine, the Shondells' sweet cherry wine, Nina Simone's lilac wine, anything but actual wine. Where wine was referenced, it was often emblematically sweet, an attribute that gives it fleeting poignancy in the Tom Springfield/Frank Farian tune, “The Carnival is Over,” in which we hear of the departing lover that “your kiss was sweet as wine.” We are back in the world of Greco-Roman antiquity, when wine was archetypally sweet rather than sour or bitter.

A reference to Champagne always adds luster to an idealized lover figured in song, especially where the brand is name-checked. The pretty cabinet of Queen’s “Killer Queen” is stocked with Moët et Chandon. In the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” there is pink champagne on ice beneath the mirrored ceiling. It gets better. Billy Joel’s date in “Big Shot” is clutching a glass of Dom Pérignon. At a certain point, American rap artists became obsessed with Louis Roederer’s Cristal. Nor were they necessarily hogging it to themselves: in “Rotten Apple,” New York’s 50 Cent is “teachin the hoodrats what Cristal taste like,” an invaluable public service. More eerily intriguing is the sudden appearance in Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed” of a close companion in an otherwise deserted place: “There's a woman on my lap and she's drinking Champagne.” Red alert.

What pop lyrics have been more comfortable with is wine as solace for the shattered heart. Neil Diamond’s “Red Red Wine,” memorably covered by UB40 in 1983, is a medication for helping the deserted singer to forget. Lloyd Cole bemoans the fact that “the last thing you need is me and my weeping wine.” In the universe of country music, the titles alone tell one sob saga after another: “Tears Will Be the Chaser for Your Wine” (Wanda Jackson); “Sorrow Overtakes the Wine” (Porter Wagoner); “Wine, You’ve Used Me Long Enough” (George Jones); and, apocalyptically, “When the Wine Wears Off” (Blake Shelton).

Joy will out, however. Find an online streaming device and play the greatest drinking song ever written, in the Italian tradition of a brindisi, a song that calls on everybody to stop frazzling and whingeing and weeping, and have a drink: “Libiamo, ne' lieti calici” (“Let’s drink from the joyful cups”). An exhilarating soprano-tenor duet that booms into full party chorus in the first act of La Traviata (1853), it is the essential oil of celebration. “Let's enjoy the cup and the songs, the beautiful night and the laughter / Let the new day catch us in this paradise.” Oh, go on then.

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Harry Eyres explores the many connections and affinities between wine and music.

Music is the world as we would like it to be—a world without borders, free of prejudice and discrimination, a world governed by love and harmony, not hatred and division. Even in the worst of times, music has been able to soar free. The Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, given during the siege of the city by the surviving members of the Leningrad Radio Symphony, many almost too weak to play (three died during rehearsals), was broadcast to the besieging German forces.

I was thinking about this over the course of London’s great summer classical music festival, the BBC Proms. Highlights included a performance of Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto by the young South Korean pianist Yunchan Lim, and cellist Laura van der Heijden’s rendition of the Catalan folksong “The Song of the Birds.” Lim’s delicacy of touch made Beethoven sound almost like Chopin, and van de Heijden held the huge hall spellbound, a young British woman (her father is Dutch and her mother Swiss) channeling the spirit of the venerable Pau Casals, who made the arrangement and played the piece at all his concerts during his long exile from Spain. The distinctiveness of their playing had nothing to do with nationality or gender. 

Music is quite often invoked in the context of wine. Krug, for example, curates “music pairings” to allow “music and Champagne to resonate in harmony and awaken the senses.” Unfortunately, when I attended one, this was not my experience. The combination resulted in a feeling more like indigestion. In fact, the two art forms seem to me quite far apart. On the other hand, the commonwealths or ideal worlds of music and wine have much in common. The poem that gives this column its title, after all, is a song sung by the soul of wine to the drinker, a song “full of light and brotherly love.” Here music and wine are fused. 

One world of wine and music

The commonwealths of wine and music are, I’d say, growing ever more alike. National borders and distinctions, for example, as I have discussed here before, are becoming increasingly irrelevant. I remember interviewing the young Etienne Grivot in the late 1980s and being quite surprised to hear that he had worked in California before joining the family domaine in Vosne-Romanée. This would never have happened in his father’s generation. Now it is commonplace, with the result that those stale terms “Old World” and “New World” no longer have much meaning.

South Africa is currently the most interesting test case. The wine writer Christian Eedes says that “without four to five international harvests on their CVs, young winemakers in South Africa don’t feel like they’ve met a professional threshold.” In many instances, the interconnections go much deeper. Revered winemaker Eben Sadie spent several years working on a project in Priorat while simultaneously exploring and developing exceptional plots of old vines in Swartland. 

Having worked for Louise Hofmeyer’s Welgemeend estate in Paarl, Tom Lubbe—one of the most thoughtful winemakers of his generation—went to Roussillon and established his Matassa project, working organically with very old vines. The Krajewskis make wine in both Bordeaux (St-Emilion and Pomerol) and South Africa. The most exciting South African wines—such as Porseleinberg’s Syrahs and Chris and Andrea Mullineux’s Granite, Iron, and Schist Chenins—have almost no connection with clichéd ideas of what a New World wine might taste like. The Porseleinberg Syrahs take the line of travel of certain Côte-Rôties, toward florality and finesse, possibly even further than anyone has managed on the roasted slope. The earth or the terroir, of which their wines are inspired expressions, after all, is not necessarily older or younger in Swartland than it is above Ampuis.

The ecstatic communion of wine and music

Beyond the internationalism of winemakers is the international destiny of wine itself. Here, once again, the connection with music is strong. Music may have national or cultural roots—Janáček’s music, for example, speaks in an unmistakably Czech accent, in the same way that Vaughan Williams’s music is profoundly English—but the destiny of all great music is to transcend national boundaries. One of Janáček’s most insightful interpreters was the Australian Charles Mackerras. Attending a performance of The Cunning Little Vixen at English National Opera a few years ago, I did not sense the London audience was any less able to appreciate this earthy, tragicomic masterwork than a Prague one would have been. The same surely also goes for wines, which, even more viscerally than symphonies or operas, are rooted in place but seek appreciators and lovers all over the globe.

Returning to Baudelaire’s poem, one may find even deeper connections between wine and music. Both involve some kind of sacrifice, if it’s possible to free that word from some of its negative or sanguinary connotations and go back to the root meaning of “making sacred” through a transcending of the ego. More pragmatically, both wine and music require hard toil—the thousands of hours of practice that enable Lim and van der Heijden to play with such freedom, confidence, and expressivity, and the backbreaking work in the hot, steep vineyards that Baudelaire’s soul of wine acknowledges. But winemaking and music-making (at the highest level) both aim for a kind of ecstatic communion, a shared experience that brings people closer to themselves and others. 

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