The music
Wine is different with music
It depends on what you are listening to. It is not a figure of speech: it is measured. Try it here.
The proof
The same Cabernet Sauvignon
It was perceived as up to 60% more powerful and full-bodied than in silence.
Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh · 250 people · the same wine, four kinds of music
See the sources
- North, A. C. «The effect of background music on the taste of wine». British Journal of Psychology, 103(3), 293–301. Heriot-Watt University, Edimburgo.
- Wang, Q. J. & Spence, C. (2018). «Assessing the influence of music on wine perception among wine professionals». Food Science & Nutrition. DOI 10.1002/fsn3.554. University of Oxford.
- Spence, C., Velasco, C. & Knoeferle, K. (2014). «A large sample study on the influence of the multisensory environment on the wine drinking experience». Flavour, 3:8. DOI 10.1186/2044-7248-3-8.
Pick your wine
Every label has its tango
Origen Malbec
Warm, mid register. It accompanies without covering.
High register and light tempo for the fresh ones. Low register and long phrasing for the full-bodied. This is our own curation, not a laboratory result.
Or listen to the full catalogue
The Spotify player loads only when you ask for it, so the page sends nothing about you to a third party until you decide.
Why Gardel
For Gardel the table was not the place where you eat. It was where he met friends, talked for hours and raised a glass without hurry.
When he settled in New York to film for Paramount, he asked friends travelling from Buenos Aires to bring him bottles of Mendoza wine. He could eat in the best restaurants in the world, but when he wanted to really raise a glass he did it with a wine from his own land.
Eighty-eight years later, that wine carries his name again.
Read Walter Santoro full note
They say the best way to know someone is to sit down and share a table. If that were true, few people would be as fascinating as Gardel.
Behind the singer who conquered the world there was a man deeply devoted to good living. He liked to gather with friends, talk for hours, raise a glass of good wine and enjoy a meal without hurry. For Gardel the table was never just a place to eat: it was a space of company, friendship and affection.
That passion was born long before the fame. As a teenager, still fighting for a way into music, he often sang in the inns and cafés of the Abasto in exchange for a plate of food. Those rounds of bars and canteens, which he himself called «hacer la bicicleta», introduced him to the flavours of a Buenos Aires built by Italian, Spanish and criollo immigrants.
That is where he discovered Italian pasta, Genoese pesto, tuco, farinata, tripe, milanesas, criollo locro, puchero and risotto — above all the one made by José Razzano's family — and the Valencian paella cooked by Isabel del Valle's mother. The table, like tango, was a meeting point between the cultures that were building the new Argentine identity.
Success and fame came with the years, but he never lost his taste for home cooking. His only enemy was the scale.
When he settled in New York to film his last pictures for Paramount, he found a small Italian restaurant called Santa Lucía, close to the NBC studios. There he found something no grand restaurant could offer him: food that tasted like home. His favourite dish was the tallarines made by don Gabriele, the owner, who never would give up the recipe.
His secretary in New York, Joe Plaja, remembered that Gardel kept to strict diets — though every time he walked past an Italian restaurant he would smile and say, resigned: «Vamos, Plaja… me voy a acercar al peligro».
But there was one thing he could never replace: Argentine wine. While he lived in New York, Gardel asked friends travelling from Buenos Aires to bring him bottles of Mendoza wine. He could enjoy the best restaurants in the world, but when he wanted to really raise a glass he did it with a wine from his adopted land. Those bottles were not simply a drink: they were a piece of Argentina crossing the continent to sit at his table again.
He conquered Buenos Aires, Paris and New York. But he never stopped missing the flavours of Buenos Aires. Because good food, like tango, has the extraordinary capacity to awaken memory. And for Gardel every glass of Mendoza wine, every plate of pasta, every long talk after dinner with friends was much more than a meal: it was a way of coming home.
So when, 88 years later, the possibility arose of creating the Carlos Gardel wine, made in Mendoza, I understood that this was not simply launching another label. It was giving continuity to a story that had begun almost a century earlier, when Gardel asked his friends to bring him Mendoza wine to New York to feel a little closer to his land. Today that wine carries his name again.
