Winesthesia: The non official art of pairing a song or an album to a wine based on completely speculative and affinity driven decision-making process and a hint of musical background to associate musical tone with the drinking experience.
I have such a vivid memory of this wine. First of all a clue about my color, smell, sound associations. Pianos are cold and blue and like a cold jam bottle taken out of the fridge early in the morning. Go ahead and judge, I’ll wait.
So as I was saying, I had this J. Davies Cab Sauvignon 2008 with a good friend who opened it when we visited his cellar. A place absurdly cold even for me and I lived in New England. This was the first time I tried this wine and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A very nice California Cabernet. Creamy vanilla tones, coffee all the way to the back of my head and a full bodied weight in mouth that felt deliciously jammy not to mention its long long finish. This wine got an average of 92 points among the Olympus Point Givers yet I would have given it more. The Diamond Mountain District carries some heavy hitter wines and I’m just surprised I had not heard about this wine till that moment. Then again, This was a few years back and I only had like 3 years within the world of wine.
The funny thing with wines and music for me is that I don’t like forcing a pairing. It feels even more subjective if I try. For me it either arrives or it doesn’t. Once in a while the pairing comes to me afterwards but normally it happens within the first glass or the second. In this case it was on the first glass. The darkness of the cellar, the cold environment, the jammy feeling the wine had I was already listening to the notes of one of the albums songs while I was drinking it. I’m talking about the synth pop trio Faded Paper Figures or @fpfmusic in twitter.
The group originally from Los Angeles, California is composed of Kael Alden, R. John Williams and Heather Alden. The first time I listened to them I 
was on a quest to find a group that would fill the void left by The Postal Service when they did a magnum opus of an album and then left it at that. So my searches led me to Dynamo and it completely attached to me like a slug to Will Wheaton in Stand by Me.
Just like it happened with the previous winesthesia entry, the similarities include the album released date being the same year as the wine’s vintage: 2008. This wasn’t planned, but make the synchronicity even more cool.
The whole album blends with the wine but among the songs that more than the others have that cold jammy piano feeling to it you find “I Just Fell Off My Name“, “Metropolis” and “Polaroid Solution”.
Other than the Dynamo album, I would include a song from their 2012 album “Relatively” that could have easily been part of that first album. It has the melodic sensibility and even though the production feels different (more mature I suppose) it couuld have been, in my opinion like a hidden track of sorts.
Give it a try, or listen to them and see if you can blend their sound to another wine. It’s an individualistic journey, this thing of drinking wines. Even when you are in a room full of people, it’s about you and your palate. In this case, also your ears. And your brain, don’t forget your brain. For the synapses thing where it connects, you know…I think you got it. I’ll stop now.
