Wine Is A Multisensory Product. Its Branding Should Be Too.

Think about how we experience wine: we see its colour, we smell its aromas, we taste its flavours, sweetness and acidity, we feel its texture through tannin and body. Even before the first sip, the weight of the bottle, texture of the label, sound of a cork being pulled and atmosphere of the room are already shaping the multisensory experience. Wine is inherently multisensory and yet wine branding remains overwhelmingly visual. Logos, labels, bottles, photography, typography are all important, but brand identity can be much bigger than what people see.

Welcome to multisensory marketing

Multisensory marketing deliberately uses combinations of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste to influence how a brand is perceived, experienced and remembered. Consumers appear increasingly receptive to it: research from Wunderman Thompson has been cited as finding that 63% of consumers seek brands that provide multisensory moments, while 61% want brands that can ignite strong emotions. The interesting word here is emotion. People do not remember you for what you said, they remember you for how you made them feel. Consumers rarely remember every message a brand communicates. They are much more likely to remember how an experience made them feel. Wine has a significant advantage because taste and aroma already give it sensory assets most categories would love to possess. The question is whether wineries are using the rest of the sensory palette.

Ink Grade: bringing the vineyard into the room

Napa Valley’s Ink Grade provides a fascinating wine example. Its immersive tasting experience has used a 360-degree video installation to transport visitors through the seasons of its Howell Mountain vineyard, harvest and winemaking process while they taste the wines. Ink Grade describes the experience itself as immersive rather than simply a seated wine tasting. That changes the role of hospitality. The guest is not simply being told about terroir: sight, sound, environment, taste and storytelling work together to create a sense of place. The wine still remains the hero, but the sensory experience makes its story easier to feel and remember.

And then there is sound

Sound deserves particular attention because it can influence emotion, memory and behaviour while working almost invisibly in the background. Wine research makes this especially interesting. A study published in the British Journal of Psychology found that participants’ descriptions of wines shifted in accordance with the emotional characteristics of the music they heard while drinking them. An earlier supermarket study found something even more commercially provocative: when French music played, shoppers bought more French wine; when German music played, German wine performed better. Most customers said they were unaware that the music had influenced them.

A great real-world wine and hospitality example is City Winery in New York, which continues to build programming around the intersection of wine and music. In June 2026, for example, its Vintage Dead event paired two live sets of Grateful Dead music with a curated wine flight served throughout the show, turning the relationship between sound and taste into the experience itself. Sound is therefore not necessarily decoration, it can become part of the product and brand perception.

Big consumers brands are already thinking this way

Mastercard moved beyond its visual identity by developing a sonic architecture that works across advertising, sponsorships and payment interactions. It says research has linked investment in sonic branding with 76% higher brand power and 138% stronger perceptions of advertising, while its payment sound has been shown to increase trust fourfold.

Air France consistently uses music to reinforce its interpretation of French elegance. For its global brand film, it commissioned a re-orchestrated version of Michel Legrand’s The Windmills of Your Mind, deliberately using sound to carry the same emotional territory as its visual identity.

The relationship between brand and music can extend beyond sonic logos. Adidas and Missy Elliott demonstrate what happens when music, fashion, personality and product become culturally intertwined. Their relationship began more than two decades ago, including Elliott’s landmark Respect M.E. collection in 2004, and Adidas brought her back into its Superstar story in 2025. The connection feels credible because the music, aesthetic, artist and brand codes belong naturally together, building cultural relevance through music.

Ask yourself this: what does your wine brand sound like?

And what does it feel like? Which colours belong to it [other than the colours of your wine or exisrting logo]? Which materials, fabrics, textures? Which movements? Which emotions? What is the pace, the tempo, the beat?

Would somebody experience the same brand personality through the tasting room, packaging, event, website, soundtrack and social content? This is not about adding sensory gimmicks everywhere. Again, review the AdidasXMissy Elliott example, the goal is to create coherence across the senses and build cultural relevance through sound and music.

It is this question [what does your wine brand sound like] that has inspired the new AD-VIN series launching this week: Wine Marketing & Music. Over the coming weeks we will explore House, Jazz, Hip-hop, Reggae and Classical music, looking at what wine can learn from each culture, where commercial and creative opportunities exist, and occasionally sharing some of my own inspiration: pairing great wines with great tracks. Sometimes the right soundtrack simply accompanies the wine, most of the time it changes the way we experience it.