In July, the Wine Composer  was invited to the very first edition of the Festival Vins & Musique Assignan. My task was to create a music performance based on the wines from the 5 producers of the village Assignan, in the region Languedoc-Rousillon.

I could choose one additional musician to join me, and this time I wanted to go for a saxophone. Not only because the wines on focus were AOC Saint-Chinian red wines, but also because I knew a perfect saxophone player who alone, with one saxophone and his sophisticated effects, could describe the power of these wines in music. Pauli Lyytinen (you should check out for example his fantastic solo saxophone project  Machinery) accepted the challenge, and our duo became a part of the festival program.

This concert was more like a “pop-up” version of Wine Composer. We had the possibility to taste the five wines only during the concert day, so the performance was based more than 50% on improvisation. I composed motives and sketches based on the general feeling of the wines of the region, as I knew them, and these frames were complemented during a tasting on back stage, some hours before the concert. At this point me and Pauli worked together as a team, and we could make good collective decisions about the moods, tonalities, harmonies and so on. Each wine was turned to one composition-improvisation.

The final form of each interpretation was created on the stage in front of the audience; we had all the five wines with us, and in between of each performance, we made the final tasting and final musical notes for each wine. A very exciting experience, and the musical result was certaintly intuitive and unique.

The wine list of the concert:

Domaine du Sacré Coeur – Tradition 2014
Domaine de la Femme Allongée – Les Branquignols 2014
Domaine des Soulié – Le Secret de Remy 2013
La Grange de Quatre sous 2011
Chateau Castigno – Secret des Dieux 2011