Panning for gold

Digging beneath the surface of wine and hip hop

Drinking notes: on music and wine is a short weekend newsletter exploring music and wine pairings, delving into stories and observations about each. Written by two music-loving wine professionals.

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Music and wine are simple sources of pleasure – aren’t they? When it comes to things we like, our subconscious takes over and no further questions are asked. If a particular groove fills your veins with honey, then there’s no need to give it a second thought. The same if something delicious makes you grin from ear to ear like Gregg Wallace. But if we dig beneath the surface and begin to ask why these things are so enjoyable rather than merely accept the fact that they are, then we can begin to appreciate the complexities and the nuances, the craft and experience involved in creating such ‘simple’ sources of pleasure.

In the WSET Diploma tasting exam (a few days have passed now, so I feel OK talking about it), once you’ve assessed the wine on its appearance and palate, the examiner asks you to identify certain components such as the grape variety, the region of origin, or even to comment on the winemaking involved. A glass of wine is full of references. There are clues pointing you towards vineyard influences and winemaker intervention and – although it was the last thing I wanted to be doing on a Wednesday afternoon – burrowing beneath the topsoil in this way allows you to appreciate the wine for more than its fruity flavours and its ability to depress the cerebral cortex (spittoons save lives).

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There’s a parallel here with hip hop. Built on sampling, hip hop producers take existing music to create an aural collage. A sample, however, is not only a reference to another song or sound, but it can be a glimpse into the mind of the sampler themselves – a look into their musical upbringing and creative heritage. What makes one producer sample a jazz pianist while another prefers to use a snippet from funk music? And why can I taste vanilla ice cream in one glass of Chardonnay and lemon sorbet in another? Nature versus nurture.

There’s an art in repurposing music from your grandparents’ generation and making it appropriate for a Brooklyn nightclub. One such artist is Q-Tip. Rapper-producer extraordinaire and founder of A Tribe Called Quest, Q-Tip made a name for himself through the use of tape decks and samplers, sifting through the alluvial deposits of his extensive vinyl collection in the hope of eyeing a crumb of gold. Quest’s sound came from Q-Tip’s crate-digging capabilities, his knack for dusting off old jazz records and reupholstering them, turning them into items of modernity. (No doubt, the majority of jazz videos on YouTube will have comments sections littered with ‘Q-Tip brought me here’.) One notable track is Jazz (We’ve Got). On the face of it, this is as laidback as rap music comes. Delve a little deeper and it is a papier collé of musical influences and tributes; the main refrain comes from the opening of a jazz staple, On Green Dolphin Street, while the drums are taken from a track by soul group The Five Stairsteps.

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It’s impossible to talk about sampling in music without mentioning hip hop demigod J Dilla. J Dilla was revolutionary in the way he rewrote rhythms and glued together seemingly random samples to create tracks greater than the sum of their parts. The finest example of this is the seminal album Donuts, released three days before his death at the age of 32. Produced from a hospital bed with the help of his mother, who would bring crates of records during visiting hours for him to rifle through, Donuts serves as a life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment. Each sample is biographical, each scrap of sound having been deliberately chosen to tell a story: the J Dilla story. I could spend a year on Substack writing about this album but, thankfully for you, the superb Sampling Donuts does a much better job than I ever could in visualising and presenting the range of influences and genres that make Donuts what it is.

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For me, hip hop and wine are like cryptic crosswords. There’s only so much fun to be had in completing the grid. Merely knowing the correct answers doesn’t quite do enough to scratch the itch. Knowing why the answer is correct brings the greatest joy. Unpicking the clues, unpacking the box of signals or, in exam speak, being able to show your workings, is what really turns me on.

From Grand Puba to Gang Starr, O.C. to ODB, hip hop’s purpose is not just to make you move your feet or rap along to the few lines you learned by heart. It allows us to look through the keyhole into the history of music; it affords us an insight into the lives and interests of the producers behind each track; it is a launchpad into another universe of songs you may not have otherwise listened to.

Wine possesses the same power. The more references we discover in a wine, the more sensory paths we can venture down. When we find out why something tastes the way it does, we gain confidence, compelled to discover further. Pleasure knows no limits. Perhaps it’s not just Fino Sherry that you like, but the way the wine has been matured under a film of yeast and, if that’s the case, maybe it’s time to drink some Vin Jaune? And if Keith Murray is making you groove to the beat, then there’s every chance Billy Brooks will do too.