The sound of wine in the Alexander Valley

The idea was to create a three-dimensional soundscape that would envelop the listener from all angles while telling the story of the ranch and winery.
photo credit: Tina Caputo
Ames Morison(left) and Hugh Livingston at Medlock Winery in the Alexander Valley.

A visit to a winery typically engages the senses of sight, smell and taste.

But what about our sense of hearing?

Medlock Ames winery is bringing this often-overlooked sense to the forefront through an innovative sound experience on its remote estate in Sonoma County’s Alexander Valley.

Aside from 50 acres of vines and hundreds of olive trees, most of the winery’s sprawling, 340-acre property at Bell Mountain Ranch — located just outside Healdsburg — has been left in its natural, woodland state.

Winery owner Ames Morison explained that the property’s resident birds, insects and other wildlife make this a perfect location for an Immersive Sound Experience.

“About 20-plus years ago, I visited a museum in Brooklyn called PS1, and they had a sound installation exhibit there,” Morison said. “I was just fascinated by how you can incorporate sound as an art piece, and I had this dream of somehow translating it from the indoor space to our outdoor space at the vineyard.”

The idea was to create a three-dimensional soundscape that would envelop the listener from all angles — kind of like surround sound at movie theater — all while telling the story of the ranch and winery.

“Sound creates this very full, dynamic experience,” Morison said. “And there are so many sounds that we have at our property of people working, the natural life, the farm life, and it's something you can only be here to experience.”

To bring his vision to life, Morison collaborated with Berkeley-based sound artist Hugh Livingston.

“I want to try to get as much of the natural environment without human intervention as possible, which is difficult because there are a lot of low-flying aircraft in Sonoma, and there are machines that are part of the agricultural process that run all the time,” Livingston said. “So, at a certain point, one has to say that's part of the environment and part of the story we're trying to tell.”

To collect sounds for the installation, Livingston mainly used a handheld recorder with an extra-long battery life. “I will go deep into the woods or towards some attractor point, like a pond,” Livingston said, “where there are certain kinds of birds that'll be there, and I leave the microphones, for sometimes days at a time.”

To give me a better understanding of the immersive sound experience, Livingston and Morison recently walked me through the tour. First, they handed me a smartphone and over-the-ears headset. All I had to do was press play.

Walking to the starting place for the tour, I heard the sounds of birds and insects recorded in the pollinator garden. As we strolled down a paved path, Morison and winery staff members occasionally chimed in with recorded narration about the wildlife that lives on the ranch.

Veering off the paved trail and into the vineyard, I heard sounds of pruning as vineyard manager Agustin Santiago explained the process. Next came the energetic sounds of harvest, including tractors, the voices of the harvest crew and lively music.

“It's the most high-energy experience you can possibly imagine,” Livingston said. “It's just a high spirit — there are lights, there are tractors running, and they're just moving so fast. And they're playing music, and you just feel like this is the culmination of a whole year's worth of work.”

What struck me while I was going through the tour was how realistic the audio sounded. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between the sounds coming from my headphones and those out in the real world.

Livingston explained that the process behind the audio is called binaural recording.

“What I do is, I find a tree that's about as wide as a human head,” Livingston said, “and I place the microphones at standing height for an average human being. Because even reflections off the ground make quite a bit of difference in the realism of the recording.”

After a stop at the property’s organic garden, we headed back toward the winery to the clanging sounds of production.

Livingston said he even recorded audio of wine fermenting inside a barrel, using a waterproof mic called a hydrophone. But it didn’t make the final cut.

“Well, nobody liked it,” he said. “It didn’t work in the soundscape because of the lack of clarity of what it was. So, we had to make some decisions.”