from the Aeolian harp to the panpipe

The pan flute - Mozart or heay metal?

At the beginning of the 1980s we were among the first winemakers to use cultivated yeasts - and ten years later we were again among the first to stop. But the microbial cosmos of our cellar was out of balance and the stop and go fermentation that sometimes dragged on for years caused us sleepless nights. What to do? From our studies we knew that cows react to music, tense up with heavy metal and like to give more milk with Mozart. Why shouldn't our yeasts respond to pleasant music too? In the mid-1990s, the idea of a panpipe ripened that caught the wind protruding from the cellar and turned it into sounds. It should be a hexachord in order to do justice to the long cellar vaults with their appearance as a nave with Gregorian chant. And, very important: The tones should not manipulate the wine in a certain direction, but rather be available as "fruitful" vibrations for different needs. We chose E flat major as the earthy key between major and minor. And indeed! After two hours of searching with a keyboard, a harmonious and melodic soundscape floated in the vault - the tones were found! So that they can penetrate the thick cellar walls better, we transposed them a few octaves lower and a physics teacher (he subtly pointed out that someone with a high school diploma should actually be able to do this himself) calculated the length of the organ pipes from the sound frequency. We received valuable information about the optimal diameter from the neighboring organ builder Oberlinger. The result:

Since 1999 the sound has animated our vaulted cellar quietly and unobtrusively. A nice feeling! Taking a closer look at the tones, we discovered the following interesting aspects: The tone c is not far from the frequency of the earth's orbit around the sun (68.4 Hz), which is calculated by octaving the frequency 1 / 365.24. (The tone between C and C sharp is called "the mother" in Indian music.) And the A flat - the early baroque concert pitch A, the foundation of European music - corresponds almost exactly to the orbital period of the moon. The 29.53 days of the lunar month result in 423.29 Hz (and 105.8 and 52.9 respectively in the lower octaves).

die aeolische Harfe - die Stimmen der Götter

In the beginning there was the word ... the breath of God ... The wind stands in all myths for the birth of the patriarchal religions resp. of the conscious man. The priests in Dondona, the oldest Hellenic sanctuary, listened to the rustle of the leaves of their sacred oak trees, and at midnight King David opened the door of his tent to let the wind blow over the strings of his guitar.

nothing works without Dionysus

It is said of the Hellenic priests quoted above that they had to go barefoot and were forbidden to wash their feet so that they would not lose contact with the earth, with nature, while listening to the gods. What a nice picture! Culture is created through the integration of mind and body. Civilization lives from the (meaningful) encounter between humans and nature! As an energetic and symbolic counterpoint to the panpipe, we therefore let groundwater from the Moselle flow through our cellar. In the emerging tension between Apollon and Dionysus, or, to put it in Asian terms, between Feng and Shui, our wine finds optimal framework conditions for its individual development. When structure and chaos meet, at the interface between control and laissez-faire.

Between heaven and earth Fernando Knof belongs to the generation of young musicians who "can also use computers". He carefully cleaned the sound recordings from our cellar and put them together. The Apollonian sound of the panpipe and the Dionysian bubbling of fermentation resulted in an exciting and at the same time relaxing listening experience - somewhere between the soundtrack of Captain Nemo, Gregorian chant and Tibetan meditation.

Here the audio file for download.