“No one tells you what’s in the glass. You have to look at the color. Where’s it from? What’s the terroir? What was the process of making it? When you have a glass of wine in front of you, you just sniff it and it tells you a lot about the people that made it and the earth where it was from. It’s the same with a piece of music.”
So explains Roberto Kalb, music director of Detroit Opera. We’re chatting over a glass of Washington state Blaufränkisch at The Royce downtown. Today, we’re talking about his love of wine, his love of music, and how the two have become inextricably linked through his life experiences.
The synesthetic enjoyment of wine and music, for Kalb, comes from a life spent pursuing art and appreciating all kinds of sensory experiences.
The young composer and conductor has recently completed his Court of Master Sommeliers introductory course examination and has long been inspired by music. The Mexico City native attended Interlochen Arts Camp in northern Michigan when he was 17, then racked up degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of Michigan. He joined the roster at Detroit Opera full time in 2022, having previously conducted Ricky Ian Gordon’s 27 there in 2018 and led Artistic Director Yuval Sharon’s reverse-chronology production of La Bohème in 2022.
Kalb has been enchanted by wine for almost as long as he has by music: During his time pursuing a doctorate in composition at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, his roommate introduced him to the concept of blind wine tasting. Because he was studying music so intently during this period, he found immediate parallels between it and wine. A blind wine tasting, he says, is remarkably similar to a music identification exam. For music, he says, “the end product is a result of the people and the place where it was written. And the wine is also a result of the people and the place where it was grown.”
Kalb also finds that both wine and opera can be intimidating to some people — entirely without cause, Kalb insists. “Opera as written is the most human expression of art,” he says. “It’s all of us. It’s stories about humans. And wine is made with the hands in agriculture. At the end of the day, it’s not anything fancy.”
To allay the fears of people who associate both wine and opera with
elitism, Kalb arranges intimate evenings of wine and song for friends and acquaintances. He’ll pair a historic Champagne with a well-known aria, for example, or explore bolder connections with natural skin-contact wines and avant-garde opera. Throughout, he tries to remind his guests simply to look and listen and enjoy, rather than getting tied up in worries about being wrong or seeming uneducated.
“If you’re doing a blind tasting, you’re so stressed out about trying to get the wine right, you forget to enjoy the wine,” he says. “I have to remind them constantly that they need to just enjoy.”
There are numerous concrete interactions between wine and opera as well. The toast scene, for example, is one of the most common choruses in opera. Verdi’s La Traviata features “Brindisi” (commonly known as “The Drinking Song”), recognizable to many listeners for its joyous celebration of vibrant life. During the scene, the chorus sings (in Italian),
Let’s enjoy the cup and the canticle,
the lovely night and the smiles;
may the new day find them (still) in this paradise.
“The toast acts as that moment where we hold time” in between moments, Kalb says. In opera, songs about wine and toasts abound. Don Giovanni’s Champagne aria, Faust’s “Vin ou Bière,” and Die Fledermaus’s “Im Feuerstrom der Reben” all work to harness the audience’s emotional response to a common pleasure in order to drive the plot forward.
For Kalb, opera and wine encapsulate a universal emotion in a single synesthetic experience. He explains that musical “keys are different colors for me, and when I listen to music, I always see shapes. It’s just the same with wine.”
The cup and the canticle, wine and song: It’s hard to find a better pairing.
This story originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on Aug. 6.
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