When you think of winemaking, audio frequency isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But for audio engineer turned multiple winery founder and social entrepreneur Anthony Lewis, the connection seemed natural.
Sound had always played an important role in Lewis’s life. His parents emigrated to the United States from Wales back in the 1970s, and Lewis grew up in a household filled with music in San Francisco. From an early age, it was clear to him that he wanted to work with sound, which led to his decision to become a recording engineer.
When Lewis wasn’t on tour throughout the US playing music with his brothers, he could be found assisting with the set-up of various recording studios in locations such as Long Beach in California as well as Colorado and Canada. He then went on to become a mastering engineer, and began working on a new technology called Sony Super Audio. This was developed for the purpose of capturing analogue tape recordings in a digital format before they deteriorate beyond repair.
A spiritual experience
Lewis and his colleague Gus Guinness were tasked with digitizing master analogue tapes from recording sessions with big names such as Elton John, The Doors and Jim Morrison. Sony Super Audio used one gigabyte a minute for each track, so massive amounts of hard drive space were needed to get the audio, as it recorded far above 20,000 hertz and far below 20 hertz — in other words, far above and far below the normal range of human hearing.
“Sony Super Audio has frequencies much higher than what we hear,” Lewis explains. “What happens is that they create harmonics that create logarithms that go to our brain and give us placement, giving us a whole other depth of what’s happening with frequencies all around us.”
The audio was captured in its entirety, but the problem was that there was less than a gigabyte of space on each CD for the whole album. Lewis and his colleague therefore decided to capture only what the human ear could hear for the CDs rather than the full range that Sony Super Audio offered.
The listening experience was, however, completely different. “I know what it’s like to listen to a record pressed from analogue with your headphones on, lying in your bed — that’s like a spiritual experience,” he says.
Sound and wine
When Lewis’s father founded The Vibrant Vine Winery in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, in 2003 and asked him to become a partner in the business, Lewis began thinking about how he could apply his knowledge of audio frequencies to vines and wine.
Lewis started working at The Vibrant Vine Winery in 2008, and he began asking questions about how audio frequencies could affect plant growth. “I began hanging out with doctors of viticulture at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, because these guys were the only ones asking the same questions as me,” Lewis recalls.
Lewis was fascinated by the potential that frequencies outside our normal range of hearing could have on vines. He started researching and experimenting with different types of music and different frequencies in the vineyard. “I took the irrigation system, and I made speakers that went in the sprinklers. I started asking myself whether the plants were growing better because they were getting these super high frequencies and super low frequencies, or was it the type of music that I was playing to them?”
Emotions and Dr Emoto
One question led to another and, after many Google searches, Lewis came across the work of controversial Japanese “pseudoscientist” Dr Masaru Emoto (1943–2014). Emoto was known for his studies on the effect of emotion on water, but he didn’t have a traditional background in science. Having studied international relations at Yokohama Municipal University, he then went on to become a doctor of alternative medicine, certified by the Indian Board of Alternative Medicine.
Emoto spent over 20 years studying the way in which sounds, music, thoughts, words and emotions can affect the molecular structure of water. “It was 1994 when the idea to freeze water and observe it with [a] microscope came upon me. With this method, I was convinced that I should be able to see something like snow crystals,” Emoto once said.
In a controlled scientific environment, he exposed glasses of water to different music, words and pictures, and froze the samples using a process called flash-freezing. He then examined the samples under a microscope. When Emoto looked at the samples that had been exposed to heavy metal music and negative emotions, he could see distorted, dark gold, fractured images in the ice. By contrast, when examining the samples that had been exposed to classical music and positive emotions, Emoto could identify beautiful crystals that looked like snowflakes.
Time is the enemy
While Lewis wasn’t completely convinced by Emoto’s experiments, he was intrigued by the different effects harmonics and jarring sounds could seemingly have on water.
Lewis decided to use loose grains of sand to analyse the movement that different sound frequencies could generate. “We made this thing out of an old beer cooler, a speaker and a flat piece of metal,” he explains. “We put sand on it, and we played different frequencies using a frequency generator app on my iPhone. The sand started to move and make these really cool patterns.”
At that moment, Lewis realized the potential that this kind of orderly movement could have. “Instead of adding all the shit that I put in the wine — bentonite, egg whites, [chitin from] crawfish or these God-knows-what chemicals — I decided to use frequencies to clarify my wine,” he says.
“Time is the enemy in winemaking, so we played these frequencies to the wine, and tried to make all the floating particles cluster,” Lewis explains. “What you’re trying to do is get all the sediment to settle at the bottom because it’s like miso soup at the start.” The sediment is then removed, and the process is repeated several times until the wine is clear and ready to be filtered. This is a time-consuming process, and in time, wine can oxidate, bacteria can start to grow and winemakers ultimately lose money on their investment.
Lewis swiftly realized that he needed to work with harmonics to achieve the best effects. “Harmonics create what’s called a ‘node’. You have three frequencies: one goes below atmospheric pressure, one stays neutral and the other one goes above atmospheric pressure by the same amount. That creates a node. And in these nodes, there’s no sound or vibration. So, wherever it’s vibrating, the larger particles are pushed together, and the node allows them to cluster. When the clusters become heavy, they fall to the bottom of the wine.”
What’s the frequency?
When Lewis realized the potential that sound had to accelerate the production process, he decided in 2012 to start his own winery in Kelowna with an in-built recording studio. He called it Frequency Winery. The concept worked so well that he would go on to open other wineries based on the same idea.
When it came to selecting the best frequency to play to his wine, Lewis turned to Google. “You know, I thought, if I am going to play a frequency to the wine, what’s the coolest one? I found the DNA repair frequency, also known as the mother frequency — 528 hertz. This is the frequency that moves the water clusters around our DNA to protect it. When this popped up on Google, I thought, ‘I dig that!’”
Engaging with people on an emotional level is at the core of everything that Lewis does. “That’s why we spend so much time on the packaging, on the cork. I only buy corks that make the right sound because that sound instantly reminds you of Thanksgiving dinners — it makes you feel good.”
Setting up the wineries was a collaborative effort, and Lewis was keen to express his gratitude to everyone who had helped him on his journey. “We made a wine called Grateful Vine. I used to write down the name of somebody I was grateful for every day and add them to the list.” Lewis printed the first thousand names on the Grateful Vine bottles.
Social enterprise
Feeling grateful and helping others are two key aspects of Lewis’s work ethos. Frequency Wineries are owned by the social enterprise company that Lewis also founded in 2012 — The Orphan Grape. “I visited Haiti right after the earthquake in 2010, and my wife’s dad started an orphanage over there. When we came back, I thought, ‘I don’t really want to be a fancy-pants, snooty wine guy any more’.” Lewis started wineries that would earn money to feed the orphanage. He and his team converted underutilized farm properties into licenced wineries, made wine out of their grapes, sold the wine and gave the farmers a share of the profits.
After 12 years of working at the wineries, Lewis decided to move to Nicaragua with his family in search of greater fulfilment. He remains a partner in The Orphan Grape, but his desire to help others build and market their own local businesses through what he calls “gratitude marketing” led him to start his Facebook page and YouTube channel Everything Nicaragua. “I’ve found a way of using what I know, not necessarily to get cash, but to get things in exchange,” he says. “I do marketing for somebody, and they give me accommodation, food, water. By constantly helping others, they seem to help me.”
For Anthony Lewis, it seems, whether he is working with analogue tapes, audio frequencies, grapes, wine or people, the key to success lies in radiating the vibes that he wishes to receive.