Could the Lunar Cycle Be Affecting the Taste of Your Wine?

Astrological enthusiasts, devoted star sign disciples, and even casual horoscope perusers, lay down your corkscrews. The moon's movement could be having an impact on the taste of your merlots, rieslings, and rosés—and you didn't even know it.

The theory behind this shift in flavor lies in something called the biodynamic calendar, a guide used for the planting and sowing of crops that is divided into four types of days: fruit days, flower days, leaf days, and root days.

Biodynamic believers posit that wines taste their best when the moon is passing through Sagittarius, Aries, or Leo—a.k.a. "fruit days." However, a more bitter taste will emerge when the moon's in Virgo, Capricorn, or Taurus—a.k.a. "root days." Additionally, wines sipped on "flower days" will generally be more pleasant than on "leaf days," though the effect isn't as potent.

For those looking to sync up their uncorking or bag-slapping to the stars and the moon, as with pretty much anything in this life, there's an app for that. The When Wine Tastes Best app is a built-in biodynamic calendar for your smartphone, which promises to help you "get the best from your bottle of wine" and reveal "the best days to open your good wine."

When Wine Tastes Best—which is also available in book form—follows the ideas of Maria Thun, who was one of the world's leading authorities on biodynamics before her death in 2012. Thun's 50 years of research provided the backbone for her annual Biodynamic Sowing and Planting Calendar, which was considered a vital tool for those passionate about the relationship between seeds and stars.

Thun's work was based in a theory first raised by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924, who suggested that the energy of plants is not only affected by human actions, but also the alignment of the moon, stars, and planets. Steiner suggested that the agricultural process as a whole should be oriented around the lunar patterns and cosmic rhythms. And while Steiner reportedly arrived at this theory after communicating telepathically with unearthly spirits—the typical source of all reliable scientific facts—Thun was stalwart in her defense of his ideas.

Dubious of this new-age concept, a group of Australian researchers recently set out to test the relationship between wine and the lunar patterns for themselves, publishing their results in the online journal PLOS One. The study, titled Expectation or Sensorial Reality? An Empirical Investigation of the Biodynamic Calendar for Wine Drinkers, brought together 19 New Zealand wine professionals and 12 pinot noirs for a blind taste test over different days in the biodynamic calendar.

The tasters evaluated each of the wines four times, on two separate fruit and root days, rating each wine's taste, aroma, and mouthfeel, using the provided 20-point wine scoring system.

The researchers concluded that the wine scores did not vary substantially at any particular point in the lunar calendar, determining that there was no evidence to support that the placement of the stars determines how a wine tastes on any given earthly day.

While the most devoted followers of Thun's agricultural work are likely to be unfazed by these scientific findings (after all, no unearthly spirits were even consulted in the course of this testing), the rest of us are probably free to drink our whites and reds whenever we see fit, regardless of the moon's schedule.

However, though we're no astrological experts, we can almost guarantee that no alignment of the constellations will ever make your bottle of blue wine even mildly palatable.