Not So Much a Taste as a Feeling

“Why would you ever want to ruin a good cup of tea with cream or sugar?” It’s a question I’ve asked many a Southern friend who just can’t get over his or her Sweet Tea. Almost invariably meant as a rhetorical question, I never expect to get a rationally coherent answer that has to do with anything beyond personal preference.

But then I started drinking wine (and working here at Basignani), and I discovered tannins.

From tea to wine? Yes, my thought patterns are notoriously quite random (just ask my family and friends…keeping abreast of conversations with me must feel like watching a really bad tennis game with no out-of-bounds—serves lobbed without direction and returned unexpectedly hours later), but I promise that these two subjects are, for once, not at all unrelated.

You see, both wine and tea express tannins on the palate. What this means in terms of wine I’ll get to a bit later, but for now it is enough to note that talking about tea in a wine blog is not nearly as crazy as it sounds.

The word tannin, as you may have already surmised, is related to an old process for curing animal hides using plant compounds that cross-link proteins—tanning. Tannins are found in the bark, leaves and immature fruits of many plants and are often associated with a bitter taste. In nature, this bitterness helps the plants to survive long enough to reproduce (young grapes are bitter, for example, until the seeds are ready to be ingested by birds and dispersed…well, you get the picture.)

To get an idea of what tannins taste like, brew a really really REALLY strong cup of tea (Caution: Mug Contains Hot Liquid…please, let it cool before you taste it). ‘Betcha the contents of your mug are more than just slightly bitter—those are the tannins. 

Since tasting is so subjective, especially when it comes to wine, tea is a good way to develop a mouth-feel for tannins. As Jamie Goode explains in his article on the subject, “tannins contribute two characteristics to red wine…astringency (most significantly) and bitterness—these are sensations that are sometimes confused by tasters.” The “bitter perception is quite well understood, since it is one of the five primary tastes and is sensed by a specific receptor found in taste buds on the tongue and soft palate.” It’s astringency that gets the inexperienced taster.

According to Goode, “the common understanding [of astringency] is that it is actually mediated by the sense of touch rather than by taste. Tannins are thought to taste astringent because they bind with salivary proline-rich proteins and precipitate them out. This leads to increased friction between mouth surfaces, and a sense of dryness or roughness.”

Tea is much better for gaining a basic understanding of both these properties (bitterness and astringency) than wine, if simply because good wines are so complex that distinguishing specific aspects of the palate takes years and years of practice. But we all know that a strong cup of tea is bitter (hence why my Southern friends simply must dilute it with sugar). Tea is also an even better example of the astringency associated with tannins—even herbal teas (caffeine-free, and therefore not in the least dehydrating) leave your mouth feeling dry. That feeling? That wooliness between your tongue and hard palate? That’s the tannin. (If you’re not a tea drinker and cannot readily call this sensation to mind, try it out sometime! I promise that finally fully understanding tannins is worth it!)

Now that you’ve developed a sensory memory of what tannin tastes and feels like using the tea, it will be much easier to discern the tannin in the wine you drink beyond the basic: this is bitter or this is dry. You will be able to start observing differences in tannin level and how this affects the wine. Even the same vintage will change over time, becoming softer as it ages (hence why wines with low tannin levels should be drunk young while others should sit on the shelf for a bit).  

Tannins, though they may be found in all wine (more from barrel ageing in white wines, than anything else), are most noticeable in the flavor profiles of red wines. The tannin in red wine comes from the exposure of the juice to the grape skin (and I finally get down to the main difference between reds and whites…after the grapes for white wine are crushed, they are pressed immediately to separate the juice from the pulp and skins that would give it a deeper, red or purple color). When tasting red wine, tannin is identifiable (as earlier with the tea) in the bitter aftertaste or feeling of dryness in the mouth. A wine is tannic if the tannins overpower the other three components of balance (sweetness, acidity, and alcohol), and this overly tannic or bitter finish is considered a shortcoming.

A lot of new wine drinkers aren’t particularly fond of red wine, and I would hazard a guess that this has to do with the bitterness and dryness caused by tannins (personally, I’ve always preferred red…but then I also drink my tea black). Of course, everyone’s taste preferences are different—a wine you consider tannic someone else might consider just perfectly bitter. But now we know what makes us describe a wine as bitter or dry, we can start to develop a more discerning vocabulary.