Wrestling with tannins
Regular readers of this blog will know that I have a strong interest in the language of wine. I find it fascinating that in the wine trade we frequently share our own private, conscious experiences of specific wines with others.
This, of course, requires that we develop a vocabulary for describing the taste and smell of wine (although I do know of a colleague whose tasting notes are embellished with a small graphic showing the ‘shape’ of the wine). It’s actually remarkably difficult to translate flavour perception into words in a way that is meaningful to others. Frequently, we achieve this by means of a code language, learnt through tasting with others in a structured manner. Part of wine education is, I suspect, learning this code.
In this codified language, the term ‘tannin’ crops up on a regular basis. Indeed, it’s probably the most common descriptor in tasting notes of red wines. Tannins can be soft, silky, smooth, harsh, green, velvety, coarse, rustic, fine-grained and even ‘filigree’. By using the term ‘tannin’, which is actually a chemical term, albeit an imprecisely defined one, tasters are making an assumption about the chemical entity that is causing this particular aspect of flavour perception.
However, I strongly suspect that most of the tasters using this term only have a vague understanding of what tannins are in a chemical sense. Do the many varieties of tannin described by tasters correspond with chemical realities? Or is this an example of a code in which the chemical term is merely borrowed?
One question that we should probably address is whether the link between perception and chemistry is important. Does it matter that tasters use chemical terms without these corresponding to what is occurring in the wine?