What are Tannins, Anyway?

Some wine drinkers love them, others hate them. Tannins are the part of red wine (some white wines have some tannins, but they are very limited) that has no taste, but in extremes makes you pucker. 

Some people love them. They are more sensory than anything else and those wine drinkers like the idea of the wine creating a sensation of structure and fullness in their mouths. Others hate them. The feel as if the tannins overwhelm everything else about the wine. Most are somewhere in between.

Tannins are not particular to grapes, but it's when made a part of wine that they show themselves. They are found in the bark of many fruit trees, and in the case of grapes, they are found in the skins, seeds, and stems of the grape. We know that generally speaking, wines with more tannins tend to age better than wine with fewer rannins although there are any number of exceptions.

Getting really geeky for a while, tannins get their name because they interact with proteins and precipitate them out. And, this is how animal skins are tanned. Get it? Tannin? Tanning? That purportedly is a real connection between the words.

Technically proanthocyanidins (it's way easier to say tannins, I feel certain you would agree) expose red anthocyanidins during fermentation with exposure to acid. They are flavonoids of primarily polymers and also oligomers of catechins. [Note: catechins have been found to reduce blood pressure in humans and to result in weight loss, loosely proving that red wine is good for you ... said in jest, but perhaps not.]

What else has catechins? Tea, particularly green tea, also thought to be good for you, calming, a blood pressure reducer, and weight loss aide. See! I told you red wine has benefits.

What else has tannins? Oak does. But, as oak is exposed more and more to fermenting wine, the tannins dissipate. So, wines aged in new oak, all other things being equal, will have impart more tannins in a wine than previously used oak or "neutral oak," the term normally given to oak that has been used at least twice previously.

Here is where it gets trickier. Nobody truly knows how to measure tannins. What we do know is that tannins tend to contain gallic acid. And, some think that the concentration of gallic acid is relatively constant. Something called the Folin Ciocalteu method that measures gallic acid concentration (yes, I had to Google that) is often used to measure tannins. 

It's 2020. People like hard data. Me? I prefer to measure tannins with mouthfeel.

Ultimately, we don't know much about tannins, but we do know that getting more and more of them into your body seems to be really good for you.

So, the moral of the story is letting a day go by without having some wine with tannins into your body might decrease your life span. That's not desirable. 

QED.