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On the tongue · 1.2

Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth

Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.

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Tannin is not a flavour. Nothing about it registers on your tongue as bitter or sour or sweet. It is a sensation of drag, of the inside of your cheeks becoming slightly rough, and it belongs to touch rather than to taste.

What is actually happening

Saliva is slippery because it contains proteins that coat the surfaces of your mouth. Tannins bind to those proteins and pull them out of solution, so the coating stops working and the surfaces begin to drag against each other.

That is the whole of astringency. You are not tasting a compound; you are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.

Why fat changes it

Fat and protein in food compete for the same tannins. Given something else to bind to, the tannin binds to that instead and leaves your saliva alone.

This is why a tannic red works with a fatty steak and with a hard cheese, and it is why the same wine is punishing on its own. Nothing about the wine changed.

Chocolate is on both sides of this

Cocoa butter is the fat, and a bar with a lot of it will soften a tannic wine in exactly the way a steak does.

But cocoa solids carry tannins of their own. A very dark, very dry bar with little added butter is itself astringent, and put against a young tannic red it does not cancel anything. Two drying things arrive together and multiply.

Which produces the result that surprises people: the darkest bar on the table is not automatically the best partner for the biggest red. A seventy per cent bar with a generous butter content frequently is.

Nothing else in the mouthtannin binds the proteins that make saliva slippery,and the mouth stops being lubricatedwhich you feel as drag, not as a tasteWith fat in the mouthfulthe fat takes the tannin first, so the saliva is left aloneand the same wine stops feeling harsh
1.2Tannin binding the proteins that make saliva slippery, and the same tannin binding to fat in the food instead.

The other two levers

Salt softens the perception of astringency, which is why a salted caramel or a bar with flakes of salt on it makes a hard wine easier. It is a small effect and it is reliable.

Chilli does the opposite. Capsaicin and tannin together amplify each other, and a chilli chocolate against a tannic red is the least comfortable pairing available at most tastings. Try it once to know what it feels like.

It accumulates

The proteins tannin removes take a few minutes to be replaced. Taste four tannic reds in succession and the fourth will feel harsher than it is, because you have less saliva to spare than you had at the first.

This is not a metaphor and it is the practical reason for the order of tasting, which has its own entry. Water helps a little; something fatty helps more; time helps most.

What ageing does

Tannins polymerise over years into larger molecules that bind less readily, which is why an old red feels softer than a young one made the same way. The tannin has not gone anywhere; it has become less able to reach your saliva.

Very little of what is poured at a festival is old, so most of what you meet is on the grippy end, and the fat in the chocolate is doing more of the work than you might assume.

At the table

If a wine feels harsh, the question is not whether it is a bad wine. It is whether anything in your mouth is giving the tannin somewhere else to go. Take a piece of the highest-butter chocolate on the table, wait, and taste the wine again.

If it improves, the wine was fine and the pairing was not. That single test settles most of the disagreements people have on a tasting floor.

Where the tannin comes from

Skins, seeds and stems, and from oak if the wine was aged in barrels. A red is fermented in contact with its skins and a white usually is not, which is most of why reds are astringent and whites are not.

Longer contact means more tannin, so the same grape can produce a soft wine or a grippy one depending on a decision somebody made about how long to leave the juice with the solids. That is a winemaking choice rather than a property of the variety.

Astringency is not bitterness

They arrive together and they are different things. Bitterness is a taste, detected on the tongue, and it fades on the same timescale as other tastes. Astringency is a mechanical sensation and it builds and lingers.

Telling them apart is worth doing because they have different remedies: sugar suppresses bitterness and does nothing much for astringency, while fat handles astringency and leaves bitterness where it was.

The whites that have it

Skin contact is a choice rather than a rule, and a white fermented on its skins acquires tannin in the same way a red does. Those wines have become fashionable and they surprise people who assume astringency is a red-wine property.

They also pair with chocolate in ways most whites cannot, for exactly the reason this entry describes.

Testing your own threshold

Sensitivity to astringency varies substantially between people and is not something you can argue somebody out of. Strong tea, brewed longer than usual and cooled, is the cheapest way to find where yours sits.

Knowing that you are at the sensitive end explains a great deal about which wines you have been avoiding and why other people did not agree with you about them.

Also in this part

For further context, see UC Davis wine-chemistry research.

Every ticket, every table, every hour given.

The festival exists to raise money for older people in New Hanover County: transport to medical appointments, meals delivered at home, respite for family carers, and the foster grandparent programme. That is what the wine and the chocolate are for.