What Makes Wine Taste the Way It Does? The 3 Key Components

Ep 125

What if the secret to understanding wine wasn’t memorizing grapes or regions but unlocking just three key components?

In this episode, I’m breaking down the building blocks that shape every glass of wine: tannin, acidity, and body. By learning how to identify these elements, you’ll not only know what you like (and don’t like), but also have the words to describe it with confidence.

You’ll discover why tannins create that dry “cotton ball” feeling in your mouth, how acidity makes your mouth water, and why body is the foundation for food pairings. Along the way, you’ll get simple tasting tricks like the “chipmunk test” for tannin and the “drool test” for acidity, plus everyday comparisons (think milk or almond milk) that make wine structure easy to understand.

So, whether you’re brand new to wine or looking to sharpen your wine confidence, tune in to this episode and discover these three essentials that will help you better understand your next glass of wine.

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• BonChocolats: Go to bonchocolats.com to order some delicious artisan chocolate (that actually pairs well with wine)!

Episode Highlights:

• Learn what tannins are and how they create that drying “cotton ball” feeling
  
  
• Discover how foods like cheese soften tannins in wine
  
  
• Understand the difference between “dry wine” and tactile dryness
  
  
• Explore the role of acidity in wine balance and aging potential
  
  
• Find out how malolactic fermentation adds buttery flavors
  
  
• Try the “chipmunk test” to identify tannins in red wine
  
  
• Use the “drool test” to measure acidity in your glass
  
  
• Match wine body with food intensity for better pairings
• Compare wine body using everyday references like milk or almond milk

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Email - hailey@corkandfizz.com

Transcript

0:09

Interested in learning about wine but not sure where to start. You're in the right place. Welcome to the Cork and Fizz Guide to Wine podcast. I'm your host, Hayley Bowlman, and I'm so glad you're here. I'm a wine enthusiast turned wine educator and and founder of the Seattle based wine tasting business, Cork and Fizz. It is my goal to build your confidence in wine by making it approachable and lots of fun. You can expect to learn everything from how to describe your favorite wine to what to pair with dinner tonight, and so much more. Whether you're a casual wine sipper or a total cork dork like myself, this podcast is for you. So grab yourself a glass and let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to the Cork and Fizz Guide to Wine podcast. Today we are going back to the basics in a way, and we're going to talk about three key components in wine that I think understanding these components really gives you a great general understanding of wine. Like if you know these three things, you can talk about wine really intelligently, if that makes sense. Or like, like you kind of know what you're talking about and it'll be easier to figure out what you like and don't like in the wine and maybe not figure it out so much as, like, how to say it out loud. You know, when you kind of have a taste and you're like that feeling, that's the thing that like, you either like or you don't like. I'm hoping once you understand these components, you might be able to put a word to that feeling. That's the goal. You're not really. My hope isn't that you become a total wine snob after learning these three things, but that you become a little more, I don't know, wine confident when you know these three things. So the three components we are going to talk about are tannin, acidity and body. So let's dive into it. So we're gonna start off with the most complicated, or at least what I think is the most complicated of the three, or maybe the most misunderstood of the three, because once you have an idea of what it is, it totally makes sense. But it gets confusing. So we're gonna talk about tannin. Tannin in wine is what causes that tactile drying sensation and a sense of bitterness after you have a sip of wine. It's basically that feeling like you have cotton balls in your mouth or like all the saliva has been just like sucked out of your mouth. Like, you end up kind of Trying to, you know, try to pull some saliva back in so that you can talk. That is the tannin in the wine. And interestingly enough, if you're a tea drinker, you might also be fairly familiar with tannin, because tannin can be found in black tea. If you've ever left a tea seeping for too long, if you're anything like me and you're like, oh, a glass of tea sounds great, and then you forget about it. And 15 minutes later, you go to take a sip, and holy moly, it's like, whoa, where did all the saliva go in my mouth? Those are the tannins at play in the tea, and that is also what is found in wine. Now, the question is, why does this cause that cotton ball feeling? I'm a huge why person. I always like to understand what is happening. So why do tannins cause this sensation? Tannins bind and they precipitate proteins, meaning they separate them out. Human saliva is full of proteins, which is what makes it so slippery. I know this is gross, but I'm telling you the why. A tannic red wine will bind to the saliva. And so this is basically what causes you to basically feel like all the saliva's been pulled out of your mouth because the tannin has bonded to the saliva, basically ridding your mouth of it. This explains why fatty foods actually can counteract tannins in wine. If you take a bite of fatty food, let's say like a bite of cheese, then you take a sip of tannic wine, the tannins in the wine are now split between the salivary proteins, so you still, you know, it still causes those to dry up, but only half of them and then the other half bond to the fat in the cheese. Since there is not as many tannins available for those salivary proteins, the wine feels less, you know, tactically dry, less astringent, and ends up being smoother. Tannins, where do they come from in the wine? Why are they there? They come primarily from the skins, the seeds, and the stems of grapes. And now, when we know this, it tells us that they are generally found only in red wines. Because when we're making a white wine, if you remember listening to my How Is Winemade Podcast, I think just a few episodes ago, we learned that with white wine, you remove the skins and the stems and the seeds as quickly as possible versus the red wine, you leave it in contact with the juice of the grapes. So we're going to get more of those tannins in a red Wine, wine. You can also find them in an orange wine, which is where a. You use white grapes, but you leave them in contact with the skins and the seeds. So again, we get some tannin. You can find some of these tannins in a white wine, just not as much. Right. Because we are removing the things that that contain them away from the juice, away from the wine as quickly as possible. Tannin can also come from oak barrels. So even if it is a white wine that was not in contact with the skins or the seeds, if it was in contact with an oak barrel, you will get wood tannin, which is different than the skin tannin or the grape tannin, I should say. But it still can cause that feeling. If you want the nitty gritty science of it, I'm going to tell you it right now. But if this is like right over your head, that is totally fine, too. We're just going to pretend to be scientists for a second. So there are essentially two types of wine tannins. There are condensed, hydrolyzable. Those are ones that are affected by water. The hydrolyzable tannins are generally absorbed into wine through the barrels, the oak barrels that it is aged in. They provide softer aromas and flavors favored in oaked wine. So our oak tannins are the hydrolyzable tannins. Condensed tannins, on the other hand, generally come from seeds, skins, and stems. These tannins are far more bitter and pronounced. These, again, come from the grapes. Now, if the tannin, you're like, okay, but like, why do we really want this? Do we want this, like, dry sensation feeling? And tannins do a lot for red wine, and there's a big reason for wanting a lot of tannin in your wine. For one thing, it helps red wines age well for decades. A wine that's bitter at a young age can become very soft and complex with age. But due to the tannins, those big bitter tannins will, what's called, polymerize. They'll create long chains with each other, which causes them to feel smoother and less harsh. Also, fun fact, wine tannins can be good for your health. Again, whenever I say this, please do not take this. As Haley said, red wine is healthy. That's not what I'm saying. But wine tannins can be good for your health. There's actually a study on the effect of wine and tea tannin on oxidation in the body. And in these tests, wine tannins resist oxidation, AKA they are antioxidants. I know, right? I never thought about that word meaning that. But they are antioxidants, which we all know is a buzzword for something healthy, right? So the next time you're like, you should have a pomegranate to have some antioxidants, you can be, how about I have this glass of wine, this red wine, so I can have some antioxidants. Last thing I want to talk about when it comes to tannin is how to taste it in your wine. If you're still not quite sure what I mean when I say that dry sensation, that dry tactile. Because here's the thing, the reason why tannin is confusing, I think, is because there's the term dry wine. And you might think because tannins cause a dry sensation, that when I say a dry wine, I must be referring to a tannic wine. That would only be logical, right? Of course, that's not what that means. A dry wine simply means a wine with no sugar. Dry means something totally different in the wine world, which is why I'm trying to be very clear that tannins cause a dry sensation, like that dry tactile sensation. And so this is where it gets kind of confusing. But if you're still like, what even is this dry tactile sensation? Here's a test that I learned from another wine expert. I'm going to call it the chipmunk test because it's, I think it's hopefully the best way to explain it to you while you are listening to this and what this does. So first of all, it's not going to tell you the level of tannins. So generally when you're tasting a wine, you're going to say it has either low, medium or high tannins. This test isn't going to tell you low, medium or high. All it's going to do is allow you to understand what tannin feels like in your mouth. So it's always going to feel like high tannin no matter what wine you have, as long as it's a red wine. If you do this test with that red wine, it's going to feel like high tannin. I just wanna make sure that's clear. It's not gonna tell you low, medium or high. It's just gonna tell you what that sensation feels like in a more extreme concentrated way. So the chipmunk test, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna take a small to medium sized sip of your red wine and then you're gonna put it behind your top lip. It kind of causes your top lip to kind of pooch out, if that's a good word, I don't know. And you kind of look a little bit like a chipmunk or like a squirrel. That's like stor. Hold the red wine up against the gums and the back of your top lip for, I don't know, even three seconds will do it. And then swallow the wine and then feel how that feels on your top lip. And what should happen is it should feel like your top lip is stuck to your gums. You're going to want to pull your lip away from the gums. You're going to want to run your tongue over that because it's going to feel so dry. That is that tactile dry sensation. Now take a bite of food, do something, kind of reset your palate. Then go back to that glass of wine. Have a regular sip, just a medium sized sip, kind of move it around your mouth a little bit and swallow. And basically using that feeling behind your top lip as the high level of tannin, that's high on the scale. Use that as a reference to figure out, okay, how much do I feel that tannin everywhere in my mouth make sense? Hopefully. Okay. The next component that we're going to talk about in wine I think is far more straightforward and that is acidity. Acidity is basically that fresh, tart, sour attribute of wine. Essentially. How much does it make you pucker up like you sucked down a lemon? Or how much does it make you salivate? Basically the opposite of what tannin does. There are several different types of acidity in wine. The most prevalent are tartaric acid. Tartaric acid is naturally occurring in grapes. If a wine contains a lot of tartaric acid when bottled, that acidity will clump together into crystals when it's chilled. And those crystals are sometimes called tartrates or wine diamonds. They're totally safe to drink. They'll actually dissolve back into the wine as it is warmed up. But you'll often see them. If you take a cork out of a bottle and you see those little crystals on the bottom of the cork, those are called tartrates or wine diamonds. And they're just tartaric acid that is kind of clumped into crystals. Again, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your wine. The other types of acidity prevalent in wine are malic acid. This is a naturally occurring acid that is found in the grapes, which is also found in apples. So think about that kind of sour taste. And then also lactic Acid. This is not naturally occurring in grapes, and it's actually created via a secondary fermentation. So after wine goes through its first fermentation to create alcohol, sometimes winemakers will have it go through a second fermentation called malolactic fermentation. And the name of it tells us essentially what it's doing. It is transforming malic acid, which we just learned was naturally occurring in the grapes. It's what's found in, like, an apple. It's sour and it converts it to lactic acid, which is the acidity that you'd find in, like, milk or a dairy product. So it's much smoother. This is what can cause that kind of buttery taste. Not oak barrels. The buttery taste comes from that malolactic fermentation. Now, there are two ways to measure acidity in wine. First, you have total acidity, and this tells us the concentration of acids in the wine. I love producing this podcast for you every week, but here's the truth. It's not free. That's why I'm so grateful for sponsors like the following brands supporting me so that I can share everything I love about wine with you. If you're able, show them some support back. I'll be honest, I never really believed chocolate could pair well with wine until I partnered with Bon Chocolatz for a local event. 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I'd love to help or take advantage of the live chat wine experts@wine.com the second way to measure is the ph. And the ph levels tells us how intense those acids taste. The acidity in a wine often provides the backbone that again is needed for long term aging of a wine. Something that's interesting about acidity is that sugar can balance the acidity in wine without changing the amount of acidity or the PH of the wine. So many sweet wines, like dessert wines, are actually incredibly acidic, but it's not super noticeable when you're tasting because they balance each other out. A common one, a great example of this is Sauternes, which is a very famous dessert wine from Bordeaux, France. And the wines can be incredibly acidic, but there's more sugar than there is acidity so you notice more of the sweetness. I liken this to like think about making lemonade, right. Like you need to find that right balance between sour and sweet. And, you know, lemon juice just on its own, super, super acidic, right? Then you can add a bunch of sugar. It doesn't change the ph level. There is still all that, that acidity present. You just don't taste it as acidic anymore because the sweetness, the sugar balance it out. A lot of great wines do that too. Now how do you test for acidity in wine? Well, you do the drool test, of course. Don't worry, I promise you're not actually going to be drooling. But it is fun to say it, isn't it? It's like, ah, what are you gonna make me do, Haley? I promise it's not too silly. It's a little silly. If I see you doing this in public, I love it because I'm like, hey, there's a cork and fizz wine taster. Okay, what is the drool test? Drool test is where you take a sip of wine. Again, let's go for like a medium sized sip. You're going to move it around your mouth. Remember this is what we call chewing the wine. It's like a slow motion mouthwash. And then after you swallow, you're going to tip your head forward, but make sure your mouth is shut. And basically what you're testing is, would you have drooled had I told you to not shut your mouth? And if the answer is yes, and especially a lot, that's high acidity, not so much medium to low acidity. So medium sized sip, move the wine around your mouth. After you swallow, tip your head forward with your mouth shut. And then you're basically just seeing how much saliva you produce. I know it's weird, I know it might sound gross, but it's a great way to isolate the acidity in the wine. Okay. The last element in wine that we are, the last structural element we're going to talk about in wine is the body of the wine. The body of the wine is the apparent weight of the wine in your mouth. How heavy does it feel? A wine can be light, medium or full bodied. That's our scale. Right. So light on the low end all the way up to full bodied. Factors in wine that typically affect the body are either the alcohol content or the sugar content or both. The body of the wine. It's really important when discussing wine. I mean first it's a great way to classify wines because there are over 10,000 grape varieties. So if we tried to just classify wine by grape varieties, we would be here a while. Right. And so instead it's easy to classify them by either a light bodied wine, medium bodied or full bodied wine. Body is also important when you're discussing wine and food pairing because it's the starting point. You often want to match the body of the wine with the intensity of the food. I was actually talking to my dad about this the other day. He's been drinking more wine than he ever used to before, but he still isn't a huge fan of red wines. And so when we went out to dinner, we actually had dinner over at my in laws and they were serving grilled steak and they had some white wine on the table that he was enjoying and but my father in law brought out a red and my dad tried it and he wasn't like a huge fan. He's like, I think I'm going to stick with the white wine with a steak. But he asked me, you know, why is it that people tend to pair red wine with steak? And the reason for this is, you know, it is a tradition. It does really work well. And one of the big reasons is the body of the wine. Typically red wines are fuller bodied, they have a little more weight to them and we want to, you know, when we're having a steak, a steak has a ton of flavor, a ton of stuff going on. So we want to match it, you know, that intensity of the food, we want to match that with a fuller bodied wine. Because if you try to match it with a light bodied white wine, the steak will overpower the wine. So a lot of times that's why we pair it with a red. Now that's not saying you can't find a full bodied white that will do the same job. You definitely can. And these are always guidelines, not like you have to do. He ended up having the steak with the Pinot Grigio and it was great. He was totally happy with it. So you don't have to. But matching the intensity of the food with the body of the wine is a great place to start. It's also why you typically don't pair sushi, raw fish. Right. Think super delicate with a big full bodied red because the, in this case, the wine would overpower the food. Makes sense. And like I said, yeah, we use body to classify wines. It's more reliable than the grape variety as well. Because, you know, a Chardonnay, if we called something a Chardonnay, there are a million different ways to make a Chardonnay. So it's not totally clear, but if I told you it was light or full bodied, that actually tells you a little bit more about the wine. It's my favorite way for wine shops to be organized and wine lists for that matter. I wish more places would organize their wine lists by light, medium and full bodied because I think it makes more sense once you know what you like. Like, oh, I'm looking for a light bodied red. Like you want something that you know, doesn't have a lot of oomph to it or you want like a full bodied white and you know that, you know you want a white wine that has a lot of that oomph. And I think that's easier to find than looking by country or variety. How do you tell the body of a wine? Right. How do you figure out what you like? The easiest way to tell the body of wine is actually to compare it to a type of milk. And again, I know I have such silly little things here, but they work so well. I'm originally from Wisconsin, so I use my milk scale. So think a light bodied wine is similar to skim milk. It's almost like, I want to say watery. I know that makes it sound bad. I don't mean that, but it just doesn't have a lot of like weight or fat in it. Right. So it just doesn't have that, that heaviness. So light bodied is like a skim milk. Going up our scale, a medium bodied wine is like a 2% milk. We've added some more fat in. Right. So it's got a little more heft to it. It kind of, you know, coats your mouth a little bit more. And then a full bodied wine is like your whole milk. It's viscous, it coats your mouth, it has that weight to it. So think about comparing your wine to these different types of milk. Now if you're like, Haley, I'm lactose intolerant and haven't had milk in years, I feel you same. And so I've come up with my dairy free milk comparison as well. So a light bodied wine is like an almond milk to me. Those are usually lighter, more watery. Your medium bodied wine is going to be like an oat milk or maybe even a soy milk. I've been drinking soy milk way more than oat milk lately. But again, it's got a little more weight to it, it's a little heavier, a little bit more oomph to it. And then finally your full bodied wine is like you are, you've got a full fat coconut milk and it is, it is rich and it's thick and it's viscous. All right, so light, medium, full bodied wine similar to almond milk, oat milk, coconut milk. Hopefully that helps. All right, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Cork and Fizz Guys Guide to Wine podcast. I really like going back to some of these basics things because they're, they're things that like I teach at all of my wine tastings. But I feel like they really help those like, aha moments where you're like, oh, that's why I like this wine and not this one. Because it's, you know, this one's higher acidity or this one's more full bodied or this one has less tannin to it. Right. Like being able to figure that out is just so much fun. If you love this episode, it's much as I did, I'd love it if you take a quick second to rate it and leave a review. And if you know a wine lover in your life that would enjoy it, please share it with them. In next week's episode, we're diving into an area of the world of wine that is growing quickly but is often overlooked, and that's technology and wine specifically. We're going to be talking about AI, and I know a lot of us have strong feelings about that, so definitely stick around. Come back next week to listen to the interview I'll be in interviewing John Tan, who is the founder of Cork Vision, which is an AI co pilot for wineries powered by a smart assistant named Corky. And yes, if that sounds kind of familiar, Corky is kind of based off Clippy from Microsoft Word. If you are of my generation, you are probably very familiar with Clippy, but apparently Corky is much, much, much more helpful. John spent decades building a tech company in New York with any he moved to Napa without a plan, just a curiosity for wine and a willingness to get his hands dirty. That led to working harvests, supporting friends with their wineries, and ultimately realizing how much time and opportunity wineries were losing to outdated tools. So today he's combining his tech background with deep industry empathy to build QuarkVision, a platform designed to help wineries sell smarter, connect with customers, and bring data to life through Corki. We had some really interesting conversations and don't worry, I did not stray away from those questions of like, hey yo, is this going to take our jobs? We talk about that. So come back next week to listen to that episode. Thanks again for listening. And if you want to learn more about wine, come follow me at Cork and Fizz on Instagram. Cheers.