Your definition for tannins as "grit" is spot on. I had a bottle of wine from Burgundy that was so strong I thought is was like liquid sandpaper. It took three days before I could drink it.
Awesome video, thanks! Love the Garzon Tannat! I have a drawer in my cellar devoted to Tannats from Uruguay, France and my home state Virginia. If I’m not mistaken, Tannat gets its name from Tannin.
It recently clicked for me how tannins can enhance a wine. I always wondered why anyone would like something that dries the mouth or feels grippy. I just had a very interesting French Malbec that was fairly high in tannins (to my limited relative experience) and I noticed it sort of prepares your mouth for the fruity flavors hidden behind all the rest going on like this licorice/menthol/earthy start. Not that those were unpleasant, but it was surprisingly not at all fruit forward, but once my tongue had been thoroughly tannin-coated, it was like the last few sips were a completely different drink. I'm still a "beginner" enthusiast, but I think my fav thing about wine has gotta be how a glass often transforms with each sip, and I think tannins really help with that.
Let me start off by saying that I was more of a beer/whiskey drinker and I never really cared for wine, but then I went on a trip to Napa with my wife and our wine centric friends about 2.5 years ago and really started to taste wine the way I would taste whiskey. I love an occasional IPA. I had a wine at one of the first wineries that we went to that was pretty high in tannins. The astringent, moisture sucking sensation from that Cabernet Savignon actually took me right back to drinking an IPA. Obviously it wasn’t as bitter as an IPA but I was able to make the correlation in my head and it all changed for me. So as a new-ish wine drinker, tannins are what started me off in my wine journey.
I know what tannins are. I know what they taste like the issue I have is "how do you taste PAST the tannins to determine whether this will have fruit once the wine has aged". When I go around Bordeaux I struggle with tasting their young wines because they are dominated by tannins to the point that you can't taste anything else. How do I know if these wines will be great with age? No one talks about that.
Great question. Here's how I've been thinking about it lately: A young, age-worthy wine will taste brash and tannic, but all the components will be up in your face, not just tannin. And high acidity too.
I'll pull this from a study so you have the facts: "The word tannin is a collective name for a group of phenols that exist naturally in the grape berry. This group of phenols is further subdivided into flavonoids and non-flavonoids. The non-flavonoids consist of the benzoic acids and the cinnamic acids, while the flavonoids consists of flavanols, flavonols and anthocyanins (Monagas et al., 2005)."
