I have had a couple of Chianti wines recently where I sensed a sweetness. I have never really understood when I have seen people use the term sweet tannins, but I think it registered with me on a recent 2021 Poggerino Nuovo Chianti Classico. I don’t know what the actual amount of residual sugar was in the wine, but there was a sensation of sweetness. For the first time sweet tannin came to mind.
For those of you that use the term sweet tannins, can you explain what you mean and how that might be different than just a wine with perhaps some residual sugar?
I don’t think tannins can be sweet. And if the wine is fermented dry, it won’t have sugar in it. But wines that are harvested very or overripe give the sensation of sweetness, and if that is pervasive enough, I could see it affecting one’s experience of the tannins, especially if the ripeness led to a feeling of polish or softness in the tannins.
I’d never ascribe sweetness to tannins, no matter how ripe or smooth the tannins are or the wine is, and I always cringe when I register somebody talking or writing about “sweet tannins”.
For the most part, grape tannins don’t really have much taste - and they don’t have any flavor. They just lend a tactile feeling to the wine, and that is mainly astringency, ie. that grippy, drying feeling on your gums and tongue. Sufficient tannins can also contribute to the texture of the wine as they count towards the wine’s dry extract.
However, mostly normal, ripe grape tannins tend to have no taste. Only very short-chain tannin molecules have a taste, and that is bitterness. Certain grape varieties tend to yield these shorter-chain tannins, which can add a bitter note to the taste. However, I feel the bitterness tends to come from wood tannins, ie. new oak barrels. These tannins don’t really add much if any tannic grip to the wines, but a good amount of wood tannins can add a bitter taste to the wine.
But sweet tannins? Well, to me, saying a wine has sweet tannins is like describing a Mosel Spälese having wonderful sweet acidity with a lovely sweet mineral core. Nope. This just does not compute. Don’t ascribe sweetness to the tannins (or acidity or minerality) as they can’t carry any sense of sweetness. A ripe wine might have ripe, smooth, resolved or mellow tannins (as opposed to, let’s say tough, assertive, angular or aggressive tannins) with juicy, sweet-toned fruit and maybe even a bit of sweetness from the residual sugar. But sweet tannins? Ugh, please, no.
Arguing with Otto about wine is probably about as smart as me arguing with Jamie Goode. I can attest to the fact that for my senses ripe tannins equate to a “sweetness” on the finish. It has nothing to do with residual sugar - it is more the lack of tough bitterness while still imparting a mouth coating astringency that coats the sides of the mouth with mouth puckering “sweetness.” FWIW, I would ascribe the term to Parker and his acolytes. Not sure what other professional tasters use it but I know what they mean when they do use it.
Yes, tannins are not sweet. However, pigments/anthocyanins are glucosides and they bind with tannins to form a very stable polymer, which does convey a smoothness or mouth puckering sweetness you describe.
Yeah, I too suspect that most likely the term from Parker.
However, as I said earlier, bitterness is not particularly common with tannins - you need to have either certain kinds of tannins, or then just a helluva lot of tannins for them to impart noticeable bitterness. Thus in this sense the lack of bitterness with mouth-coating astringency is very common in most red wines. However, I myself can’t see how astringency (a tactile sensation that dries your mouth) could be associated with sweetness in any way. Not saying that it isn’t possible, but my brain just isn’t wired that way - and that means I honestly have no idea what people mean when they talk about sweet tannins. To me, it makes as much sense as sweet acidity.
FWIW, during my wine education we sampled different mediums (water, 10% alcohol solution in water, and a neutral white wine) with added powdered grape tannins. We could add quite a lot of powdered tannins to any of these solutions and they would become just undrinkably astringent, but you needed to add really a ridiculous amount before the wines started to actually taste bitter. Usually when people ascribe bitterness to tannins, it’s often other compounds than grape tannins that actually lend that bitter taste to the wine. As I said earlier, oak tannins might impart some bitterness to the wine, but even then the barrels would need to be new; for example a 10-yo foudre is not going to impart any kind of wood tannins or bitterness to a wine!
My impression is that the term “sweet tannin” has less to do with sweetness in terms of sugar and more in common with something like the term “sweet crude” (describing low-sulfur oil, which is sweeter and smoother only in comparison to the unpleasant, pungent nature of sour crude). Which is to say, it describes a softness or plushness of tannins (as described in posts above), typically combined with a complement of aromas associated with sweetness of fruit.
The equivalent in the world of acidity would be something being “juicy” (when sweet fruit aromas are abundant) vs “sour” (when they are not). This difference of perception in acidity has little to do with taste buds and more to do with how aromas modify your brain’s perception of taste signals. So, in a sense, I would dispute Otto’s claim that there is no such thing as “sweet acidity”.
To me, these are basic tastes, not flavors. Flavors modify things, but tastes like acidity, sweetness or bitterness are separate elements. At least the way I perceive things, sweetness and acidity (or astringency) just don’t mix. They remain very separate and easily perceptible from one another.
And I use the other terms differently as well - although that might be because English is not my first language, so often I have to translate it (consciously or unconsciously) through my native language. For example “juiciness” is a quality I don’t associate with acidity, unlike sourness, which is definitely a quality of acidity. Certainly juiciness can go together with acidic elements, but it doesn’t require acidity, as it is an unrelated descriptor.
I don’t mean to argue against your experience of the world, only to validate another’s. These terms may not be meaningful to you, but they are meaningful to other people and I think the aim of the OP is to understand how. The OP asked about how people use the term sweet tannins and before anyone had a chance to say anything about their use of the term, you jumped in with a bunch of pretty dismissive stuff about how tannin has no taste unless it’s short-chain and thus bitter (itself a debatable point at concentrations relevant to wines).
Also, you are ascribing specific sensory experiences to specific compounds. These things are not reducible into component effects. Saying these things are all separate and clearly discernible from one another does not accurately describe the experience of most people. For example:
I can’t speak for you, but this is not the case for most people. If nothing else, sweetness and acidity are intimately linked because one impacts the perception of another. I’m pretty sure you’ve talked about this yourself on other threads as it relates to the low perceived sweetness of residual sugar in high-acid wines.
That is entirely true and I don’t mean that they are totally inseparable from each other in that way. Your example is great how acidity and sweetness impact one another; higher acidity can definitely diminish the sense of sweetness from the residual sugar, or vice versa - higher amount of residual sugar can mask away sharpness from the acidity.
My earlier point was not that acidity and sweetness couldn’t affect each other, because they certainly do; instead I meant that the way I perceive them, they simply don’t mix, like in the sense that higher level of residual sugar doesn’t make acidity taste sweeter. It just can’t - to me, acidity just tastes, well, like acid, no matter how much or little there is sweetness. And sweetness is always sweet; higher acidity simply doesn’t make sweetness taste more acid, it just masks the sweetness away. In my books the basic tastes are inseparable and perceptible as separate elements from each other, whereas flavors are those that can easily mix with each other, and can also modify tastes, or vice versa.
Thanks for the replies. I was having trouble wrapping my head around what I was sensing in the wine. I tend to agree with Otto. I think in the end I was picking up tannin and residual sugar - not that the tannin somehow imparted sweetness. I’d love to know the technical analysis of the wine. I think I remember seeing that if the wine is sold through Canada, that might be available there. I would expect these wines to be completely dry.
I don’t remember the wines seeming lower in acid, but I guess that could have impacted what I was getting. Does higher alcohol impact the sensation of sugar?
Even on its own, ethanol actually has a subtly sweet taste to it, so even without any RS the ripe, sweet-toned fruit flavors and high alcohol can have a “protagonistic effect” on each other, together making the wine taste sweeter than with each element alone.