Wine Structure

People talk a lot about structure in wine – but what is structure and how can you have structure in a liquid (scientists among you stop right there). Structure is an aspect of taste. Pretty much all wine, irrespective of how its made, where its made or what grapes its made with, has certain things in common – it has fruit flavourings, it has acid, it has alcohol and, if is red, it has tannin. That’s it, that’s structure: Fruit, acid alcohol and Tannin. When people talk about structure they are talking about the interplay of these three things. When they are nicely matched and balanced a wine is called ‘well integrated’.

Wine Acid

All wine needs acid otherwise it tastes like the evil twin brother of Ribena. This is not a good thing. A wine lacking acid is called ‘flabby’ because the flavour lacks the definition given it by a good dose of crisp acid. Imagine an apple with no acid in it and you’ll get a sense of what wine would be like. Acid whips all the flavours into shape making them sit up nice and pert for our delectation.

Red Wine Tannin

Only found in red wines (except for some crazy Rrioja which some lovely Spanish woman once showed me) this is the stuff that dries your gums – just as stewed tea dries your gums because there is tannin in tea too. In the case of wine tannin comes from two sources - the skins of the grapes and the oak barrels in which wine is stored. Therefore if you don’t know what tannin is you can either lick the skin of a grape. If you still don’t get it peel the grape and eat the skin – when the insides of your cheeks seem to touch each other you’ll know what it is. Tannin is good for red wines because it helps them age – it is a preservative that buys time for the wine to evolve in the bottle (more on that later). However it doesn’t actually taste that nice on its own so an excess of tannin makes a young wine taste pretty grim. (I say young because tannin disappears with age so a grimy tannic wine in its youth can produces a gloriously smooth wine in its maturity – the French are masters of this)

Alcohol in Wine

Does exactly what it says on the tin and appears in wine courtesy of fermentation. Fermentation is when the sugars in a grape turn into alcohol. If all the sugars are turned then they wine is dry; if some sugar is left (known as residual sugar), then the wine is sweet.

Oak

After being made but before bottling wines can be kept in oak barrels for a few years. This imparts some oak flavour to the wine and it also imparts tannins (different but related to the tannins in grape skins). Oaking a wine is optional for a wine maker depending on the style they like. Beaujolais generally isn’t oaked, Chilean Chardonnay generally is but it is optional. Many think of it as an aspect of structure but to keep things simple I’m not going to count it. By the way if you really want to know what oak tastes like go up and sniff an oak tree. You look stupid but it really does work. This brings me onto the subject of The Wine Palate