The Rest of the Palate

So far you have two parts of structure, sweetness and acidity, and you know that balance is how they sit together. This lesson adds the last four: tannin, alcohol, body and finish. With all six, you can describe a glass the way a professional taster does. You say what the wine is built from, not only whether you like it.

One idea runs under all four. Structure is a set of forces that push against each other. Tannin and acid make a wine feel firm. Alcohol and sugar make it feel heavier and softer. Body is what you feel when all of them add up. Keep that picture in mind, because it explains why one wine can feel lean and another feel round, even when both are dry.

Tannin, alcohol, body and finish in the glass

Start with tannin. You met the word in lesson one, when you learned that color and tannin live in the grape skins. Here is what it is and how to judge it.

Tannin is a natural compound found in plants. In wine it comes from four places. The first is the grape skins. The second is the seeds, which some people call pips. The third is the stems, when a winemaker leaves whole bunches in the tank instead of pulling the berries off. The fourth is oak, because barrels made of new wood add some tannin of their own.

You do not taste tannin. You feel it. Tannin grabs onto the proteins in your saliva. Saliva normally makes your mouth feel slick. When tannin binds to it, that slick feeling goes away. What is left feels dry and rough, as if your gums and the inside of your cheeks were being pulled tight. Tasters call that feeling grip.

You already know this feeling from somewhere else. Brew a cup of black tea and leave the bag in far too long. Take a sip. Your mouth feels dry and a little furry, and your gums feel coated. That is tannin, and it comes from the tea leaves. A strong red wine does the same thing, for the same reason.

Acidity and tannin are easy to mix up. Both make a wine feel firm, and both can feel sharp at first. But they do opposite things to your mouth. In lesson two you learned to judge acidity by waiting after you swallow or spit and noticing how much your mouth waters. Acid makes saliva flow. Tannin takes it away. So the test is the same pause, with a different question. After the wine is gone, is your mouth wet or dry? A watering mouth points to acid. A drying, gripping mouth points to tannin. Many red wines have both, and you will feel the watering and the drying at the same time. That is normal. You rate each one on its own.

To rate the amount of tannin, use the same three steps you used for acid: low, medium and high. Pay attention to how far the drying spreads and how strong it is. Low tannin is a light touch, mostly on the front of the gums, gone in a moment. Medium tannin spreads across the gums and tongue, and you clearly notice it. High tannin coats your whole mouth, and the drying stays after you swallow.

The amount is only half the story. Tannin also has a texture, and the texture can matter as much as how much there is. Think about the difference between fine sand and gravel. Both are rock, but they feel very different under your hand. Tannin can be fine-grained, silky or velvety. Tasters call this ripe tannin. Or it can be coarse, harsh and green, which tasters call unripe or green tannin. A wine can have a lot of tannin that still feels smooth, and a little tannin that feels rough. So a full tannin note has two parts, the amount and the feel, such as "medium tannin, fine-grained".

Now tie this back to lesson one. Tannin comes mainly from skins, seeds and stems, and those only get into the wine through skin contact. White wine is pressed off the skins before it ferments, so it has almost no tannin. Rosé gets only a short soak of a few hours up to about a day, so it has very little. Red wine ferments with its skins and seeds, so it carries the most. Orange wine, white grapes made the red way, sits in between and can have some real grip. If you remember how a wine was made, you can often guess its tannin before you sip it.

Next comes alcohol. You learned in lesson one that yeast eats sugar and turns it into alcohol and carbon dioxide. So the amount of alcohol in a dry wine depends mostly on how much sugar was in the grapes. Riper grapes hold more sugar. More sugar gives the yeast more to work with. More food for the yeast means more alcohol in the finished wine. That is the whole chain: ripeness sets the sugar, and the sugar sets the alcohol. A grape grown somewhere hot, or picked late, usually makes a stronger wine than the same grape grown somewhere cool, or picked early.

Like tannin, alcohol is not mainly a taste. You feel it in two ways. The first is warmth. Swallow a sip, or breathe out gently after you spit, and notice the back of your throat and your chest. Alcohol leaves a warm glow there. The more alcohol, the stronger the glow. The second is weight. Alcohol adds weight, so a stronger wine feels heavier and fuller as it moves across your tongue. When there is too much alcohol for the rest of the wine, the warmth turns into a burn. That burn is a sign the alcohol sticks out and is out of balance.

The standard tasting scale sorts still wine into three bands, using alcohol by volume, the percentage you see on a label. Low alcohol is anything below eleven percent. Medium runs from eleven percent up to thirteen point nine. High is fourteen percent and above. Many light, off-dry Rieslings fall in the low band. A great deal of everyday wine falls in the medium band. Wines from very ripe grapes, often from warm places, land in the high band.

You do not always have to guess. In the United States, most wine labels state the alcohol, and above fourteen percent the label has to. But the number is allowed some wiggle room, called a tolerance. For a wine at fourteen percent or lower, the real alcohol can be up to one and a half points above or below the label. For a wine above fourteen percent, the room is smaller, one point either way. There is one more rule. The tolerance cannot carry a wine across the fourteen percent line, because that is the legal line between table wine and dessert wine, which in American law simply means wine above fourteen percent, sweet or not.

Here is how that works in practice. Say the label on your bottle reads thirteen percent. Because thirteen is at or below fourteen, the one and a half point tolerance applies. So the wine could really be anywhere from eleven and a half to fourteen percent, but it cannot go over fourteen. Now say a label reads fourteen and a half percent. That is above fourteen, so the one point tolerance applies. The real number could be anywhere from fourteen to fifteen and a half, but it cannot drop to fourteen or below. The label gives you a good idea of the wine's strength, but it is not an exact measurement.

That wiggle room is a good reason to practice judging alcohol by feel. It also connects to lesson two. There you learned that high alcohol can make a dry wine seem a little sweet. Alcohol has a faint sweetness of its own. So when a dry wine seems oddly round and soft, check the warmth before you call it sweet. The pinch-your-nose test from lesson two still works. Sugar you taste stays when you block your nose.

This lesson treats alcohol as a part of structure, the way a taster does. It says nothing about alcohol and health. What public health guidance says about alcohol and the body gets its own lesson in the serving and storage unit, with its limits stated plainly.

Now body. Body is the overall weight of the wine in your mouth, how light or heavy it feels. The easiest way to understand it is milk. Take a sip of skim milk, then a sip of whole milk. Both are milk, and both taste much the same. But whole milk feels thicker and heavier, and it coats your mouth more. Skim feels thin and quick. Wine works the same way. A light-bodied wine feels like skim. A full-bodied wine feels like whole milk or even cream.

Body is not one ingredient. It is what you feel when several parts add up. That is the center of this whole lesson, so take the parts one at a time. Alcohol is the biggest driver, and more alcohol gives more weight. Part of that comes from the way alcohol and water mix, and part from glycerol, a smooth, slightly sweet compound the yeast makes as it ferments. Sugar adds weight too, which is one reason sweet wines feel thick. Then there is extract. Extract is everything dissolved in the wine that is not water, alcohol or sugar. It includes tannin and the color compounds from the skins. A wine that soaked a long time on thick skins carries more extract, and it feels heavier. Winemaking can also add weight. Letting a wine rest on its spent yeast, called lees, or aging it in oak, can make it feel richer and rounder.

Acidity pushes the other way. Acid makes a wine feel leaner and lighter, because it cuts through the weight and makes your mouth water. Here is the picture of forces again. Alcohol, sugar and extract build weight. Acid trims it. Two wines can have the same alcohol, but the one with more acid will feel lighter. When you judge body, you are feeling the result of that push and pull, not measuring any one part.

Rate body on the same three steps: light, medium and full. Picture a light-bodied wine as skim milk, a medium-bodied wine as whole milk, and a full-bodied wine as something closer to cream.

The last part is the finish, also called length. The finish is how long the pleasant flavor of the wine stays after you swallow or spit. Some wines vanish almost at once. Others leave their fruit and other flavors in your mouth for a long time.

The way to judge it is simple. Count. Swallow or spit, then start counting seconds in your head. Breathe out gently through your nose as you count, because much of the lingering flavor reaches you that way. Stop counting when the wine's flavor has faded. A short count means a short finish, and a long count means a long one. Use the same three steps: short, medium and long. Over time your own counts will give you a feel for where the lines fall.

There is one trap. Only pleasant flavor counts. After a sip, other sensations can linger too. The warmth of alcohol can stay in your throat. The drying of tannin can stay on your gums. Your mouth can keep watering from the acid. Those are parts of structure you have already judged. They do not add to the finish. Ask one question as you count: can I still taste the wine itself, its fruit and its other flavors? When the answer is no, stop counting, even if your mouth still feels dry or warm.

Length matters for another reason too. It is one of the main signs of a wine's quality. A long finish usually means the wine has real concentration of flavor. That makes the finish the bridge to the quality lesson ahead, where you will judge a wine by its balance, length, intensity and complexity.

Now you have all six parts. Sweetness, acidity, tannin, alcohol, body and finish. Put them together and you can describe almost any glass by its structure. A full structure note might read like this: "Dry, high acidity, medium tannin with a fine grain, medium alcohol, light to medium body, medium finish." That sentence says nothing about whether you liked the wine. It tells another person what the wine is built like. That is the skill this whole tasting unit is working toward.

If you want to try it, here is an optional exercise. It uses ordinary bottles you can find almost anywhere. You do not need to do it to follow the course.

1. Pick two wines: a light, crisp white, such as a Pinot grigio or a dry Sauvignon blanc, and a fuller red, such as a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Syrah.
2. Pour a small amount of each, about fifty milliliters, into two glasses, and set out a cup or bowl as a spittoon, since spitting is normal practice for tasters.
3. Taste the white, then wait and ask: is my mouth watering or drying, how warm is my throat, and does it feel like skim milk or whole milk?
4. Taste the red and ask the same questions, then count the finish of each wine and compare the two counts.
5. Write a short structure note for each, using all six parts.

The white will usually show more watering than drying, little or no tannin and a lighter body. The red will usually show clear drying on the gums and a heavier body, and often more warmth. Having both side by side makes the differences easy to feel.

Why Willamette Pinot noir is light in grip and moderate in warmth

Now bring all of this home to the Willamette Valley. In lesson one you learned that Pinot noir leads in the valley, and that it is thin-skinned. That one fact explains a lot about its tannin.

Remember where tannin comes from. Skins are one of the main sources. Pinot noir has thin, delicate skins, and there is not much skin compared to the amount of juice. So it has less skin tannin to give, and fewer color compounds. Compare it with Cabernet Sauvignon. Cabernet grows small berries with thick skins, so there is a lot of skin for the amount of juice. That gives Cabernet dark, nearly opaque color, a full body and firm tannin that grips the whole mouth. Pinot noir usually gives pale color and lower tannin. When the grapes ripen well, that tannin tends to feel soft, silky and fine-grained. So a typical Willamette Pinot noir might rate low to medium tannin, with a smooth texture.

Winemakers know this, and some of them work to add a little more grip. One way is to leave some whole bunches, stems and all, in the tank. The stems add tannin. Another way is to leave the wine on its skins longer, so it draws more tannin out of them.

Ricochet Wine Co., the course's home winery in McMinnville, shows the first way in its 2022 Holmes Gap Pinot noir. The grapes come from Holmes Gap Vineyard in the Van Duzer Corridor, the low gap in the Coast Range you met in lesson one, where cool ocean air pushes into the valley. Ricochet reports that thirty percent of the grapes went in as whole clusters, stems and all, and that the wine then spent eleven months in French oak barrels, a quarter of them new. That puts two more of today's four tannin sources, stems and new oak, alongside the thin Pinot skins.

Now alcohol. The valley is cool, mostly in the coolest heat class. You learned in lesson two that cool weather slows the build-up of sugar, which is why the grapes keep their acid. Less sugar means less alcohol. So Willamette Pinot noir tends to sit in the medium band. Producers commonly report alcohol between thirteen and fourteen percent. Prince Hill Vineyards, for example, reports thirteen point one percent for its 2022 Dundee Hills Pinot noir, which puts it in the medium band.

The year changes that number. In a cooler vintage, such as 2019 or 2022, ripening is slower, and alcohol often lands near thirteen percent. Those wines tend to be fresher, higher in acid and lighter. In a warmer vintage, such as 2018, 2021 or 2023, the grapes ripen faster and build more sugar, and alcohol climbs toward fourteen percent. The fruit tends to turn darker, and the body gets fuller. Cool evening breezes from the ocean help hold the wines back even in those warm years. Now follow the chain you learned. A warmer year means riper grapes. Riper grapes mean more sugar and more alcohol. More alcohol means more warmth and more weight, and so a fuller body.

So a Willamette Pinot noir is a good wine for practicing what you learned today. Expect light grip, moderate warmth and fresh acid. Then check whether the year pushed it fuller.

The next lesson moves from the palate back to the nose. It covers primary, secondary and tertiary aromas, and where each one comes from. Until then, try one thing today: brew a cup of black tea, leave the bag in too long, and feel how your gums dry. That is tannin.

The tea shows you tannin on its own. For all six parts at once, visit Ricochet in McMinnville, a winery that belongs to a friend of the show, and book your visit at ricochetwine.com. Give each of its wines a full structure note: rate the tannin and its texture, feel for warmth and weight, and count the finish.