Banfi Vintners

The building blocks of wine

After hearing of aldehydes and histamines, tannins and sulfites you are probably wondering: What else is in that glass of vino!?!Truth be told, wine is approximately 80-85 percent water! Its principle building blocks are:

  • Alcohol
  • Sugar
  • Acid
  • Polyphenols (tannins and pigments)
  • Extract (flavor compounds)

And these building blocks should be in balance with one another. No single component should stand out in the extreme.

Wine has personality…
in the form of body, legs and tears

In general, the alcohol content of a glass of wine runs anywhere between 8 to 14 percent. The more alcohol a wine possesses, the more body it has. And — the more alcohol the wine has, the more significant the tears or legs—.those streams of liquid that coalesce and slide down the inside of the glass when you swirl your wine. Many people associate tears or legs with quality. That is not the case. In a glass of dry table wine, tears or legs are simply an indicator of alcohol content. The slower the tears are to form, the thicker the streams, the higher the alcohol content.

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Imbalances:
A wine with too much alcohol is said to be “hot.”

A wine with too much sugar is said to be “cloying” or “overly sweet.”

A wine with too much acid is said to be “hard” or “overly tart.”

A wine with too much tannin is said to be “astringent” and “overly tannic”; it can also be deemed “young” as in it needs to spend time in the cellar to mature and mellow.

“Wine is light, held together by water”—Galileo, Italian physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)

When someone refers to a wine’s structure, they are referring to its composite makeup of acid, tannin, sugar, extract, and alcohol.

Wines are usually described as being light, medium, or full-bodied. Think milk!

Skim = a light-bodied wine
2% = a medium-bodied wine
Whole = a full-bodied wine

Each milk type has a weight or texture on the palate. Wine does too.

Dessert wines can also be quite slow to form tears or legs. This is largely due to the viscosity of the residual sugar; it is not necessarily a reflection of alcohol content.