Tannins - What Are They Good For? #8

Bitter, Astringent and Wonderful

Communicating about wine, it's elements, characteristics and particularities is a sometimes frustrating but necessary part of trying to understand it better. What else can we do?  It will always be an imperfect, and sometimes daunting odyssey of conversation but it really does help put the wine puzzle together.

Detailed talk about exactly what foods taste like is really not a strong feature of our culture in North America. Although we might comment for instance that this is a good, very good or even excellent nectarine, for the most part, we feel a nectarine is a nectarine is a nectarine and talking about it in any greater detail might seem peculiar or very, very French. We don't really have a lot of practice talking this way about our foods. We do talk in details about food preparation, recipes and cooking tips but about the ingredients - not so much.

Wine is a part of cuisine.  If we did have specific conversations for instance about the merits of various types of lettuce available: Iceberg, Red Leaf, Butter and Romaine it might make us less suspicious of the florid sounding, intricacies of Wine Talk.