How important are tannins in fruit wines and mead

[meadman77]

Hi,
I have a knowledge of pH adjustment and starting with the correct sg, but I notice a lot of recipes call for a small amount of tannin. How important is this to the final flavour, and does it matter what the source of it is (some being sold online state that they are chestnut derived)?

 

[Turock]

Well, this is a subjective sort of question. On the whole, we don't use tannin in most fruit wines. But small doses can be used in things like strawberry which can help with color and prevent the plating of color in the bottle. Tannins will always help stabilize color in any wine, and help in clearing and add structure and body. Because it makes wine more astringent, you want to be careful not to add too much.

Many tannins and tannin complexes are made from chestnut and other woods. The way I understand it is that they are more reactive and they bind with color compounds,especially if used as fermentation tannins. Lack of natural tannin will make these color compounds precipitate out,creating a loss of color in the wine.

The best way to bind color is by using Lallzyme EX along with something like FT Rouge in your ferments. Strawberry is a problematic wine, as far as color goes. So paying more attention to the use of tannins can help give you a better wine.

I am not familiar with meads, as I don't make them. But tannin--especially along with the Lallzyme--- will reduce or eliminate herbaceous or vegetal characteristics, also.

 

[Bergmann]

Tannins Is not necessary in mead, I personally only use it for melomels that contain certain fruits, Chestnut is frequently used because the shell of the chestnut is high in tannic acid, another source is the bark from the brown birch tree which can be used to add a significantly different flavor to a wine or melomel.

 

[BernardSmith]

I just bottled some strawberry wine and never had a problem with any loss of color during fermentation or in the bottle. Is this something that I am likely to experience? Not at home and cannot check my notes but I don't know that I added tannin although I may have...

 

[Turock]

Well, we've made tons of strawberry over the years and go back and forth between having no color issues---and then having color issues. It's all dependent on the berries from what I've been able to figure out. Sometimes we have little red "beads" at the bottom of the carboy and the wine is more orange. I think tannin will help those berries that are pale red because the color will be more bound.

Some varieties are not very good--pale red and acidic. The best berries we ever found were at the Amish auctions---intense red and very sweet. That wine came out very red and not orange. So selection of fruit for this wine is very important.

 

[meadman77]

Thanks everyone. So it seems that tannin is not really that important except perhaps for some fruit wines/melomels where there are colour issues?

 

[Deezil]

I find that drier fruit wines and melomels can benefit from some tannin additions, but it's not anything on the scale as you'd find in red grape wines

 

[Winorick]

I add tannin to all flower wines, rather I leave them dry or sweetened. Also all fruit wines made from canned fruit. Without the tannin, they turn out a bit flat.

 

[Turock]

There's nothing like experience. Try some tannin in your wines and see what you think. Small doses can't hurt.

 

[meadman77]

Thanks. I put down a large batch of plum wine over the weekend after getting given 103lbs of ripe plums. I ended up going with 15 gallons and put 1/2 tsp tannin per 5 gallons. I had a bit of trouble identifying the change in flavour. The unfermented plum pulp was quite zingy - I think quite high in acid, so I didn't add any acid. I think the acidity was masking the astringency of the tannin. Will be interesting to see how it goes after some aging.