The Chain Gang Cycle Tours

It’s All In The Tannin - Wine 101

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Lizzie, our web guru, has asked me to reply to a question about why wine improves with age. Someone asked the question on a forum, and the Wikipedia answer in response was “When properly stored, wines not only maintain their quality but many actually improve in aroma, flavour, and complexity as they mature.” Not very helpful.

And of course it isn’t true of all wines - in fact it isn’t true of most wines. It’s easier to understand if we restrict ourselves initially to red wines.

Let’s Look At Red Wine

Wines do change over time, but mostly that just means they go off. Most obviously, their colour degrades. If you take a wine from last year, and compare it with a 2004, for example, you’ll see the new wine is very purple.

Although on their own they’ll both look a lovely, deep red (assuming they’re any good), comparing one with the other, you should easily be able to decide that one is ‘purple‘, the other ‘ruby‘.

This colour degradation will continue over time until the wine becomes almost brown, and eventually begins to break down and appear as sediment in solution.

Tannins

The way to slow down this degradation is to have high tannin levels in the wine to start with - the tannins give structure to the wine, and allow it to be stored for a long period of time.

This doesn’t mean that adding a lot of tannin to any wine means it can be kept for decades. The balancing act is that if a wine is to be stored over a long period, it must have high tannin levels. With high tannin levels from the pips and skins, the wine can be stored longer in oak, and even in new oak, without overpowering the wine. Length of time in oak, and the use of new oak, both add to tannin content of a wine.

Cabernet Sauvignon

The classic red wine grape with high tannin content is cabernet sauvignon. This is the traditional grape used to add ‘structure’ to a wine. That’s why clarets can be stored for so long.

Wine makers in Chianti found that improving techniques were producing wines worth keeping longer. So they introduced small amounts of cabernet sauvignon to give the wine the necessary structure to hold it all together while the wine aged and mellowed.

But Not All Wines Improve With Age

So, not all wines improve with age. As I’ve explained, if a wine does improve with age, it needs high levels of tannin to provide the structure that prevents the wine from degrading.

Then it’s a question of luck - does all that tannin from the grapes and the barrels produce a taste that is pleasing on the palate? High levels of tannin in a young wine taste very bitter - you can gauge the level of tannin by swilling the wine around the front of your teeth. If they feel rough and dry, that’s tannin, a foolproof test.

Wine Warning

These wines need to be left for the maturing process to work its miracle. That’s why some wines come with a warning - not to be drunk for 5, 10 or even 15 years. Almost always this means the winemaker has decided that the best this wine can ever get is if it is matured for x years with y amount of tannins from leaving the wine on the skins, and z amount of tannins from storing in oak for a certain amount of time, with a certain percentage of new oak.

Changing any of these variables will change the time when the wine is at its optimum, but the pleasantness of the wine at the new optimum will be less, in the view of the winemaker.

And the longer the winemaker has decided is the optimum time, the more undrinkable the wine will be as a young wine. For example, a really high quality Pauillac like Mouton Rothschild will be primarily cabernet sauvignon, kept for a while on the skins and stored primarily in new oak. After 12 years it will be mellow and beautiful. After 3 years it would be very bitter indeed.

It’s About Balance Too

But you can’t take a Vin de Pays de l’Herault, or an ordinary Pinotage from California, leave the skins in, use lots of new oak and store it for 20 years. Yuk! Very, very acidic, with no balancing fruit. It’s about balance. Is the wine fruity enough to take a heavy dose of tannin sufficient to store it for long enough to allow the fruit and the acid to evolve to equilibrium? That’s a wine you can age - and it sounds very much like a good quality claret to me!

Tornado Tom Wins Paris - Roubaix

Probably the biggest one-day race on the cycling calendar is the Paris-Roubaix. It’s a 260 Km (162 miles) race from, you guessed it, Paris, finishing in the velodrome in Roubaix in the North East of France

On April 14^th, it was the 106^th running of this classic race, and the distinguishing feature is the inclusion of many sections of traditional paved roads, or pave. These sections traditionally sort out the winners and losers. The riders all use special equipment for this race, which strangely enough usually means going low-tech. They trade in their super-light carbon frames for heavier versions, they double-tape their handlebars and use heavier wheels.

My ‘man of the moment’ Fabian Cancellara came 2^nd, which is quite a result, but he lost out to ‘Tornado’ Tom Boonen, a hero in Belgium, a previous winner, and also the winner of the first ever Tour de France stage that I watched in Angers.

But, my personal highlight from this year’s Paris-Roubaix was the appearance of my absolute favourite piece of bike equipment. The humble jubilee clip, or hose clamp, known in France as a ‘collier’, or collar.

An old boss of mine, when as a student I worked in a bulldozer repair yard, told me you need two tools. A torch (of the oxy-acetylene variety) and a sledge hammer. With a torch and a hammer, Albert Curwood reckoned you could fix anything. That might be true on a bulldozer, but for my own personal tool collection, you have to add a jubilee clip.

Years ago, in the early nineties, I set off to cycle around France one summer. I was planning to be away for about 3 months, but less than 25 miles after getting off the ferry in Roscoff, one side of my pannier rack broke. All I had to fix it with was string. At the 40 mile mark, the other side broke. This was a Blackburn rack, guaranteed for life, apparently! I made it to the house of a friend of mine, Ken Dalton, in Broons near Rennes (twinned with Exeter, so a decent enough place). He’s a wonderful car mechanic, and he prescribed a pair of jubilee clips.

The next day I wrapped a jubilee clip around the broken end of the back rack and the frame and just tightened it until nothing would move. I cycled across France and into germany, then south through Austria and Switzerland into Italy. I cycled back over the Alps into Switzerland and into France via Chamonix, and finally back to Exeter via the Roscoff-Brittany ferry. The following week I happened to be in the bike shop in Exeter from which I’d bought the rack. The owner saw my jubilee clips, and offered to give me a new rack as they were guaranteed. Brilliant. My jubilee clips had managed 4,000 miles, and he was offering me a brand-new rack with a proven life of just 40 miles. That was one of the easier decisions I’ve ever had to make. Many Chain Gang cyclists will have seen my little collection of jubilee clips, I wouldn’t want to set out on a tour without them.

Have a look at this photo and you’ll see the professionals agree with me:

Read a bit more about the wonderful race.