ingenious and laborious work done at Montpellier on the degree of polymerization (DP) that exists in grape skins and seeds. But these polymers are unlike those we are trying to build in finished wine. As soon as they hit the highly acidic grape juice, they break down into monomers, which collect into colloids, later reassembling into wine polymers through a variety of pathways. Anything we might learn about grape tannin polymerization is lost in the chaos of fermentation. Over months and years, these monomers reassemble like Lego blocks, forming two kinds of permanent chains (nonoxidative and
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