I’m a home winemaker and in a book I have called Post Modern Winemaking there’s some details regarding the chemical reaction that polymerizes tannins in red wine. For the nerds, it’s called the vicinal diphenol cascade ????.

I was just sharing my curiosity in whether this would be a good reference in deciding a cellaring temp for red wines. It’s a pretty tight temperature band. I’m sure there’s other considerations to be made in the cellaring temp such as yeast left in the bottle, other oxidation reactions, and more, so it’s hard to say this is truly the way to go for sure. Tannin polymerization in most cases will have mostly happened before bottling, but perhaps they go through other combinations slowly over time, even after polymerization.

The sparknotes of the reaction is that single tannin monomers bond together in the presence of oxygen and can be terminated on either end by anthocyanins. The book suggests that tannin polymers in lengths of 4-7 monomers is ideal. This is definitely nerdier than I initially intended for this post, but I figured some in this crowd may be interested.