WINE AND THE DICTIONARY

How much can lexicographers teach the curious about wine, wonders Tim James

I  remember in a forlorn and thankfully long-gone adolescence seeking in the dictionary answers to my urgent questions about the Mysteries of Life. That is, I would look up various naughty and biological words – seldom to much real satisfaction.

Having got my priorities right after reaching middle-age, I wondered if a dictionary could be of much help to someone wanting to learn about wine, that other great source of sensual pleasure? I decided to put it to the test by using fortified wines as a case study, given the European Union’s recent troublemaking over definitions of ‘port’ and ‘sherry’.

Which dictionary, then? English-speakers are confident that God’s home language is the same as theirs, and most would assume that if He needed to look up a word He would turn to the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED offers further reassurance in that one imagines those Oxford dons turning from their labours amongst the high-piled words to the splendid resources of college cellars – they would know a thing or two more about wine than, say, a puritanical American. The two hefty volumes of the Shorter OED (1993 edition) should serve my purpose.

To start at the basics, the relevant application of ‘fortification’ in English is surprisingly recent: the late nineteenth century, we are told. It is ‘the strengthening of wine with alcohol, esp. a spirit’, which is valid but not hugely informative – it doesn’t even tell us that port is fortified during fermentation, while sherry receives its dose of spirit only once it has fermented dry.

The European Commissioners would be pleased, however, with the definition of port as: ‘A strong sweet dark-red (occas. brown or white) fortified wine of Portugal’. Not of South Africa or Australia as well, one notes. Cross-references to ‘ruby port, tawny port, etc’ lead to fairly unexceptional and accurate definitions of those styles, although their is no entry for colheita, the admittedly rare vintage-dated tawny. So, our Oxfordians know their port, as is to be expected from people who would provoke sneers at High Table by passing the stuff in the incorrect direction.

Less pleasing to the bureaucrats of Brussels would be the note on sherry: ‘A fortified white wine orig. from S. Spain, drunk esp. as an appetizer.’ Only ‘orig.’ from S. Spain! Is this implied generosity about which countries can produce sherry simply British patriotism? It was the Brits who long held out against Spanish claims for exclusive proprietorship of the word – not to protect the Cape’s industry but their own appalling ‘British Sherry’, made from imported grape-concentrate. In fact, however, the SOED is generally lax about restricting wine to its original appellations, as I discovered when moving somewhat beyond my original brief: burgundy, for example, in addition to being, well, burgundy, can also be a ‘similar wine from other countries’; and champagne is ‘a naturally sparkling wine from Champagne or elsewhere’.

Back to sherry. The English word comes, of course, from the pronunciation of Xeres (now Jerez, the town at the heart of the eponymous region in Andalusia), but, rather fascinatingly, it would seem that the archaic anglicisation, ‘sherris’, at some stage lost its final ‘s’ because the stupid English interpreted it as a plural – two sherris, one sherry, they apparently concluded.

Many of the sherry styles are recorded. The definition of fino is adequate as superficial description, but does not mentioning the crucial aspect of flor (the creamy layer of yeast that is responsible for its character), although flor, given in italics to indicate that the dictionary-makers regard it as still a foreign word, does get its own accurate entry. The equally crucial absence of flor is not mentioned for oloroso (Spanish for fragrant), which is not, however, a ‘heavy, dark, medium-sweet sherry’, certainly not in its original and finest form, where it is as dry as a bone. An admittedly common error, this, but the Oxfordians are no less to be forgiven.

Of South African concern, jerepigo is listed as ‘a sweet fortified wine’, with the alternative spelling of –pico (but not –piko, which is certainly commoner on labels). Learning about wine from the dictionary inevitably leads to etymological rather than vinicultural exploration, and it is interesting to note the word’s origins in Portuguese jeropiga: ‘A grape juice mixture added in the making of port’. Curiously, the English versions of this word are given as ‘geropiga’ and ‘jerupiga’; why was the easily pronounced original word altered before being accepted into the great body of English?

Another inexplicable curiosity is why sherry and port have no capital letters while madeira, to aficionados the greatest of all fortified wines, appears in the dictionary fully armed with M. This discrepancy is general: Rioja and Bordeaux are also capitalised, for example, burgundy and hermitage not. It is most disconcerting to find traces of mere human inconsistency in the OED.

As to grape varieties, the dictionary-makers have been extremely lax. The great sherry variety palomino is unrecognised, as are the port grapes: touriga nacional, tinta barocca (as we spell it in South Africa – elsewhere it is ‘barroca’), etc.

In conclusion, it is a somewhat frustrating, unrecommendable experience, trying to learn about wine from the dictionary – although its inadequacies are not surprising except to those who really believe that the OED enshrines all the words used in the language and defines them all in a way that specialists would deem adequate. There are better ways to learn. Which, in a different sphere of research, I realised as long ago as my teens.

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