Maybe you have heard of something called "grower Champagne?" It is champagne made by the very farmers that grow the grapes. What's the big deal? Well, lots of wine-savvy folks, like Alice Feiring, have a hard time understanding how you could even serve factory champagne. Factory champagnes (no need for me to name names- basically, if you've seen an advertisement, it's made by a factory) are often made with plenty of chemicals, marketing shtick and $$$. "Grower" champagne is more likely to be made using natural, environmentally friendly farming techniques and traditional methods. It almost always tastes better too. Now, if you can buy bubbles like this, you would probably want to drink normal wines of similiar quality. But how do you find them? People like Joe Dressner and Kermit Lynch have been importing them for a long time. Part of the problem is that noone knows exactly what to call them. "Grower wines" just doesn't have the same ring without the sophistication of champagne to lift it up. And your spell-check is likely to reject the term "winegrower." There is a solution- VINEAROON! According to Thomas Pinney, whose treatise on the history of wine in America is without peer, "Some words that were borrowed early from the French have not survived into modern English, evidently because the things they named no longer existed in England: vigneron (winegrower) and vynour (vine dresser) are instances.
What was true of the language in England was even truer of the language in the North American colonies. The English colonists came without a winegrowing tradition, and were, for centuries, unable to build one in the New World." Pinney continues, explaining the current state of english wine vocabulary, " French terms still felt to be alien but in fact used by writers in English include: appellation, brut, cave, cépage, chai, chambrer, chaptalization, climat, clos, cru, cuvage, cuvée, éleveur, marc, négoçiant, ordinaire, remuage, sec, sommelier, terroir, vigneron, vignoble . One of these terms, vigneron , was anglicized as vinearoon in the days of Shakespeare, but it did not survive long."
Let's bring it back. The modern anglicized version is vinaroon. Say it with me,"vin·a·roon" (vi-nə-ˈrün). People still grow their own grapes and make the wine themselves! Even though we speak english, we want to drink these wines. So, we must have a word. Next time you bring someone a bottle made by the same person who farms the grapes tell them it is "vinaroon wine." Unless you prefer to speak in affected french.