Bonjour Mary, Hello to all the Bat & wine amateurs,
MB> Thank you so very much for telling about this distinction. I am quite
MB> sure now that I have never tasted claret.
I'm sorry to interfere in such a gastronomical and oenological (*)
discussion (I love this beta-tester list and its huge variety of
technical themes :-) but I'm afraid that none of the previous
explanations was entirely right (well, they weren't entirely wrong
either, just a little bit imprecise):
It is correct that the English word "claret" comes from the French
"clairet". In the UK, at least, "Claret" simply means any red Bordeaux
wine: in "A Case of identity", Sherlock Holmes explains that Mr.
Windibank, a character of the story, "travels for Westhouse & Marbank,
the great claret importers of Fenchurch Street" and therefore has to
live most of the year in Bordeaux.
The word clairet was used in the XIIth century in Aquitaine (the
region around Bordeaux) to designate the red wine there because of its
shortened fermentation process. When Duchess Aliénor d'Aquitaine
married in second wedding Henry Plantagenet, the word crossed the
Channel with Henry becoming King of England. After these times - when
England owned a quarter of France (**) - the fermentation process
evolved and Bordeaux red became the full-bodied deep-coloured wine we
actually know; but the word "claret" remained until nowadays.
"Clairet", by the way, is still used (though not really popular
anymore) in France to mean any light red wine from any region.
Kind regards
Francis, the Frog
(*) don't bother looking for that word into your Concise Oxford dic,
it's a neologism.
(**) or when South-West France possessed England, depending on the
point of view :-)
--
FRANCIS J. SEGOND
Webpage: http://faustroll.net, http://butsu.org
PGP-Key: http://www.segond.de/pubkey/segond.asc
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