Saturday, February 26, 2005

How Do You Say That? (billy)

Though the World Wide Web abounds with wine pronunciations and pronunciation guides, we wouldn't be complete unless we posted our $.02. Wine is an ancient and cosmopolitan beverage. Wine comes from nearly every country in the world and is produced on every continent except Antarctica (I think. If you know of a novel Antarctic "ice wine" let us know). Consequently, there are many many languages, cultures, and regional colloquialisms that inform everything from the name of the wine to the grape varietal, to the name of the vineyard. No wonder it is a sometimes daunting task to simply speak the name of the wine you want.

To the reader who commented on how to pronounce the "Termes" in the excellent Numanthia Termes wine, I tried to find an MP3 or Wav file of it, but alas, to no avail.

Still, there are simply SCADS of websites with pronunciation guides and sound files so you can hear the wonderful wine names, varietals, regions, and vineyards spoken. Here are some of the best that I found. Enjoy them. Hopefully you'll learn something new.

Wine Lexicon Lots of wav files (no need to download - can play and hear them right from the web page)

French Wine Pronunciation Guide Lots of MP3 files of a sultry sounding French woman saying sultry sounding Wines. Play them over and over!

Dictionary Style Pronunciation Guide from the gang in Texas

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:44 AM

    Nice Post! Great idea...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just checked some of these sites out; Oustanding!

    ReplyDelete