Varietal Is The Spice Of Life
When I started writing about wine professionally, an editor corrected my use of "varietal" as a noun, preferring "variety" instead. My computer's dictionary also considers "varietal" to be an adjective and not a noun.
But it's not hard to find the noun in the wine press. Farmers grow this or that varietal. Wine makers blend varietals to create a wine. I recently saw an example of the usage, and wondered about its evolution.
I wrote to Harvey Steiman at Wine Spectator, asking if the magazine allowed the noun and when it gained acceptance in the style guide. He answered with an explicit definition for the noun, one backed by Merriam-Webster and The Oxford Companion To Wine, which I think most writers forget: "A varietal wine is named after the predominant grape variety used to make it." If your local winery bottles a wine and calls it "Pinot Noir," then the wine itself is a varietal. It's not made from the Pinot Noir varietal.
But a bottle of red Burgundy, made with Pinot Noir, is not a varietal because the grape's name isn't on the label. It's the marketing of the wine that matters, not the ingredients. German wines and their kin are often varietals, and I suppose blanc de blancs transforms a bottle of Champagne into an all-Chardonnay varietal.
And of the generic usage, The Oxford Companion To Wine snaps, "The word is increasingly misused in place of vine variety."
When did the noun appear? Merriam-Webster dates it to 1950, but without a citation, while the Oxford English Dictionary lists John Storm's 1955 Invitation To Wines as the earliest instance. No matter who first moved "varietal" from an adjective to a noun, nobody argues about who brought the term to the public's ear. In the 1950s, says Steiman, The New Yorker ran articles in which wine expert Frank Schoonmaker "encouraged California wineries to quit marketing their better wines as 'Burgundy' and 'Chablis' and instead market them as 'varietals'." The argument was only new to the general public: He was saying what Maynard Amerine of UC Davis had said to California vintners since the 1930s.
Five decades later, that advice has split the world of wine. American and other New World consumers want to know the grapes in the bottle. If the wine isn't a varietal, we expect to find, somewhere on the label, the percentages of each grape in the blend. Meanwhile, France's wines have suffered in part because New World consumers who define their tastes by grape variety struggle when faced with most French labels. Wine drinkers who love Sauvignon Blanc don't want to learn that Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé will provide them with their favorite grape.
Be careful, then, when you change an adjective into a noun. You might just change the world.
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