On one of my first visits to the USA in the 1980s, I found myself standing at a bar in a university town in the Midwest waiting to order a glass of wine. Among other beverages, there was a choice of three types of wine, all dispensed from optics mounted on the wall behind the bar: Chablis, Riesling, and claret.
I asked the young woman who was serving at the bar for a glass of claret, making sure that I pronounced glass to rhyme with mass, having previously encountered difficulty when talking to people from her side of the Atlantic, who tended to interpret my normal south-of-England vowel sound in that word as if I was saying half.
Even so, she still did not succeed in understanding me. After several frustrating exchanges, I eventually had to point to what I wanted. She laughed and said, “Oh, you mean, cla-RAY!” I responded that, no, what I actually meant was CLAR-et.
She then explained, slowly and carefully to this moronic foreigner, that claret is a French word and should therefore be pronounced in the French manner – we were, after all, in a university town and she was probably a student.
I was about to embark on a response to the effect that it is not in fact a French word, when I was overcome by ennui (which really is a French word!), but gave up in order to rejoin my company and finally enjoy my hard-earned glass of red wine.
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I was indeed correct about the word claret – though in those pre-internet days, I did nip into the nearby library in order to check that I had remembered the details accurately.
Claret really is an English word, not French. The best French translation of English claret is probably vin rouge de Bordeaux.
It is true that the English term did originally come from French, where its etymon – its antecedent form – was clairet. But in Modern French, vin clairet refers to a particular light-coloured red wine. The word claret is first attested as having occurred in English in about 1700.
Speakers of American English, like the young woman behind the bar, typically pronounce French-origin words such as claret with the final t unsounded and stress on the final syllable; so ballet and beret are normally rendered in the USA as “bal-AY” and “burr-AY” respectively. But while these are genuinely French words, claret is not.
Claret is in fact a mainly British term that is used – without official approval from any internationally recognised viticultural body – to refer to red Bordeaux wines, which are mostly blends based on the Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grape varieties. It is sometimes also used to refer to Bordeaux-style red wines produced elsewhere, such as in the United States itself, which was no doubt the case in that Midwestern bar.
Originally, the term claret was used in medieval English to refer to a type of wine with an amber or reddish hue. In older French, clairet referred to a drink consisting of a mixture of wine, honey, and spices, sometimes also known in English as clary.
Merlot
The name of the dark red grape which produces merlot wine appears to derive from the French word merle “blackbird”, the connection presumably being that the dark colour of the grapes resembles the hue of the plumage of the male blackbird. There is also a tradition of merle being used to mean “blackbird” in Scots, particularly in verse: in Rabbie Burns’s poem “On the approach of Spring”, he writes that “the merle, in his noontide bower, makes woodland echoes ring…”.
