This is probably the most pressing issue of our time: Are wine varietals capitalized? The grammar/spelling geeks want to know!
As it turns out, most style manuals I have consulted state that wine varietals are not capitalized unless they are named after a place, which of course is a proper noun.
So zinfandel is zinfandel, but Champagne is Champagne. And Burgundy is Burgundy. Now all we have to do is figure out which ones are places. Shouldn’t be too hard.
Don’t worry, I won’t pester the board with corrections on this subject. It might be a pressing issue, but it is not my issue.
But I will never give up on the fact that zinfandels are not not zinfandel’s and wines are not wine’s. Someone must watch out for the abuse of the lowly apostrophe.
Phil Jones
Okay, you really want pedantic? Then shouldn’t that be “varieties”, not “varietals”?
Well, neither Champagne nor Burgundy are varieties.
-Al
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You know not what you’ve stepped into. Nothing gets people as hot under the collar as style rules, which are ultimately arbitrary.
The grape capitalization topic has been debated – ferociously – before. Those with an academic bent or an interest in botany insist that plant types require capitalization. Those reared on journalistic style rules prefer lower case.
I thought I summed up the correct take well in that thread, but it did not satisfy those wedded to caps:
As an editor, I can tell you there’s no right or wrong on this. It just depends on what style rules you adhere to. Most news styles (AP, NYT, WSJ) aim for simplicity, so they disfavor caps in general, just as they mandate using numerals for numbers from 10 on up. Other publications have more formal styles. The New Yorker, for instance, uses the somewhat out-of-fashion serial comma (i.e., before “and” in a string) and spells out even percentage numbers (e.g., “sixty-nine percent”). I don’t know what The New Yorker does with grape types, but I’d lay a bet it would use capitals.
Happily, our mother tongue remains quite democratic and anarchic.
There might be an exception for names like Muller-Thurgau that derive quite recently from proper names. But I’m not sure.
It has always bugged me that my Apple products (not to be confused with apple products like cider) insist on using autocorrect to capitalize the names of non-place varieties like riesling and chardonnay. Of course, Apple autocorrect is well known for being awful with apostrophes as well. Who the heck wrote that code anyway?
Interesting. This I don’t recall hearing before. Is this true in other scientific specialties? Do academic zoologists capitalize animal names like Tiger or Elephant? Do academic chemists capitalize Oxygen and Carbon?
Puzzled pedants want to know these things.
I do not think that is true for plants. A Douglas fir is a Douglas fir because David Douglas was a guy. But a western red cedar is not capitalized, according to my plant books.
A type of grape is a variety, but the wine made from that grape is a varietal.
In the other thread, it devolved to the point that the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants was cited in favor of caps.
Nope
And the Apple spellchecker insists on capitalizing grape types, which creates a strong presumption they should NOT be capped.
Indeed. WWSJD? Then use the Costanza “do the opposite” rule.
I don’t know what the duck you are talking about.
-sent from my iPhone
As soon as I read “varietals”, I started scrolling for this exact comment. ![[berserker.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8600bbd4810d342b8fbd4ffb62b4f0026275fd37.gif "berserker"){kind=small}
Thank you. Variety is a noun. Varietal is an adjective: of, relating to, or characterizing a variety.
The thread I clicked on after this one was Bird Migration Season, and sure enough, there is inconsistency with capitalization there too.
i wouldn’t Start making a big deal of capitols. Every one is just gonna say that your grammer was bad. Its a wine bored so theirs no need to spend thyme Correcting sentences.
I decided to look at the bottles in my cellar. Every single bottle that has the grape variety on the front label was capitalized. I looked at bottles from ; Alsace, Australia, Germany, New Zealand & USA.
It seems like the folks who make the wines and label them agree on this question…
Brodie