Huet and nonstandard French

S

Sharon Bowman

Sharon Bowman
A bottle opened in the cellar yesterday brought to a head my perplexity with certain nomenclatures in use at the Domaine Huet (or Huët, as some put it (though not them)) in France's Loire Valley appellation Vouvray.

"Début Pressée" was the descriptor on yesterday's bottle.

There also exists a bottling they make called "1ère Trie."

Why "pressée"? What feminine thing was pressed? It doesn't match up to anything grammatical or syntactical that I can think of.

And why "trie" in the feminine? The word is "tri." Why not "1er Tri"?

Are they just trying to be Ye Olde, or is there some reason I miss?
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Huet and nonstandard FrenchA bottle opened in the cellar yesterday brought to a head my perplexity with certain nomenclatures in use at the Domaine Huet (or Huët, as some put it (though not them)) in France's Loire Valley appellation Vouvray.

"Début Pressée" was the descriptor on yesterday's bottle.

There also exists a bottling they make called "1ère Trie."

Why "pressée"? What feminine thing was pressed? It doesn't match up to anything grammatical or syntactical that I can think of.

And why "trie" in the feminine? The word is "tri." Why not "1er Tri"?

Are they just trying to be Ye Olde, or is there some reason I miss?
Click to expand...

I asked Julien Barrot why Pure wasn't masculine, given that both vin and grenache are, and he told me that cuvée is feminine. That would apply to both Pressée and Trie. Since, at least down here, cuvée is still a word generally used to designate a batch rather than to designate something set aside to be charged more for (though that usage of course exists), maybe that's the noun being modified.
 
These types of M/F, plural/singular, etc. pop up all the time in France and Germany. Not so much, in my experience, in Italy.
 
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