Posted on 26/01/2021
A few wine-related expressions explained and contextualized!
Here, we've got into the habit of focusing on wine and language. In fact, they're inseparable, both literally and figuratively, since without the tongue, wine loses all its taste! So let's take a look at some expressions that borrow from wine's power to clarify things.
Here are five of the most popular in France!
In vino veritas
Here in its Latin form, I think it exists in every dialect across the vast world. The observation is implacable: when we drink too much wine, we say what's in our hearts, our truth. With age, however, we can qualify this statement by saying that sometimes a brain clouded by alcohol is confused, and the words we say distort our thoughts. Conclusion: it's wise to enjoy wine without abusing it!
Drink the chalice to the dregs
My nephew recently asked me to explain this expression he'd heard a hundred times, shaking his head to hide his incomprehension. "Jeanne, with her divorce and confinement, you could say she's drunk the chalice to the dregs!"
It's simply living an unhappy experience to the end. In the old days, at Mass, we drank Christ's blood from a chalice, all of it, including the deposit (lees)!
Putting water in your wine
Another family anecdote, if I may: my mother, who grew up on a farm in the Périgord region, kept this habit of cutting her wine with a little water all her life. In the old days, wine was thicker, and that's all it took to keep us from getting sick. So it's a way of softening things, of compromising.
Pour a pot of wine
There's little suspense about the meaning of this one, so widespread is it in newspapers, on the radio, on television... But where does it come from? The Middle Ages. In those days, it was understood that when you paid someone, they went out and bought wine with the money (in other words, a tip). So sometimes you paid him directly with a pot full of wine.
When the wine is drawn, you have to drink it!
In a vineyard, when wine is bottled, it is "drawn off". Ordinary people have seized on this jargon to construct an expression that literally means "once you've poured the wine, you have to drink it": once you've started something, you finish it!
