This was supposed to be an American word to us instead of calling these blends “Bordeaux blends.” But it didn’t really catch on, and as you noted, the majority of people seem to assume that the pronunciation should be French-ish, and then everyone feels awkward about it.
What has mostly happened in practice is wineries using “the important-sounding big word” to signal a meritage / Bordeaux blend. Symmetry, Insignia, Elevage, Tapestry, etc.
Also, these blends are on the rise, because (1) merlot quality in Napa and Washington is high, but (2) customers don’t buy merlot or at least value it at high price points, and so (3) a mostly-merlot blend that’s marketed as a meritage has a better chance of selling and at a higher price point. Shafer has just rebranded its merlot as TD-9, for example.
I’m digressing, but what the hell.
By the way, I love pronunciation threads. It’s one of the best things we do on here, since not knowing how to pronounce things can be a significant impediment to good conversation about wines.
Very good point and I strongly agree from personal experience trying to learn a couple of foreign languages as an adult. The sounds in the foreign language that “don’t exist” in my version of English are really the biggest-hurdles. Once these new sounds are at least semi-mastered, fluency accelerates.
On the broader subject of pronunciation, being brought up around Boston, I am sure we don’t even have to leave the English language to have pronunciation issues.
Virtually any linguist would distinguish among the vowel sound in pop as pronounced by someone from the Bronx, someone from Georgia, someone from Ohio and someone from London. Some of those distinctions would be more evident to an American ear than the differences between the vowel sound in pop as he or she pronounced it and pape as pronounced by a French speaker from, let us say, the Loire, where 19th century mythology had it, people spoke the “purest” French.
The Boston accent is useful, actually, since its broader aspects are fairly easy to imitate. I used to use the phrase “park the car in Harvard yard,” with the Boston accent, to get people to make what’s known as the Intermediate A sound.
No argument, there are many variations on all sorts of accents. It didn’t decrease the efficacy of that trick with my students.
Tying back to my original point, though, unless you study these things or have a talent for it, you may not be able to distinguish. Thus one of the difficulties in reproducing unfamiliar sounds - the ear, in addition to the mouth.
On the radio the other day I heard a woman newscaster talking about a house police had raided where they found a large “cachet” of weapons.
One of the bad things in English is that we like to drop French words into the mix. Those are supposed to make us seem more sophisticated. Unless we mispronounce them as we inevitably do!
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