Since the age of 18, I've been fortunate enough to pick up a few languages: Catalan and Spanish of course, plus the ability to communicate relatively well in Italian and French. Interestingly, I can talk fairly fluently about wine in all of them. (On the other hand it's harder to talk about the net - the terminology is too anglo-centric).

But every now and then you get tripped up by a word: this week it was coupage, the French word for a blend. Or at least that's what I thought.

Much of wine terminology stems from the French, so when a blend in Catalan is a cupatge, and whilst cupaje is used less in Spanish , (probably a Catalan usage rather than the correct term) I was quite surprised when coupage in French turned out to be a fairly derogatory term. It turns out that, yes, it is a blend, but when referring to the "recipe" of a fine wine, the correct term should be assemblage. Seeing as the Catalan word cupatge probably comes from cup (pronounced coop), the old underground tanks where grapes fermented, maybe it does carry more of a "chuck everything together" implication, than a carefully selected blend.

No confusion in Italian: they call it a taglio instead...