Please click here for the updated glossary (March 21, 2019).

“It may all be summed up by saying with Seneca, and with Flaccus before him, that we must write just as the bees make honey, not keeping the flowers but turning them into a sweetness of our own, blending many very different flavors into one, which shall be unlike them all, and better.” Petrarch to Boccaccio, 1365 (photo snapped in August at the Ca’ del Bosco winery in Franciacorta).

“Such is the fate of hapless lexicography,” wrote the great 19th-century English lexicographer Samuel Johnson in the preface to his 1755 dictionary, “that not only darkness, but light, impedes and distresses it; things may be not only too little, but too much known, to be happily illustrated.”

I’ve been reminded of this all-too-true observation as I continue to expand my Italian wine terms glossary (see the updated and revised version below).

Many have written me expressing their support for the project while others have rightly pointed out oversights and errors.

Like translation, lexicography is an inexact science and I apologize for my inadvertences in the hope that the overarching spirit and intent of my work eclipse my shortcomings. But, alas, I am only human — all too human.

This most recent version includes revisions and notes from my friend Maurizio Gily, one of Italy’s greatest wine writers (imho) and consulting enologists.

Justifiably, he nudged me to revise my entries for giropoggio and ritocchino (see below). There are no precise English renderings of these terms (at least as far as I can find). But I did discover that ritocchino may have Tuscan origins and that it most probably derives from the Italian china (KEE-nah) or slope.

Another revision worth noting was suggested to me by both Maurizio and Finnish winemaker Jarkko Peränen who lives and works in Chianti Classico: alberello, which, as both of them correctly observed, should be rendered head-trained bush vines (see the revised entry below).

Not that it has any bearing here, but my research led me to this wonderful entry in UNESCO’s “intangible cultural heritage” list on the “head-trained bush vines” of Pantelleria (worth checking out).

As I continue to expand, revise, and edit the project, I encourage everyone in our community to offer suggestions, corrections, and observations. It is a work in fieri and its hypertextual nature is what makes it so valuable (for me personally and, I hope, for our community at large).

I only ask you to be gentle in your disapprobation for I am only a man of modest intellectual means who is trying to see through both the darkness and the light.

Post scriptum: a hand-list of sparkling wine terminology is also forthcoming.