Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Drinks with friends yesterday, at Café Renzo (where Niebaum-Coppola — yes, that Coppola — used to be). On the table was a flyer for a cognac:

LOUIS XIII is a blend of 1,200 eau-de-vie aged from 40 to 100 years, and created exclusively with grapes from Grande Champagne, the most prestigious region of Cognac.

$75 for half an ounce!

We were amused at the idea that blending 1,200 cognacs would result in something superior to any of them, or to a blend of a few carefully chosen ones. Presumably the blending of a great many cognacs is a selling point, along with the age of the contributors — snob appeal, to go along with the “exclusively” and the “most prestigious” in the flyer, plus the “eau-de-vie”.

[Note plural eau-de-vie, though eau is singular in French. So it’s a zero plural. And in fact, you can google up lots of occurrences of many eau de vie, alongside some for many eaux de vie.]

This entry was posted on June 3, 2011 at 9:45 am and is filed under Inflection, Language and food, Language in advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.