How to Pronounce Wine Grapes: 116 Underdog Names, Said Out Loud

The grape you cannot pronounce is usually the one worth buying.

That is not a slogan, it is a pricing fact. A name a shopper can say gets asked for by name, and a name that gets asked for carries a premium. The awkward ones sit on the shelf priced to move, doing nothing wrong except being unfamiliar in the mouth. Every syllable you learn is a discount you unlock.

So here are 116 of them, with the phonetics, grouped by the language that governs them. Learn one language's rules and you can say the next grape in it without looking anything up.

Say it wrong and order it anyway

Before the list, the thing nobody tells you: mispronouncing a grape has never once stopped a bottle from being sold.

Point at the shelf. Say your best attempt. A good merchant will say it back to you correctly without making a moment of it, and a bad one is telling you something useful about where not to shop. English drinkers spent a generation mangling Gewürztraminer and bought it anyway, and nobody now thinks twice about Sauvignon. Familiarity did that work, not difficulty. These names are only hard because they are early.

The list below is for the second problem, which is real: a grape you cannot say is a grape you cannot ask for twice.

The rules, by language

Most of the phonetics below stop being necessary once you know the pattern behind them.

Italian. Every written vowel gets said, including the last one. C before e or i is ch; ch is a hard k, so Schiava is skee-AH-vah. Gli is ly, gn is ny, and doubled consonants are held slightly longer than feels natural.

Greek. Transliterated names keep their own stress, and it lands later than an English speaker expects. An initial X is ks. Ch is a dry throat-clearing h.

Portuguese. An unstressed final -o drifts to oo, so Verdelho is vair-DELL-yoo. Nasal -ão is roughly own said through the nose. Lh is ly, nh is ny, and s before a consonant or at the end of a word goes sh in Portugal.

Spanish, Catalan and Basque. Ll is a y, j is a throat-scraped h, and z is a lisped th in Castilian but a plain s through most of the Spanish-speaking world. Catalan uses x for sh, and the raised dot in Xarel·lo simply holds the l a beat longer.

French. Final consonants usually go unsaid, oi is wah, eau is oh, and the nasal vowels have no English equivalent worth chasing.

German and Austrian. W is v, v is f, z is ts, ei is eye, and ä sits between the vowels in bed and bad.

Hungarian. Stress is always on the first syllable, without exception. S is sh and sz is s, which is the opposite of what English instinct suggests.

Georgian. The consonant clusters are not typos. Mtsvane opens with three consonants and expects you to say all of them.

Balkan and Adriatic. Š is sh, c is ts, and j is y.

The list

Italian (39)

Greek (10)

Portuguese (14)

Spanish, Catalan and Basque (14)

French (11)

German and Austrian (6)

Hungarian (4)

Georgian (4)

Balkan and Adriatic (6)

Everywhere else (8)

Where these respellings stop being honest

Every line above is an approximation, and a few of them are a choice I made rather than a fact I found.

Mencía is the clearest case. I have it as men-THEE-ah, which is Castilian, and it is what you will hear in Bierzo where most of the good bottles come from. Cross into Galicia, or anywhere in Latin America, and the same grape is men-SEE-ah with no lisp at all. Neither is wrong. The file shows you one of them, and you should know that before you correct somebody.

The same caution applies more quietly everywhere else. English respelling has no letters for the Portuguese nasals in Vinhão or Castelão, none for the French vowel in Mondeuse, none for the ejective consonants a Georgian speaker uses in Mtsvane. What you have above will get you understood. It will not get you mistaken for a local, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something.

One more thing before you trust the speaker button. Most of these clips are synthesised, not recorded. They use macOS system voices, one per language, so an Italian name is said by an Italian voice and a Greek one by a Greek voice, read slowly because a single unfamiliar word at conversational speed teaches you nothing.

Six are not. Rkatsiteli, Mtsvane, Kisi, Saperavi, Aleksandrouli and Mujuretuli were recorded for this site by Tamari Araviashvili, who is Georgian and writes about Georgian wine. Until she sent them, those names played an English voice reading a respelling, because macOS ships no Georgian one. They were the weakest clips here and now they are the only ones said by somebody who grew up with the words.

Seven still have that problem. Armenian, Albanian, Croatian and Macedonian get no macOS voice either, so Areni, Kallmet, Plavac Mali, Pošip, Vranec, Stanushina and Temjanika are read in English. If you speak one of those and would record five words for me, say so.

One more seam. The respelling printed beside each name is anglicised; the audio is native. On a few grapes the two disagree audibly, and where they do, trust the voice. On the Georgian names the voice is a Georgian.

Start with one you can now say

Reading a name is not the same as drinking it. Two of these are worth ordering tonight, and both are grapes that reward the Barolo and Cabernet money you were about to spend elsewhere.

Xinomavro, ksee-NOH-mah-vroh, is the one to start with. Thymiopoulos Young Vines Xinomavro is the softest entry into a grape that can be austere, and the Kir-Yianni Ramnista is where it gets serious.

Aglianico, ah-LYAH-nee-koh, is the other. Grifalco Aglianico del Vulture Gricos comes from a family that moved south from Tuscany specifically to farm it.

If you would rather browse than be told, the wider Xinomavro shelf is here.

Disclosure: some links here are affiliate links — if you buy through them I may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Learn more You must be 21+ to buy alcohol in the United States.Wine.com is the seller: they take the payment, ship the bottle and handle returns, and what's available depends on the state you pick at checkout. I never see your order.

Prices move constantly, so I have deliberately not quoted any above. Check before you buy.

Then go deeper

Every grape in the tables links to its own guide: what it tastes like, where it grows, the famous bottle it stands in for, and where to find it. The Underdog 101 is the shortlist of the ones I think matter most, and it is open for votes.

You are welcome to keep saying them wrong. The wine does not mind.