I love a good mispelling. Typos, to, which explains my affection for Saint-Véran.
That cheap pie you just ate? It wasn’t real pumpkin:
Food allergies? Avoid the knitted hats and scarves at the company holiday bazaar. They’ve been in contact with nuts:
Looking for Dad? Check the adults-only aisle at the home improvement store:
My first memory of misspelling is from spelling class in the fifth grade. I misspelled “stripped.” I had left off the second P and spelled “striped” instead.
I’ll never do THAT again.
The substitute teacher on that day read me the riot act. How could I, she wondered, have possibly confused “stripped” and “striped,” knowing that Jesus had been two-p stripped of his garments just before his crucifixion? It was a Catholic school, the Tenth Station of the Cross, and I was an altar boy for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake.
She might have also been the one who told us fifth graders that we wouldn’t go to Hell if we died wearing a devotional scapular. We never got practical tips like that on how to avert eternal damnation from our usual teachers. Or from the nuns. Or the priests. They never threw themselves into their teaching like the substitutes. Probably because they didn’t have to.
About Saint-Véran, the delightful, unoaked AOC white wine from southern Burgundy: The real village of Saint-Véran is high up in the French Alps, on the border with Italy. It is nowhere near the vineyards southwest of Mâcon where they grow the Chardonnay grapes to make the wine.
In non-technical wine geographical terms, Saint-Véran is the bread in the Pouilly-Fuissé sandwich. The SV vineyards border the PF ones on the north and the south.
The town near the vineyards is Saint-Vérand. Apparently, the scribe who inscribed the wine on France’s AOC list of wine heritage in the early 1970s had inadvertently left off the final letter D, transforming Saint-Vérand into Saint-Véran. Some say that the misspelling was intentional and that Saint-Véran was the village’s ancient name, but that explanation doesn’t square with the Institut national de l’origine et de la qualité‘s strict AOC nomenclature.
In either case, the misspelling is a memorable talking point, especially for the growers and knowers saddled with the task of distinguishing Saint-Véran from the more than 25 AOC-certified white wines, mostly chardonnays, produced in Burgundy.
I don’t know how to end this one, so I’ll conclude by saying that the Drouhin Saint-Véran is available at Spirits of Mount Vernon in Baltimore. Don’t worry about the screwtop. CLINK!
I was talking about the wine 