Wine and tasting

La vente en primeur came into English whole, as « en primeur », a label for buying a wine that is still lying in cask. In French it is not a label at all, because la primeur is an ordinary noun meaning earliness, the quality of coming first, and it does three jobs. At the market it is early produce: les primeurs are the first vegetables of the season, and un marchand de primeurs is a greengrocer, which is the sense a French reader meets most often. In the newspaper it is the scoop: avoir la primeur d’une nouvelle is to be the first person told, and a paper that a eu la primeur de l’information got there ahead of the others. And in the cellar it is this sale, early in exactly the same way, because the money arrives before the wine does. English borrowed the third sense and left the other two behind, so the phrase is opaque here and transparent there. Knowing what it is made of also explains un vin primeur, a wine released within weeks of the harvest and drunk while it is still new.