Wine and tasting

The forty-seventh entry is venda na adega, and the building at the centre of it has travelled further than any bottle sold there. A adega comes from Latin apotheca, taken whole from the Greek apotheke, a place where things are put away — from apo, away, and tithenai, to put. Nothing in the word says wine; it says storeroom, and each language that inherited it chose what to keep inside. Portuguese rolled barrels in and kept a adega; Spanish did the same with bodega. Further east the storeroom filled with tools instead, which is bottega, the craftsman’s shop, and that branch came through Provençal into French and reached us as « boutique ». The learned form stayed with medicine: apothecarius was the man who kept the storeroom of drugs, and he is « apothecary », the word painted on shop fronts before « chemist » took over. Portuguese kept that branch as well, side by side with the first, in a botica and o boticário. One storeroom, and it ended up holding wine in Porto and medicine in London.