Meritage
As California’s wine industry matured through the 1970s and the French became increasingly protective of their regional names for wines, a movement started to give a new generic name for the classic Bordeaux blend (cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, malbec, petit verdot, or any combination thereof). According to Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine, the name meritage was selected after a competition run by the Los Angeles Times.
Meritage is meant to rhyme with “heritage”, and generally does in the United States. In Canada, however, where the name has also been adopted, it tends to rhyme with “Taj” as in Mahal. This is probably as a result of the combination of association of wine with France, the fact that every English Canadian has at least some knowledge of French, and the fact that that’s how French speakers would pronounce it.
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