vintaging

Pluralvintagings

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of vintage.

   By late September the growers were vintaging the hillside rows one block at a time.

   The cooperative has been vintaging its members' wine in the same stone cellar for decades.

   Note

   The -ing form covers both halves of the work, picking the grapes and turning them into wine, and in either it takes an object: growers vintaging the hillside rows, a cooperative vintaging its members' wine. The object shows which job is meant: rows and vines for the harvest, wine for the cellar.

2. 2
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The act of harvesting grapes or of making wine from them.

   The estate's year turns on two great labors: the pruning in winter and the vintaging in autumn.

   Her paintings celebrate rural life, with its harvests and vintagings and village dances.

   Note

   As a noun it has a literary ring, and it counts readily: the plural vintagings appears in Jethro Bithell's Contemporary French Poetry (1912) and in Maxwell Gray's The World-mender (1916), where it sits in a list of "marryings and feastings, their vintagings and gossipings." It suits that kind of catalog of country life.

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