A missing word

From the blog of the rare books collection of the ETH Library, I just learnt that the word for the study and classification of grape species that I was looking for is “ampelography” (ampélographie in French).

(The relevance of this word to my daily life is that the computers on my home network are named after grapes; red grapes are reserved for desktops and white for laptops.)

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Kowalski

I am a professor of mathematics at ETH Zürich since 2008.

2 thoughts on “A missing word”

  1. I presume you cycle through different varietals when you replace your computers; what are you on now? I’ve often used my favoured wine regions to name my computers. My current desktop at work is named Petit Chablis (my pocket money doesn’t extend far enough to drink Montrachets).

    1. I actually just glance through the Wikepedia lists of grape species whenever a new computer comes along, and pick whichever seems most euphonious at the time. (For a while I had a computer named “zeta” because there is a white grape of that name…)

      The current names in use on my own computers are “ondenc” and “lauzet”…

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