Vintage (pronounced vin-tij)
(1) The wine from a particular harvest or crop (usually a
season).
(2) Of wine, the product of a season of outstanding
quality (labeled by calendar year)
(3) The annual produce of the grape harvest, especially
with reference to the wine obtained (technically also recorded as the “yield of
grapes during one season”).
(4) The time of gathering grapes, or of winemaking.
(5) The act or process of producing wine; winemaking.
(6) The class of a dated object with reference to era of
production or use.
(7) A wine of a specified vintage:
(8) Attributively, a subset of something, representing often
the most memorable or highest quality items produced (although it can apply to
all associated with the designated era) such as vintage cars, vintage dresses
et al. Sometimes, what constitutes a “vintage”
item (as opposed to a “veteran”, “antique” et al) is defined by various
institutions (vintage watches for example said to be those dated between 1870
and 1980).
(9) Attributively, something old-fashioned or obsolete.
(10) Attributively, something the being the best of its
kind.
1400-1450: From the Middle English vendage & vyndage, from the Anglo-Norman vendenge, from vinter, from the Old French vendage & vendenge (vine-harvest, yield from a vineyard (and cognate with the French vendange)), from the Latin vindēmia (a harvest of grapes, vintage), the construct being vīn(um) (grape; wine) + dēmō (take off or away, remove), the construct being de (of; from, away from) + (e)mō (acquire, obtain). A number of European languages including Spanish, Polish and (surprisingly) France adopted “vintage from English”. Vintage is a noun, verb & adjective, vintager is a noun, vintagey is (a non-standard) adjective and vintaged & vintaging are verbs; the noun plural is vintages.
The meaning shifted to “age or year of a particular wine” after 1745 with the general adjectival sense of “being of an earlier time” emerging in the early 1880s. In the business of winemaking, the notion of “vintages” came in the twentieth century to become elastic, the term not of necessity misleading, just one which needed to be understood. Originally, a vintage was one wine, produced with grapes grown and harvested in the one season and that system is still used but the word has long been used also as a label to denote “something of a superior quality”. The taste of wine being a subjective thing however and something the industry (often in the small print or with a “NV” added) markets as “non-vintage” may by many buyers be preferred to a “vintage” because the “un-vintaged” drop might be a blend of wine from several years; something routinely done to ensure a particular product tastes much the same from year to year. Even then, while the regulatory environments in many jurisdictions do specify that to qualify as a “vintage”, the fluid in the bottle must contain a minimum volume from the year on the label but the “foreign” content can be as high as a quarter and according to EU regulators, in some places special exemptions have been granted permitting a 50/50 split. The use also proved attractive to others and there are many “vintage” cheeses and other foodstuffs, the word in this context meaning little more than being sold at a higher price.
“Vintage” has been used of cars since 1928 but in the post-war years when
the idea of cars as collectables coalesced, in various places categories were
created and while somewhat arbitrary, the cut-off points between one era and
another tended to reflect the existence of something significant which (at
least for the majority of the vehicles involved) made them in some way identifiably
different from what came before. The
terms vary: The most evocative is the “brass era” used in the US and it covers essentially
anything produced between the beginning of organized production in the mid
1890s and 1915, the name chosen because of the extensive use of brass for
fittings such as headlamp surrounds radiators and levers, the polished metal
lending the distinctiveness. The choice
of 1915 as the end of the brass era reflected the decline in the use of the
material as mass production made the use of other materials more attractive but
the main factor was that was the year Ford ceased use for the Model T, the car
which had for years dominated the market.
In the UK (and therefore throughout most of the old British Empire),
cars produced prior to 1919 were called “veteran” although there was for a time
a fashion to speak of them as “Edwardian, a reference to the reign of Edward
VII (1841–1910; King of the UK & Emperor of India 1901-1910), the
imprecision in the dates accounted for by “Edwardian” being used as a
descriptor of the fashion, architecture etc of the era rather than the reign
proper. “Vintage” cars are those made
between 1919-1930 (or 1916-1930 in US use) and as an epoch that follows what
was at the time called “post-war” (between the end of the World War (1914-1918)
and the onset of the Great Depression.
Conveniently, it conforms (more or less also to the advances in
engineering and style which made the machines of the 1920s distinct from those
of the next decade.
So,
what in political science are the “inter-war years” are divided by the
collector car community into “vintage” and “pre-war”, the later epoch being
1930-1942 (US passenger car production ending early in 1942). Most of what was produced between 1945-1948
was a continuation of what was abandoned with the onset of hostilities but
nothing produced after 1945 is grouped with the “pre-war” cohort and the era is
generally called “post-war classics” and depending on who is writing the classification,
that period ends somewhere around 1960-1962, motoring’s beginning of “the
modern” although that’s obviously inexact, some strikingly modern stuff coming from
as early as the 1940s and some true relics still on sale as late as 1968. These definitions don’t apply to stuff made
outside the West and in places like the Warsaw Pact nations, the relics would
endure until the 1990s; nor do they include retro devices like the Morgan or
products of pure-functionalism like Jeeps and Land Rovers. In the modern age, the labeling has changed
and the tendency now is to use self-explanatory terms like “1970”s, “muscle car
era” etc.
Lindsay Lohan in a vintage Herve Leger bandage dress, New York, May 2007 (left) and in a vintage-style dress, New York, February 2017.
In fashion, “vintage” can mean a piece from decades ago or just a few seasons earlier. Vintage items can sometimes be genuine museum pieces or simply be “old” enough to have gained some sort of respectability. To be “vintage”, something needs to be the product of an acknowledged designer or manufacturer; items which have gained their notoriety for some other reason (who it’s associated with or the circumstances in which it was worn) can be newsworthy but they’re not “vintage”. The word is used also of style, a “vintage look” an indicating that an outfit is something which either recalls something associated with an older style or uses known motifs to achieve the effect. Depending on the implementation, the latter can also be treated as a “retro” whereas a “vintage look” is something where the relationship is more vague.
There is vintage and there is retro: Lindsay Lohan in an art deco mini-dress, said to be a vintage original, paired with a pair of retro Prada stilettos in burgundy.
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