A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1039 entries
beeswing
The fine, translucent, scale-like crust that forms in port and other long-bottled wines — crystals of potassium bitartrate that come out of solution over years and lift off the glass in flakes when the bottle is disturbed. It is a sign of age rather than a fault, and it is the reason old port is decanted slowly and held to a candle.
Etymology
Simply bee plus wing, for what the flakes look like held to the light: thin, veined, iridescent, weightless. English has used a bee’s wing since at least the 1590s as the standard measure of something impossibly fine, so the wine sense is a specialized use of a much older comparison.