I haven’t reminded you for a while that I recently released a book on the etymology of wine words. The word coffee gives me another chance.

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A blogger named Joe Roberts reviewed the book and began by trashing the sales pitch on the back cover. It reads:  “A stimulant at dinners, wine tastings and cocktail parties. Plus, as a gift, this book makes an excellent accompaniment to a housewarming bottle.”

He said you can say the same thing about marijuana or Viagra.

Lucky for me he then turns around and claims the book is “an absolute joy to page through.”

I can only hope the book’s sales amount to a fraction of those for marijuana and Viagra.

Whatever you’ve been enjoying the night before coffee comes as a welcome pick-me-up the morning after and the reason it merits this vineyard diversion is that the etymology of the word coffee is thought to be tied to wine.

One theory on why coffee is called coffee is that the bean may have first grown wild in an area called Kaffa in Ethiopia. But The Oxford English Dictionary explains that this is probably a coincidence. There does not seem to be any documentary evidence supporting this origin and besides, in the region of Kaffa the name for the plant that produces coffee, and the berry produced by the plant is bunn, not any word that sounds like other coffee related words.

Coffee, the drink, landed on Europe in the 1600s and English likely picked up the name for the stuff from Italian.

Before that the word is believed to have come from Arabic, although Beyond Arabic, the etymology gets hazy.

Lexicographers have theorized that the word originally came from the root word qahiya, meaning “to be without appetite” and designated a type of wine.

Addendum: Margaret sent me this link to Coffee – The Wine of Islam.