Gigondas, Montrachet, Pauillac: why wine names trip up French text-to-speech
Appellations, estates and regional cheeses are the words a wine site is judged on, and the words a synthetic voice gets wrong most often. Four recurring traps, the 41 wine and food entries we prepared and why none of them applies automatically, and how to fix pronunciation for your own catalogue.
Every wine merchant has met the customer who orders a bottle of "Mont-ra-chette" with total confidence. Nobody minds much in a shop. It is a different matter when the mispronunciation comes from your own website, read aloud by the audio version of your tasting notes, on the one word your reader came for. A listener who hears an appellation said wrong does not blame the software. They conclude that the site does not know its subject.
This is not just a problem for wine blogs. A French regional food shop, a tourist office describing its wine route, a food magazine, an importer's product pages: all of them write names whose local pronunciation has drifted a long way from their spelling.
Four traps that keep coming back
A synthetic voice reading a word it does not know falls back on the general rules of written French. Wine and food names were fixed by local usage long before modern spelling, and they still carry the marks. Most errors fall into four groups.
The final consonant that may or may not be sounded. In the southern Rhône, the final "s" is pronounced: Gigondas is "Ji-gon-dass", Vacqueyras is "Va-kè-rass", and the same goes for Cornas, Juliénas in Beaujolais and Moulis in the Médoc. In Burgundy, Montrachet drops its "t" twice, in "Mont" and at the end: "Mon-ra-ché". Nothing in the spelling tells a machine which habit applies.
The x that sounds like "ss". Aloxe-Corton is "A-losse", Auxey-Duresses is "Ossé". A voice reaches for the "ks" of "taxe". The same trap appears in town names such as Auxerre.
Silent letters inside the word. The "s" in Vosne-Romanée is silent ("Vône"). Pauillac is "Po-yak", where "au" is "o" and "ill" is "y". Beychevelle swallows its middle "e".
Words from other languages. The vocabulary of the cellar and the table is international. Alsace gives Gewurztraminer, with a hard "g" and a "w" said as "v". Italy gives Chianti ("Kian-ti"), Montepulciano ("Mon-té-poul-tcha-no") and Taleggio. Spain gives Tempranillo, whose "ll" is a "y". A French voice that reads them with French rules gets them wrong twice over: they sound neither French nor foreign.
What we prepared, and why it does not switch on by itself
Here is the verifiable part. Since late September 2026 we have kept a bank of difficult names, sorted by theme, for our French text-to-speech. The "Wine and food" theme holds 41 entries. Each gives the spelling we would hand to the voice engine, written in ordinary French letters rather than the phonetic alphabet (the engine reads letters, not IPA), plus the reason for the trap.
| Written | Reading spelling | The trap |
|---|---|---|
| Chassagne-Montrachet | Cha-sagne-Mon-ra-ché | Both t's in Montrachet are silent |
| Auxey-Duresses | Ossé-Du-rèss | The x in Auxey is "ss" |
| Cornas | Kor-nass | Final s is sounded |
| Blaye | Blaï | "aye" reads "aï" |
| Riquewihr | Rik-vir | Alsatian w is "v", h is silent |
| Heidsieck | Èd-sik | "ei" reads "è", "ie" reads "i" |
| Banyuls | Ba-gnulss | Catalan "ny" is "gn", "ls" sounded |
| Valpolicella | Val-po-li-tchè-la | Italian "ce" is "tché" |
| Albariño | Al-ba-ri-gno | ñ is "gn" |
| Maroilles | Ma-roil | "illes" reads "il" |
None of these entries applies to any customer's audio today simply because it sits in the bank. Each one is a proposal: it has to be listened to as the engine reads it unaided, then with the correction, and approved by ear before it joins the shared base. The reasoning is an asymmetry. A mistake in one customer's lexicon affects that customer, who will notice and fix it. A mistake in a shared base affects everyone, including accounts that have never opened the lexicon screen. A wrong shared base is worse than none.
Some names show why. Laguiole, the village that gave its name to a knife and a cheese, is "La-yol" locally and "La-gui-ole" almost everywhere else. That is an editorial choice, not a fact, and it belongs to the publisher.
The bank also refuses names that would otherwise fit. Cognac is on the list of excluded words. Lexicon matching ignores capital letters, so a rule written for the town would also rewrite "a cognac" on every product page. Sens, Nice and Orange are excluded for the same reason: a name that is spelled like an everyday word never goes into a shared base.
Fixing it for your own catalogue
The correction that settles the matter is yours, because only you know which names recur in your pages. Your account's pronunciation lexicon takes one entry per line in the form written = pronounced, in ordinary letters: Vacqueyras = Va-kè-rass, Cos d'Estournel = Koss dès-tour-nèl. It holds up to 200 entries, which covers the estates and appellations of a substantial cellar.
Three properties matter for a shop or a magazine. The rule applies to the whole word, regardless of capitals, on every audio produced afterwards. The engine receives the reading spelling, but the text shown with the player keeps the real one, so your readers never see "Po-yak" highlighted on screen. And it is a plain substitution rather than a model, so the same entry gives the same reading every time.
For names not yet in your lexicon, words whose pronunciation looks uncertain are flagged before the audio is read, so the choice is made once instead of fixed after a listener has heard it.
A practical way to start
Do not try to write a lexicon for the whole of French viticulture. Take the twenty names that appear most often on your site, produce one page that contains them, and listen. Note the ones that sound wrong. They are rarely the ones you would have guessed: a voice tuned for French reads many common names correctly and stumbles on cases nobody predicted. A lexicon built from what you hear is short and useful; one built from what you fear is long and full of entries that change nothing.
The same approach applies to product pages that mix prices, bottle sizes and vintages, covered in reading a product page aloud, and to regional place names from Brittany, the Basque Country or Alsace, covered in our article on regional names.
Give your articles a voice with WeDispatch
This blog is itself voiced by WeDispatch. Curious how it sounds on your content?
Book a demo