You may have seen a brand of wine called “Inglenook.” You may have heard of Inglenook, California — which, by the way, is not where Inglenook Wine is produced. You may have heard of Inglenook, Pennsylvania, which also doesn’t produce any wine. There’s even a logic puzzle called “inglenook sidings;” the puzzle is to shuffle trains around among sidings that are barely long enough to fit them.
But none of that accounts for this passage from The Valley of Fear, a Sherlock Holmes story: “Finally he lit his pipe, and sitting in the inglenook of the old village inn he talked slowly and at random about his case, rather as one who thinks aloud than as one who makes a considered statement.”
Besides being a place name (Inglenook Wine is named after a place too; Inglenook Farm, where their first grapes were grown), an “inglenook” is exactly what it says — a nook beside an ingle. Admittedly, that’s not particularly helpful since the word “ingle” pretty much disappeared in the late 1800s. What it meant, though, was either the hearth and chimney system in a house (mostly prior to central heating), or the fire in that same hearth.
“Ingle” probably came from the Gaelic word “aingeal,” which means fire or light. And a “nook” is a corner or recess in a room. And there you have “inglenook.” It’s probably a warm, cozy place to be, particularly in cold weather when your home fire is burning. It’s the warm and cozy aspect of it that probably led to it being used as a name for a place to live where settlers hoped for comfort.
That was the idea in 1871 when William Watson bought a farm in Rutherford, California, renamed it “Inglenook,” and planted grapes. It was an early instance of someone from one profession looking for a more attractive pursuit in farming (and winemaking). Before he started a vineyard he had managed a bank. As for Inglenook wine having anything to do with being warm and cozy, it might, but you’d have to ask somebody who’s tried it.
