wine-blue

English

Alternative forms

• wineblue, wine blue

Etymology

From wine +‎ blue.

Adjective

wine-blue (comparative more wine-blue, superlative most wine-blue)

1. Of a colour ranging between indigo and purple, like that of dark wine.
   • 1928, Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, London: The Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished as Orlando: A Biography (eBook no. 0200331h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, July 2015:

     We trudge on then by the moor path, to the high brow of the wine-blue purple-dark hill, and fling ourselves down there, and dream there and see there a grasshopper, carting back to his home in the hollow, a straw.

   • 1984, Christopher Pollnitz, Neither Nuked Nor Crucified and Other Poems, page 175:

     He'd love to sip a pint in a decent pub who never will, though down by wineblue Black Sea . . . ah!

   • 1988, E. C. Curtsinger, Towers, Crosses, page 255:

     Beside the wineblue sea, magnificent silver tanks big as a mountain gleamed in the sun.

   • 1997, Jeffrey Carson, Poems, 1974-1996, page 7:

     And the sea, as you row, allures like a woman:
     Rose at dawn, wineblue at noon, gold at dusk,
     More of a drug than lotos-syrup.

   • 2002, Astrid Sæther, Ibsen and the Arts, page 26:

     The sun that coloured Lissa's wineblue depths
     That tanned Porta Pia's red pikes
     And chased into the dungeons the creep of the Vatican […]

   • 2011, Henry Power, Homer's 'Odyssey':

     Now I have come in as you see, with my ship and companions sailing over the wine-blue water to men of alien language.

   wine-blue:  

Noun

wine-blue (countable and uncountable, plural wine-blues)

1. A colour between indigo and purple
   • 1885, The Popular Science Monthly, volume 26, page 676:

     Mulder and Maumené have given it the name of œnocyan or wine-blue, as its color, when neutral, is blue; the red color of genuine wines is due to the presence of tartaric and acetic acid acting upon the wine-blue.

   • 1964, The Limfjord, Its Towns and People, page 153:

     In this modestly sized canvas you find the wonderful blue colour of the Limfjord — a colour Homer called “wineblue” (oinops).