Flunec is an also-ran among fictional wines. Jonathan Swift wrote, in Gulliver’s Travels,
I had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort,) which is very diuretic.
Glimigrim, the more esteemed wine of the Lilliputians, has gone on to very minor fame and fortune as a word (there’s a real wine named for it), but flunec, the wine of the Blefuscudians, has not. Leaving aside what the wine is used for in the story, and leaving aside too the interesting ramifications of preferring – by satirical analogy – early eighteenth-century English wines to those of France, I will merely observe that the drug company Nortech missed a lovely opportunity when it named an anti-fungal cream (and not a diuretic) Flunec.
© S. Worthen 2009