Have you ever heard of gueuze beers? Gotta love all those vowels! Apparently gueuze-style beers are becoming more popular here in the U.S. They are a Belgian style beer that was described in the Chicago Tribune as: "complex, funky idiosyncratic, multifaceted, delicious, pungent, satisfying, intense, crisp, dry, acidic, refreshing, tart, fruity, oaky, sour, musty, vinous, lemony, strawlike, cidery, grassy, haylike, and ideal for a warm summer night." Whew! That word has more meanings than our old favorite, set.

Wikipedia article on gueuze. As for all the "vowels", they are just part of the French penchant for bad orthography. It's pronounced /gø:z/: i.e., one vocalic phoneme and two consonants. The first u is there so that the preceding g is "hard" and the final e is silent. The central eu represents a single vowel sound which does not occur in English, but does in French and German. As for the description of gueuze, I don't think it's quite the same thing as a definition or what the word "means".

Gueuze is a lambic, so it's made with wild yeast. That is, the brewer doesn't add yeast, the beer is fermented spontaneously. Some lambics have fruit added, but gueuze has no fruit. I visited the Cantillon brewery in Brussels. They say they never clean their facility, because they don't want to disturb the wild yeast.

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It's pronounced /gø:z/

I wondered how it was pronounced. I hate reading about new words and not hearing them being pronounced.

I wondered how it was pronounced.

/ø/ is a sound that occurs in a bunch of European languages, but not English. It's the ö of German schön 'beautiful' and the ø in Danish øl 'beer; ale'.

There's a funny bit in the Chinese Movie, "Red Sorghum" depicting a frustrated brewer's technique for starting fermentation. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093206/ Superb cinematography too.