G. Brock

@Kevin I too stumbled on "sleeken" (which my autocorrect also just now stumbled on, trying to "correct" it to "sleeker"), and yet it's one of those words whose meaning, even if we've never heard it used, is immediately clear. It made me curious to see if it had ever actually been used in literature, and I found only a single example (a hapax?), from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "A Portrait": "And all voices that address her Soften, sleeken every word As if speaking to a bird." But it's a lovely example, and I expect most readers of that poem found that it felt natural and apt there, in part no doubt because it's paired with "soften," a very common word that uses the same suffix in the same way.

@sotto voce This is just a botched clue imo. The "e" signals an Italian answer, and instead we get a Spanish answer (or maybe an English answer). Could have easily been clued as "Riojas y Cavas," or even "Barolos y Brunellos" -- but "Barolos e Brunellos" is just nonsense. (Unless the clue and answer are in the interlingua language.)