Towards the end of each year, Pantone announce their Color of the Year, and for 2015 this honour has been bestowed upon Pantone 18-1438 – named Marsala for descriptive and, potentially, ease-of-copywriting purposes.

The Pantone website describes the colour with words like robust, earthy, full-bodied, rich, elegant – borrowing many an adjective from a sommelier's handbook.

I don't know if it's just me but Marsala seems very 1970's. See what I mean?

It brings back childhood memories not because I used to drink marsala as a child (I didn't) but because I'd automatically call this colour 'maroon' – a word which as a 4-year old I simply could not pronounce. "Ra-moon." "Raaa-moooon!" Nope.

It's possibly a bit of a weird one for a 4-year old but I had a maroon coat that I loved showing-off, and my parents – sticklers for colour correctness – weren't about to let me call it 'reddish-brown'. (Mum worked in the Dulux paint lab before having me, so knew all the colours.)

Other than its retroness, another immediate reaction I had to this colour is that it's very much in the make-up department; show me a cosmetics counter without this exact shade of blusher, lipstick and nail polish.

But I understand the name Blusher wouldn't really cut it so, for what's essentially a wine-like colour, Marsala is as good a name as any. Especially as a similarly appropriate word is already widely associated with something else …