Representing Wine – Sensory Perceptions, Communication and Cultures

Wine culture is a complex phenomenon of increasing importance in modern society, and it combines the joys of wine appreciation with the frustrations of trying to verbally communicate sensory impressions. While wine appreciation is traditionally characterized as joyously convivial in its social dimension, sensory impressions remain eminently private. This contrast explains why the language used to represent wine, or winespeak, is the object of increasing crossdisciplinary interest.

This book analyzes the many different forms / many of the different forms of representing wine in present-day society, with a special emphasis on winespeak, starting from the premise that such study demands a genre approach to the many different communities involved in the wine world: producers/ critics/ merchants/ consumers. By combining the methodologies of Cognitive Linguistics and discourse analysis, the authors analyze extensive real-life corpora of wine reviews and multimodal artifacts (labels, advertisements, documentaries) to reflect on the many inherent difficulties but also to highlight the rich and creative figurative strategies employed to compensate for the absence of a proper wine jargon of a more unambiguous nature.