‘Elegant, racy and classy’: describing wines through personification in Wine Spectator

It is well-established by research that discourse on wine is rich in figurative language, with processes of metonymization, metaphorization, and similes, often of a synesthetic quality, common in perceptual descriptions of wine (e.g Caballero 2007; Paradis and Eeg-Olofsson 2013; Creed and McIveen 2019). Among the multitude of metaphors employed in winespeak and its related genres, a ubiquitous one that has not received as much attention as others is personification, as wines are often described with human characteristics, This study builds on existing research to examine instances of personification in international discourse on wine in English, with the main aim of identifying which human characteristics are most frequently mapped onto wines. This study adopts a cognitive view of metaphors and combines corpus linguistics methodology with conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), for a bottom-up approach from data to theory. The data source is the online version of the American sector magazine Wine Spectator. One article included in the section “features” was selected for each issue published between 1994 and 2022, for a total of 388 texts and 882,550 words. Using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2014), nouns, adjectives and verbs will be extracted from the corpus and then manually filtered to identify elements pertaining to the human sphere. Concordances for the selected terms will then be analyzed to further filter the output and how these expressions contribute to construction of imagery about specific wines.