Wine discourse in the French language

Abstract

The growth of the wine industry and the consideration of wine as a cultural sign explain the development of oenology and the emergence of wine schools and courses, publications, online forums and wine-tourist companies worldwide. All these factors have led to the development of a new genre, wine discourse. The language of wine has been the subject of linguistic research in recent years (Châtelain-Courtois 1984; Robinson 1999; Goded and Varela 2008). Some studies have given evidence of the heavy presence of metaphor in English and French wine discourse (Coutier 1994; Caballero and Suárez-Toste 2008). The aim of the present article is twofold: first, to explore the French vocabulary of wine; second, to provide a corpus-based analysis of the range of metaphors found in French specialized books and magazines which aim to describe various aspects of wine (colour, aroma, flavor, length). The study is undertaken from the perspective of cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 2006).