Wine communication in a global market: a study of metaphor through the genre of Australian wine reviews

This thesis is a report on wine communication focused on metaphoric language identified in the genre of wine reviews. Specifically, the research centred on Australian wine reviews written by Australian wine critics about Australian wines currently exported to the greater China region. In the genre of wine reviews, metaphoric expressions are frequently used to talk about wine (Caballero & Suárez-Toste, 2008). The thesis developed understanding of the influence of metaphoric language and its potential to constrain or motivate people’s sensory and affective responses to wine and highlighted the need to consider congruency of metaphoric language in terms of wine communication and education. The research was theoretically framed by the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and took a cognitive linguistic perspective to metaphor analysis (Croft & Cruse, 2004). Wine appreciation was argued to be a social event in contrast to an observational event. From this perspective, wine appreciation is concerned with influencing audience perceptions in contrast to a spontaneous commentary of an event. The thesis presents the findings of two qualitative studies that used a corpus approach to metaphor use and understanding in the genre of wine reviews. The investigation identified metaphoric expressions in Australian wine reviews and went on to explore their understanding and transfer by wine educators in Australia and China. Metaphor identification used the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (Steen et al., 2010) and the UCREL Semantic Annotation System (Archer et al., 2004) for semantic and conceptual analysis. Results indicated six underpinning metaphoric themes (i.e., AN OBJECT, A THREE DIMENSIONAL ARTEFACT, AN INSTITUTIONAL ARTEFACT, A TEXTILE, A LIVING ORGANISM, and A PERSON) of which spatial and temporal properties were often integrated. A comparison of wine educator responses to interpretation and transmission tasks showed that anthropomorphic metaphor (i.e., WINE IS A PERSON) tended to be conceptualized similarly by participants more often than other metaphoric themes. In conclusion, the cultural artefact of language used in the genre of wine reviews and the metaphoric potential of linguistic choices on sensory and affective perceptions indicates a need for the consideration of congruency when wine communication crosses cultural and linguistic borders.