The Taste of Sustainability: A corpus-assisted Comparative ESP Analysis of Promotional Tasting Notes for Conventional and Alternative Wines

Can You Taste Sustainability? Based on the premise that the grandiloquent and frequently satirised language of wine tasting emerged from the globalising socio-economic dynamics of the 1970s, the aim of this volume is to investigate whether a recent market trend — namely, sustainable wine — has engendered an alternative wine-tasting discourse that aligns with the demands of environmentally conscious consumers. To accomplish this, a comparative analysis of two corpora of promotional wine-tasting notes for conventional and alternative wines from UK-based online wine stores was conducted, adopting an integrated approach that combines theories from Language for Specific Purposes, Critical Discourse Studies, and Ecolinguistics, while also relying on tools from Corpus Linguistics. Specifically, the corpora were profiled from lexical, rhetorical, and thematic perspectives. With regard to lexical profiling, the degree of specialisation and semantic variation across the corpora were assessed. From a rhetorical perspective, the analysis focused on quantifying instances of personification — a distinguishing feature of the conventional wine-tasting discourse — and exploring their implications in terms of both accessibility for non-experts and the reinforcement of ideologies and standards about ‘real’ people. Finally, thematically, the study investigated the representation of human-nature interactions, particularly in relation to the impact of cultivation practices on taste, a theme notably underrepresented in the conventional wine-tasting discourse. Findings suggest that the focus on sustainability in alternative wine descriptions may be responsible for the despecialisation of the genre of the tasting note; indeed, descriptions for alternative wines show a lesser emphasis on the tasting dimension and a greater emphasis on the environment and cultivation practices. At the same time, however, the trend of personifying wines to increase their appeal appears to have been applied uniformly when describing alternative wines, with little emphasis on differentiating them from their conventional counterparts. After setting the context for the research, Chapter 1 outlines the distinctive features of the conventional wine-tasting language. Chapter 2 defines sustainability, ecology, and alternative wines, while elucidating their distinctions. Chapter 3 focuses on Ecolinguistics and Corpus-assisted Critical Specialised Discourse Studies (CACSDS). Chapter 4 introduces the corpora and the method. Chapter 5 presents the three steps of the analysis. Finally, the concluding section encapsulates the main findings, avenues for future research, and limitations.