How specific wine tasting descriptors are?

Abstract

Although wine tasting notes are a specialized genre in the field of Oenology, with their own rhetoric and language, some of the elements describing the language of wine are by no means as specialized as that of most other specialized genres such as technical notes, auditor reports or abstracts. In this study, we will explore how wine literature attempts to analyze such adjectives used in wine tasting notes. We will then, based on a comparable corpus of 700 tasting notes per language, study a number of common wine descriptors in English and Spanish in the context of the nouns that they collocate. Our purpose is to determine their specificity or generality in their use and meaning. On the basis of their collocability, we will categorize the descriptors and analyze the meaning components of the descriptors falling in the most general category.