TITLE:
Wine Tasting Discourse: Traditional Knowledge, and Practice
AUTHORS:
Kilien Stengel, Angelica-Helena Marinescu
KEYWORDS:
Transmission, Vocabulary, Wine-Tasting, Interculturality, Multidiscliplinarity
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.4 No.5,
May
23,
2016
ABSTRACT: Traditions, brotherhoods, wines of terroir, vintage wines…so many expressions that, beyond the numerical value, compose the wine tasting speech, in France as well as in Romania, among others. The rising of awareness concerning traditions and heritage notions has largely evolved during the XXth century, spanning from the vineyard as a field for the theatricality of the brotherhoods to the considerations given to rites and customs, as well as to wine-tasting, till the larger social context. The taste related cultural discourse or argumentation plays a major role, from a pragmatic as well as cognitive viewpoint, within the wine tasting process, in order to represent a product or conceive an advertising. Wine provides experience and subjectivity in the frame of a taste-related simulation, always new, always personal. Thus, wine language is often very different from subjective perception, which is correlated to sensorial memories resulted from past tasting experiences or situations. How to communicate about wine, from different perspectives? Or how to pass on discoursive references and representations of the good wine? These questions send to the subjectivity of wine quality, to the connection that we might have with the product, as well as to wine’s cultural imaginary, in a multidisciplinary and intercultural perspective. In the frame of wine tasting theatricality, taste is subjective and each person’s judgement concerning wine taste is in accordance to his or her own “oenologism”: meaning its identity specter as a taster. The tasting procedure, beyond being a savoir-faire, it’s an incorporation experience which shares a part of one’s own identity. Thus, the meanings and values attached to the notion of wine desire vary depending upon the significations given to the representations of “good” wine, and are illustrated by a personal speech reference.