Feminine and Masculine Wines: A Corpus-assisted Critical Specialised Discourse Analysis of Gender Framing in Promotional Tasting-Notes

Winespeak comes as largely unintelligible to people lacking wine education due to the robust presence of loosely defined descriptors ascribable, among others, to the long-standing tradition of describing wines through the organicist-animist metaphor WINES ARE PEOPLE; this, in turn, encompasses using gender as a framing device aligned with traditional social constructs of feminine and masculine which has earned wine writers accusations of sexism and contribution to the ritualisation of gender and perpetuation of stereotypically gendered traits. On the basis of these premises and considering gender framing as a way of “symbolically evok[ing] people’s ideas about gender” (Winter 2005: 454) and disseminating gendered meaning, including pre-assumptions concerning inequality embedded in gendered meaning, this paper aims to (i) quantify instances of framing wines by gender and (ii) assess the correlation between a wine’s organoleptic characteristics and its designation as masculine or feminine in promotional tasting-notes; subsequently, the study undertakes a critical examination of the results to assess the extent to which recurrent cooccurring descriptors from the domain PEOPLE contribute to the promotion of gender stereotypes (iii). The study demonstrates that although gender framing in British wine promotional communication is not common, when it does happen, it still relies on outdated notions of masculinity and femininity associated with certain human traits and organoleptic characteristics. The study places itself within the field of Corpus-assisted Critical Specialised Discourse Studies, by embracing a cross-disciplinary approach combining Critical Discourse Studies and Corpus Linguistics methods as applied to Languages for Specific Purposes.