Typology of metaphors with the gustatory target domain in Polish wine discourse

Abstract

Although wine culture is quite a new phenomenon in Poland, Polish wine blogs on the Internet are numerous, and a specific wine language is rapidly emerging. The Polish lexical field of taste is rather poor compared to other perceptual fields. It is obvious that the limited lexical repertoire does not suffice to describe such a multidimensional experience as wine tasting. Polish wine discourse is permeated with various kinds of metaphors, starting from basic terms like ciało wina ‘the body of a wine,’ through more creative, but still lexicalised metaphors, e.g. leciutka nuta korkowa ‘a light note of the cork,’ to intricate, elaborated, semi-narrative metaphors, e.g. Tyle innych burgundów z lat 90-tych cierpi na sklerozę i haluksy ‘So many other burgundies from the 1990s suffer from sclerosis and bunions.’ A number of metaphoric wine terms have of course been borrowed from French or English, but there are also many new metaphors, specific for the Polish language and culture. The material for the analysis consists of blog excerpts taken from “Synamet”—a corpus of synesthetic metaphors in Polish. The paper aims at examining taste metaphors that are used in Polish wine blogs and proposing a preliminary typology of metaphors recurring in wine discourse.