The organicist-animist metaphor in Italian wine media discourse

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the main aspects of the organicistanimist metaphor in Italian wine tasting discourse and to identify its main characteristics in the specialized media discourse. Commencing from an approach whose overall view is guided by conceptual metaphor theory, we will analyze and classify the main elements of the metaphorical schema associated with the organicist-animist metaphor related to wine and wine tasting. We will illustrate this category by examples taken from a corpus of excerpts of Italian media discourse. Tackling the issue of perception and description of wine in Italian media discourse allows us an orientation of the research by multiple approaches of the semantics of winespeak: the recognition of essential aspects of wine imaginary, with a focus on the organicist-animist metaphor in our research corpus; the analysis of sensory impressions and representations in winespeak. Our main aim is to organize conceptualizations of wine tasting notes into a main category – the organicist-animist metaphor – , following the model inspired by the research of Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors we live by, 1980).