Exploring the Image of New World Wine Producers

This article reports on a study that investigates texts on websites for wineries in Australia and New Zealand. The article focuses on evaluative language in website texts, exploring two interrelated issues. One issue concerns the kind of image that linguistic features help build up for wineries, wine regions, and Australia and New Zealand as New World wine producers. In seeking to shed light on implicit and explicit values underlying the texts, it gives attention to the aspects of local culture and natural elements most frequently represented in the texts, and if or how European wine-making traditions, European settlement, and the indigenous culture are portrayed in the texts. A second issue has to do with the way shared knowledge is built up in the texts and the kind of shared knowledge readers are assumed to have about local elements such as land and climate, traditions, wine-making processes, and local history.