A Linguistic Comparison of Wine Evaluation in Georgian and Western Technical Sheets

Abstract

This study explores how language shapes wine evaluation within the framework of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). It examines 100 technical sheets — 50 Georgian and 50 Western (American, French, Spanish, and Italian) — sampled from winery websites and online wine shops, focusing on how writers use word choice, repetition, and sentence structure to construct evaluative meaning. Although producers label these documents uniformly as technical sheets, the genre is realised in markedly different ways across the two sub-corpora.

The analysis reveals clear differences in how evaluations are constructed. Writers in the Western corpus consistently integrate technical, sensorial, and market-oriented meanings into a stable, highly structured evaluative register. Georgian texts display a more variable pattern: some closely resemble Western descriptions, while others emphasise production-focused or more generic evaluative language. To account for this variability, the study introduces the concept of frame friction — competing evaluative logics that do not fully integrate into a cohesive system. From an ESP perspective, these findings point to uneven alignment with established evaluative norms, particularly in the use of conventionalised expressions and syntactic density, while also suggesting the potential for a corpus-informed wine descriptor lexicon reflecting both emerging patterns and existing variation.