Wine Queens by Mojca Ramšak

Author:Mojca Ramšak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.2 The Wine Queens’ Metaphoric

The symbolism of the material inventory is also apparent in the conceptual foundations of the clothing image of wine queens and in their way of make-up and hairdos. The gowns of wine queens are a metaphor for their sexual and moral status, where the eroticism of a covered body and accented women’s curves are mixed with a decent, but attractive and sexy manner. Metaphors referring to the wine queen costumes at the coronation are playing with colors, forms and materials, and therefore attempt to influence the response, mood, perception and imagination of the beholder. The semblance of the wine queens’ gowns is the same as color of wine they represent: red and white or burgundy, purple, beige, yellowish, or greenish shades. Materials are shiny and rarely dim. The length and tight shapes of festive dresses are reminiscent of a wine glass or a bottle of wine; they also symbolize a female figure. Ornaments of the wine queen’s dress illustrate aromas of wine queen’s wine , such as fragrance and flavor, which can be tasted only sensory. In other cases the ornaments are taken from the nature: stylized grapes and vine leaves or beads of grapes.

Wine queens never dress trousers when they protocolarly present wines, their postures are charged with moral significance. As Bourdieu stated (2001: 28–29), the femininity is measured by the art of ‘shrinking’ and women are held in a kind of invisible enclosure circumscribing the space allowed for the movements and postures of their bodies. This symbolic confinement is secured practically by their clothing which constrains movement in various ways, like high hills, and above all the skirt which prevents or hinders certain activities (running, various ways of sitting, etc.), or because it allows them only at the cost of constant precautions, as constantly pulling at the skirt, or have to perform acrobatics to pick up an object while keeping their legs together. These ways of bearing the body, which are very deeply associated with the moral restraint and the demureness that are appropriate for women, continue to impose themselves unconsciously on women even when they cease to be imposed by clothing.

The rich wine queens’ metaphoric is not a surprise, because the language of wine, or winespeak, is considered as highly sophisticated. To the non-connoisseur, wine drinking is above all an aesthetic experience which calls for creative and inspired use of language. At the other extreme, the idiom used by the wine-expert community (oenologists and professional wine tasters) reflects a large repertoire of technical lexis which should rely on criteria and standards whose aim is to be as objective and measurable as possible. While in most instances, the expert and the layperson differ substantially in their linguistic rendering of the wine tasting experience, there is one aspect of language which is common to both—the ubiquitous use of metaphors . For instance: there is a differentiation between three different types of wine connoisseurs: the professional taster, the wine journalist who writes for the readers of a wine magazine, and the informed amateur.

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