I nomi dei vini italiani. Tra denominazioni di origine, marchi aziendali e marchi di prodotto - The names of Italian wines. Between designations of origin, trademarks and product brands

In this paper we analyse the commercial names in the Italian wine sector, that is the names used by wineries to identify their products and introduce them into the market. The research is based on a corpus of Italian wine commercial names selected from digital resources; the commercial names have been extracted from lists of product names, technical data files and labels of wines shown on wineries' web sites and from wine reviews published by experts. After outlining the legislative framework concerning the Italian wine sale denominations and product labelling and then the characteristics of wine branding, we present the results of the corpus analysis. The focus of the analysis is on mono brand names of wines, in order to identify the linguistic aspects and semantic-pragmatic functions of these commercial names and to highlight their correlation with wine marketing strategies.