The Language of Wine Reviews

Wine evaluation is a rarefied endeavor. Wine enthusiasts and sommeliers have a niche skill set, with a particular lexicon, that facilitates their evaluation of wines. Novice consumers may find wine reviews intimidating and confusing. In this paper, we use a dataset of nearly 130,000 reviews from expert reviewers at Wine Enthusiast to explore the lexical dimension of wine reviews and to determine to what extent wine reviewers systematically use language differently across different price points. Trends reveal that the information needed to make informed wine purchases are provided through the language of wine reviews. Our analysis shows that wine selection does not require a technical understanding of the wine-specific vocabulary of wine enthusiasts and sommeliers. We present a review of the literature on wine reviews and form four hypotheses under the theoretical framework of Kahneman’s two systems of thought—suggesting the lexical properties of wine reviews reveal the price of wine. We examine how the lexical categories, emotional and logical linguistic content, social, and somatic experiences used in wine reviews relate to price. We then suggest the applicability of this analysis to other commodity domains in future research.