Ever heard or read a conversation like this? ‘It’s been a long and exciting journey. I feel empowered when I’m making wine. I’m passionate about it. I have a commitment to quality and have a vision that our product will one day become an Australian icon. I’d like to thank my mentor.’ ‘Absolutely!’ Yuck!
Writing about wine sure brings out the clichés but I reckon reporters, copywriters and publicists easily outgun wine writers in over-spicing their paragraphs with hyperbole. A little while back, I ran the word wine – combined with some of my least favourite psychobabble words – through Google’s News Search. (For example, enter wine +passion, in the News search window.)
The wine and passion combination brought up 643 news items, while passionate rated 274. Journey rated 674; commitment – 603; absolutely – 790; vision – 499; mentor came up with 201; icon scored 269; empowered rated 22 and empower 33. Wine and pretentious scored 56. Remember, these results are from current daily news sources.
A straightforward Google web search for wine and passion scored over 12,000,000 hits. I quit while I was ahead.
I hope I’ve engaged you with this research – admittedly, the context in which the words are used in news items varies considerably – but you get my drift.
Interesting article. There’s certainly a lot of cliché out there, on both the consumer and producer side. But I have to say that the more producers I speak to, particularly the smaller ones, the more I truly believe that these people are indeed passionate about the work they are doing. Makes the rest on us tucked away in cities feel pretty inadequate. Stuart