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October 28, 2006
Wine cliché news count
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.
Technorati search tags: Wine
Posted by Martin Field on Saturday 28 October 2006 at 23:33
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Comments
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
Posted by Stuart on November 24, 2006 06:08 PM