ENGLISH TITLE: Natural and organic wine: notes on some aspects of oenological communication

ABSTRACT: This paper presents a semiotic observation of discourses about “natural” and “organic” wine in Italy and France. The attention is focused on some manifestos and other programmatic discourses on the websites of some associations of wine producers, both natural and organic, and on some visual images. The result is a list of aspects of the discourses that “justify” and expose the motivation of these two kinds of wine production. Semiotics helps in identifying the rhetorical forms of these discourses. Tension towards an ideal and the definition of limits and thresholds coexist in these discourses. Natural wine’s associations present in different cases their choices in opposition to conventional and organic wine, proposing a tension towards and ideal of harmony with nature. Some organic wine associations seem to prefer a discourse based on the identification of rules and limits.

KEYWORDS: semiotics; wine; natural; organic; rhetoric.