Climate in the Glass: Metaphor Drift and Language-as-Signal in Wine Value Chains

Climate variability is reshaping the global wine sector by altering the sensory profiles that underpin regional reputation and price at a time when producers, distributors, and retailers also face structural headwinds from shifting demand and digital disruption along the value chain. While the agronomic effects of warming are well documented, the downstream consequences for how wines are described, signaled, and sold across increasingly digital channels remain under-analyzed. This article introduces “metaphor drift”: the systematic misalignment between climate-shifted sensory reality and the entrenched metaphors and descriptors (e.g., “body”, “balance”, “elegant”, “minerality”) that consumers and intermediaries use to anticipate it. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the economics of information and signaling, the article develops a Language-as-Signal framework in which wine descriptors are treated as seasonally sensitive economic signals that reduce search costs, coordinate expectations, and sustain hedonic premiums along the value chain. A conceptual, toolkit-oriented design combines a synthesis of climate and wine evidence, analysis of six descriptor families, and two qualitative vignettes of a warm-vintage Pinot Noir and a smoke-affected Shiraz, with targeted applications to the low- and no-alcohol (NOLO) category. The resulting practitioner toolkit comprises a Swap-and-Scaffold lexicon and a human-in-the-loop large language model (LLM) protocol for auditing and updating high-volume digital copy and is used to formulate four propositions about how value-chain actors can govern sensory language as part of climate adaptation. The analysis suggests that transparent, linguistics-led recalibration of descriptors offers a low-cost, high-impact strategy for preserving trust, maintaining expectation fit, and supporting the economic resilience of wine value chains under climate pressure.