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Wineries · the language

The words that make every winery invisible

A word only carries information when not everyone can say it. Once every winery claims terroir and passion and family-owned, those words stop signalling anything at all.

Put your own About page in front of you. Somewhere in it are the words terroir, handcrafted, passion, family-owned. They were meant to prove the wine is serious. Instead they are wallpaper, because every winery says them, so the reader's eye slides off before they have poured a glass.

Here is the test. The left column is burned: the words are so universally claimed they now carry no information. The right column is alive for the opposite reason: almost no owner will say those words out loud, so they still land.

Burned

terroir · handcrafted · passion · family-owned · estate · artisan · our story · legacy · single-vineyard · boutique · time-honoured · let the wine speak

Still open

the table · your night · the guest · hospitality · come in · the welcome · the person in the glass · romance · longing · desire · the evening · what it felt like

Now the exercise. Every word your About page shares with the left column is a word doing no work, struck through in the reader's mind before they have tasted anything. Then borrow from the right. One sentence a drinker has never heard from a winery is worth more than a paragraph they have heard from all of them.

The words on the right are not a style. They are a position, the guest rather than the winemaker, and almost no owner will plant a flag there. The full language audit and the map behind it are in the Wineries report, and the read tells you which of those words are actually yours to say.

Ten minutes, and you will see where you sit on the map above.

Take the read ›

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