CONCLUSIONS
In the course of the story we have seen how a literary piece illustrates many distinctive features of wine language, especially the recurrent use of personifying metaphors and coupled premodifiers. Other aspects of wine tasting—most conspicuously the most censurable arrogance and pretension associated to this activity in the mind of the layman— are also portrayed. As wine becomes a complex secret that needs to be deciphered humans gradually lose their humanity. The narrator is omniscient regarding procedure, but not as to final outcome or identity of the wine. He knows the codes and ways of high culture, as a sort of sober referent from which both Pratt the snob and Mike the new rich depart. The very title of the story—“Taste”—insinuates this sort of opposition between high and low culture. Without the narrator wine connoisseurship would be perceived by the reader as a sort of perversion practiced only by rich people with too much time in their hands.