The paper focuses on analysis of idiomatic expressions such as proverbs and sayings in French language within two semantic groups such as «man’s spiritual reality» and «wine as interpretation of folk wisdom». Their semantic features are discussed as well as their role in french evaluational world view. The author attempts to illustrate the peculiarities of cultural mentality and national character of French people within their attitude to wine as a cultural value. The author also focuses on intricacies of language and touches the difficulties of translation and interpretation of phraseological units that occur in the present study due to the absence of similar connotations in Russian culture. The language units that are exposed in the paper and cited as examples were taken for analysis from up-to-date dictionaries, foreign research scientific works and were also kindly provided by native speakers. Idiomatic expressions that include cultural concept «wine» in French language represent the interpretation of outworld fixed in collective consciousness that incarnates historical and cultural values. Wine culture in France is very ancient that is why language units related to concept «wine» represent profound linguistic material that is worth of being analyzed within the frame of language and culture as well as within the scope of intercultural communication.

phraseological units, cultural concept, wine, language units, cultural connotations, world view, idiomatic expression