“Women can run with the big dogs. We can shop Burgundy. We can collect Bordeaux. Women have been educating themselves more and more. … And they do it by doing the same things that men do. They don’t need [brands such as] Mommy’s Time Out.”

That’s Annette Peters, import director for local distributor World Class Wines, talking, in one of many notes, quotes and reports that I couldn’t work into Saturday’s story on wine and gender.

This is one of those pieces that’s a lot of fun to research and report and a bit of a chore to write, simply because there is bound to be more fodder in a story on gender differences than space allows.

The story would have grown by half had I delved into another of Peters’ main points, which is that a lot of women are getting their feet in the wine biz’s heretofore “No Girlz Allowed” doors. Over lunch at Red Stag, here’s what Peters, who’s kicked down a few of those doors herself, had to say:

“You see more women in serious tasting groups. You see more women sommeliers. You see more women making wines and rising to positions of power in the wine business that you’d never seen before.”

True, that. Hundreds of wineries worldwide are run by women. About 20 percent of California’s winemakers are females, including such industry titans as Helen Turley, Heidi Peterson Barrett and Diane Viader (all of whom, by the way, make big, bold, decidedly “unfeminine” wines). Closer to home, Anna Katharine Mansfield is the chief enologist at the U of M.

The one exception is in the world of wine reviewing/rating. Yes, it can be argued that Jancis Robinson is the foremost wine critic in the world, or at least shares that distinction with Robert Parker. According to Robinson, about 40 percent of the wine reviewers in her native Great Britain are of the female persuasion.

Not on this side of the pond, however. The nation’s two most influential wine magazines, Parker’s Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator, have seven reviewers apiece, with nary a lady in the lot.

Progress is being made at a few magazines (Lettie Teague does splendid work for Food & Wine) and in the publishing world, where Natalie MacLean, Parker biographer Elin McCoy, Leslie Sbrocco, Andrea Immer Robinson and Karen MacNeil have thrived. And Alice Feiring has one of the best wine blogs going.

Women are proven to be better tasters than men, so it seems strange that men are the taste-makers in this country. Might it be that most of these publications are aimed at males, veritable Boyz Clubs featuring men writing for other men?

Or might it be that women are simply less interested in the ratings-oriented approach in general? That seems to be part of what Jancis Robinson was getting at when she wrote this:

“Women are free to have a more relaxed relationship with wine. Men are ‘expected’ to know a bit about wine. Women on the other hand — and, yes, we are far from perfect and can be manipulative minxes, moaning mumsies and worse — are much more likely simply to choose not the wine they feel they ought to choose but the wine they feel like drinking.”

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 8:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.