| The title is cringeworthy for most of us women who work in wine. After all, in 2023, why should this be a special subject? The very fact that women are still singled out as a topic for discussion shows that we still have a way to go to claim our place in this industry. This year’s theme of International Women’s Day is Equity and while great strides have been made over the last thirty years to reach equality in the wine business, there is still a lot that can be done in the wine industry, and other business to achieve equity.
When I left university, my wine-loving father forbade me to enter the wine business telling me that it was no place for women (I had already proved that I could taste by being part of a winning team in an inter-university blind wine tasting challenge). This was in the mid-1980s.
How the situation has changed! When I became a Master of Wine there were not even 20 MW women ahead of me. Today, women have often overtaken men as successful candidates. The rate of change has been rapid but so logical that today it doesn’t seem strange to any of us female members of the business.
So instead of getting bogged down about women having softer, gentler styles of winemaking or that their tasting and smelling senses are honed through the genes of their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers who barely left the kitchen, let’s have a look at why the long overdue presence of women in the wine business came about and why it is no longer necessary to write articles on ‘Women in Wine’.
The opening up of the door happened for a variety of reasons that coincided with each other: first a generation change where the children, both boys and girls, of winemakers in the 60s and 70s who had grown up on the burgeoning new domains, naturally stepped up to the plate to take succeed their parents. There had been an egality of siblings in the vineyards and cellars so that naturally continued.
Secondly the internet has made information so much more accessible. Women can have direct access to wine merchants, restaurants, and wineries so they can enquire about job and study opportunities easily. There is a certain anonymity which makes the first steps into the business so much easier. No longer do women need to rely on the male-dominated senior members of the wine trade to gain access to their hallowed world.
Thirdly the opening of wine courses throughout the world, not only through universities agricultural colleges and technical schools but also through international wine courses such as the ubiquitous WSET has enabled young people to prepare themselves for the wine business before they launch themselves. Studying wine became an acceptable part of a woman’s secondary education. Below is an early image of the UC Davis in California’s Viticulture and Enology department after prohibition in the 1930s. Look at how resolutely male it was. By the 1980s, women were being admitted as peers to their male colleagues. |
