WOMEN IN WINE
Watch any movie, ad or TV show depicting a woman having a good old catchup with her mates, and she’ll likely have her manicured mitts around a wine glass. It’s a stereotype for a reason. In the United States, 2016 research by the Wine Market Council and Nielsen showed 56 per cent of wine drinkers are women. In Australia, a Ron Morgan study found that in 2015, 49 per cent of women in Australia drank wine in an average four weeks, compared to 41.2 per cent of men. There are wine brands targeting women and women-only wine clubs.
But women aren’t only drinking the wine; they’re also slowly and surely populating the traditionally male-dominated wine industry, from cellar master to sommelier. Last July, London saw the uncorking of a bar called The Lady of the Grapes in trendy Brixton that sells only wines made by women – a toast, if you like, to how far we’ve come.
On the home wine front, praise for women is a goblet that truly runneth over: At the 2018 New Zealand Wine of the Year Awards, the supreme winner was Maude’s Pinot Noir, made by wife-husband-team Sarah-Kate and Dan Dineen. In August, the Bayer Young Viticulturist of the Year title went to Annabel Bulk, of Central Otago’s Felton Road. More women are now Masters of Wine (MWs), says Cameron Douglas, New Zealand’s first and currently only Master Sommelier. Plus “the global Court of Master Sommeliers programmes are also seeing an increase in women attendees and graduates at all levels in their programmes,” he says.
There are scant stats on female participation in our wine sector (New Zealand Winegrowers, the industry body, is now doing its own study), but we do know that women make up 46 per cent of the labour force across winemaking, viticulture, logistics, marketing, sales, admin and senior management. This compares favourably, women account for nearly 50 per cent of enrolments in viticulture and winemaking courses, but make up less than 10 per cent of the workforce. “It is encouraging to see how many women are working in what is now New Zealand’s sixth largest export market,” says Nicky Grandorge, national co-ordinator of the Women in Wine NZ initiative (see box).
