Women Supporting Women in the Wine World
Sometime at the end of July 2020, black and white photos of women flooded social media platforms with the hashtags #WomenSupportingWomen and #ChallengeAccepted. Many of those twinkling, smiling faces (or moody ones, depending on the desired vibe), flattered by the monochrome tones, were unaware that the black and white ‘women supporting women’ photo challenge was originally launched to spread awareness of the alarmingly growing femicide rate in Turkey, an issue which erupted during the pandemic-induced lockdown of the country.
Some might have called it vain, or in bad taste, to have women ‘supporting women’ around the world, blissfully unaware of the plight for awareness, posing in their privileged positions, out of harm’s way and not helping those actually in it. The sentiment of these posts, by and large, was about celebrating women, rejoicing in our sisterhood and giving thanks to the wonderful female figures in our lives.
Yet, however innocently ignorant it might have appeared, it worked. A forty-something woman posing on the bow of a boat in the Pacific Ocean probably didn’t know about the wives and girlfriends being murdered by their partners in Turkey, but after a slew of huffy put-downs in her Instagram comments telling her how insensitive she was, she sure did then. We all did. In a round-about way, this was women supporting women.
Women Supporting Women: A social media trend
There’s a lot of this on Instagram. Boss babes, entrepremoms, sistas doin’ it for themselves, go girl-ing and a-cheering and a-whooping of women’s achievements and talents. I’m acutely aware of how trite ‘women supporting women’ must seem to some. But this is what happens - when the pendulum has swung too far one way for so long, it must swing back far, far the other way, for it to one day to reach the balanced centre.
I have started one of these movements. It’s called Wednesday Wine Women. Every Wednesday at 7pm, I host an Instagram Live, where for 30 minutes I talk exclusively to a woman who loves wine. They might work in the wine industry; they might not, but the important thing is that they are passionate about wine and they have something to say about it.
What’s the point of this? Why have I decided to purposely exclude men? Don’t I think they have something valuable to say, too?
My first foray into the wine world was as a guest at a fancy sit-down dinner at an exclusive hotel. I had been invited at the last minute by a friend and went along on a whim. It turned out to be a private dinner with a famous South African winemaker and I was one of about twelve sitting around the table.
I was so enchanted by all of it. I felt like I’d become privy to a secret world - the way people spoke about what was in their glasses with such passion and knowledge; the respect they had for this winemaker; the prestige of the whole affair. As for the people sitting around the table, it gently struck me that I was in the minority. There was another woman, sitting at the other end of the table from me, who was somebody’s wife. I remarked to my friend, a man, that the room appeared to be of one demographic - male and white - without knowing, at the time, that the dinner might as well have been a Petri dish sample of the entire wine industry!
The next day, as captivated as I was, I signed up to do the WSET Level 1 course. I wanted in on this mysterious world. I was writing for a couple of online publications at the time, so I started to go to wine events as a member of the press, and I was further exposed to wine tastings and events. At them, I met many wonderful people, almost all men, who helped me and gave me excellent advice, and I will be forever grateful to them.
But, as many little black boys who watched Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther will know, it’s different when you can see yourself in the people you admire. My heart leapt every time I saw a woman in the industry, taking the stage, hosting a tasting or writing a column. I saw Amanda Barnes host a tasting on Chilean wines at the London Wine Fair and I thought, ‘Wow. I want to be like her!’. I contacted her afterwards and asked her if I could write a guest piece for her blog, which she graciously encouraged. I watched Rebecca Gibb MW deliver a masterclass on Cabernet Franc; I met Sarah Jane Evans MW and interviewed her at the Decanter World Wine Awards during judging week. Each time I saw or I met one of these fantastic women, I felt inspired and uplifted. The message was: ‘You Can Do This, Too.’
Representation matters. It really, really matters. It’s the reason there should be a 50/50 male/female split on panels and on boards. Is it any wonder that the majority of positions of power are held by white men, when they, as youngsters, saw white men in positions of power and received one very important message, which was: ‘You Can Do This, Too.’
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What does it mean for women to support women in the wine space?
I’ve been thinking on this trajectory for a while and I wondered what I could possibly do in the wine space - for women, but not just for women - for wine. When women contribute, we all reap the benefits.
Wednesday Wine Women is for everybody to see more women chatting wine. The first (of many) positives to this is that we get to hear about the awesome achievements of these women. When I chatted to Charlotte Gordon, I was in absolute awe of her focus and work ethic when she told me that she dropped out of University because she wanted to be a waitress and work in hospitality. By her early twenties, she had her pick of the top restaurants in London at which to become a sommelier and she chose Dinner by Heston, the number one restaurant in the country at the time. (She’s now a committee member for the Champagne Academy and she’s still only 26 at the time of writing.) The second, is that it inspires more women to get into wine. After I interviewed Kirsty about her WSET Diploma, I had a message from a friend, telling me that she had given up her wine studies, but seeing Kirsty lit something up in her again, and she enrolled that night on the Diploma course. Getting more women into wine and getting more women to stay in wine is a good thing for everybody - that winemaker’s dinner would have been a lot more fun, for a start!
My weekly Instagram Lives make a tiny splash in the ocean of wine. Why do we have to have more women in wine, anyway? What’s so bad about it being (another) male-dominated industry? Apart from the obvious answer of ‘opportunities’, should you be a woman who wants to work in wine or enjoy wine as a hobby (it’s harder to break into a space if there’s only one type of person in that space and you do not belong to that type), there is also the notion that it is vitally important to gain more perspectives. In a 2019 article on www.wineawards.com, titled How The “Female Palate” Is Driving Global Wine Trends, it states that in the UK, United States and much of Western Europe, women do most of the wine buying in supermarkets and shops and that women make up 55% of regular wine drinkers in the UK. Even for those not remotely interested in equal opportunities for the sexes, surely hearing from more women about wine is wise by anyone’s standards, since they are the bigger consumers?
It makes me think of chefs and hairdressers. Sexists might quip that a women’s place is in the kitchen, but we have a choir of male celebrity chefs on our televisions. Is it that women are cooks and men are chefs? Can only men make the profession one of success? Name a famous hairdresser. Vidal Sassoon. Nicky Clarke. Though the image of women gossiping about holidays in the salon is a familiar stereotype in our minds, it is men who have been allowed to become the icons. Is it the same with wine? Think of the people who do the wine segments on TV cooking shows. Have men taken something for all of us and claimed it as their own?
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Why is the focus on women supporting women and not men supporting women?
As is the case with all bias, gender bias is so deeply ingrained that so often people don’t even recognise it. I was recently asked to review a book about wine merchant’s travels. The author was male, but that fact is a bit-part in this story. I liked his writing style and his stories, but I arrived at the third time he compared a bottle of wine to being like a woman and I stopped reading. It was eye-rollingly boring, lazy and outdated. I wrote a polite email to the publisher explaining why I wasn’t going to review the book.
I read a very popular wine magazine every month. Their team of writers have recently become more balanced between male and female (although a quick flick through and you’ll see male after male face) but their letters page is almost always exclusively made up of letters from men. Perhaps it is only men who write to them? But then, what does this say about the culture around wine? Though women are enthusiastic consumers, do they not feel entirely welcome in the wine world? Having been to many trade tastings and dinners, it certainly can be intimidating to walk into a room full of men (particularly when some of them really don’t know how to welcome a woman into the room. Tip: It’s the same way as you’d welcome a man).
Women welcome the support of men in the wine industry from those who are secure enough to give it. Those who know that making room for others doesn’t impede on their space have my complete respect. But why is it powerful when women support other women? I think it smashes the stereotype of bitchy women who rip and claw their way to the top and then push away the ladder so that no other woman can follow them and risk being competition. Just as there are men like that, there are women like that, but we all know that is no way to behave if we want to make real, sustained change and provide equal opportunities for all as we head into the future.
Rather than a single ladder, I have the image of a mountain with lots of women climbing it. There’s a helping hand here, a leg-up there. But we’re all climbing, at varying paces, sometimes we’ll be higher than others and sometimes we’ll fall behind. What is this tantalising vista that we are all yearning to see? I guess that would be half the faces in a tasting room being female, half the names on a top winemaker’s list belonging to women and half the letters featured in a wine magazine signed off by women. That would be something to celebrate, rejoice, give thanks for.
In which case, #ChallengeAccepted.