KEY POINTS:
Pinot noir is like a woman's breast. It's round and firm ... and you never get tired of it," American winery boss, the late August Sebastiani is reported to have mused. Not an image that many of the women that are driving wine sales today are likely to embrace, but a quote that speaks volumes about the Boys' Club that was once the world's wine industry.
Women are becoming better represented, but it's still men who dominate our winemaking, viticulture, senior sales and buying positions and wine journalism. It's a situation that's out of kilter with the gender spilt seen in wine consumption today, where women outnumber men as the country's regular drinkers and buyers.
That women have been getting into wine with a gustatory glee is perhaps no surprise given that on top of their increasing incomes, females are generally better attuned to tasting. They're more likely than men to be supertasters - those blessed with more taste buds and who experience taste more intensely than most - while female sex hormones appear to make women of childbearing age in particular more sensitive to smells, the other key sense involved in wine appreciation.
Anecdotal evidence that women are also generally better at describing wines is being given more scientific support. Observing both all-male and all-female sensory panels, US sensory scientist, Dr Hildegarde Heymann discovered that women learned more quickly, which she linked with their ability to talk more easily about what they were tasting than their more hesitant male counterparts.
So if women respond differently to men when tasting wine, are they looking for something different? Witnessing some of the international attempts of recent years to produce girlie wines, such as Australia's Wicked Wines and the United States' White Lie, you'd think that sisters who sip were ripe for seduction by sweeter or low calorie wines sporting gimmicky pink packaging and a liberal dosage of sexual innuendo. Many of these products bombed, which suggests this is far from the case.
Leslie Sbrocco, author of Wine for Women: A Guide to Buying, Pairing, and Sharing Wine, believes the way wines are communicated about is more relevant. She considers women are more concerned with what the wine tastes like, what it's going to be drunk with and with whom rather than ratings, vintage charts and technical information. Never met a female wine bore? This could be why.
"There are too many men making decisions that affect things like the profile of wines and their communication," says winemaker Michelle Richardson.
She welcomes the fact that more women are now joining the industry and, with the likes of Jane Hunter, is one of New Zealand's handful of high profile women in wine, helping attract more females to the trade.
Greater opportunities are certainly available to women today than when Hunter started out in the 1970s. Then, the practical agriculture and viticulture course she wanted to take at Australia's main wine college, Roseworthy was not open to women.
"As I couldn't get acceptance into Roseworthy, I had to do the more scientific Agricultural Science course at Adelaide University," she recalls.
Gender is no longer a barrier to study, but women still account for less than 40 per cent of students at New Zealand's largest viticulture and oenology department at Lincoln University. If the future of wine is truly female as many predict, it may be some time before we see women shaping their fair share of the wine landscape and their contours kept out of heinous vinous analogies.
