Of Wine and Women

Brace yourselves. A new wave of wine marketing is upon us. Julie Brosterman found herself drenched in it as she strolled the aisles of a Rite Aid in Los Angeles. Surrounding her were towering displays of pink and white wines in bottles bearing such flowery names as Seduction and White Lie. Brosterman, creator of the website womenwine.com derisively dubs them the Virginia Slims of the wine trade.

Perhaps the parade of pastel bottles just beyond the cosmetics aisle is inevitable--at least in states like California, where wine may be sold beside grocery items. For while men continue to do the bulk of the nation's beer and hard-liquor buying, new surveys by Gallup and by Adams Media confirm that women make 55% of U.S. wine purchases. With that information in hand, wine marketers, after decades of ignoring women, are suddenly chasing them like dogs after a bone. "I just wish they wouldn't resort to stereotyping and patronizing us in the process," complains Mary Ewing- Mulligan, president of the International Wine Center in New York City and author of several books on wine.

Indeed, several new wines aimed at women border on the insulting. Seduction, a $28 bottle by the Napa Valley's O'Brien Family Vineyard, comes wrapped in a little gauzy sheath as if it were out of Victoria's Secret, with label copy that reads as if it were from a romance novel: "voluptuous, with sensual flavours and a velvet kiss." Says Ewing-Mulligan: "Seduction is so outrageous that it's almost acceptable," and it helps that the Wine Spectator gave the Bordeaux-style blend a respectable 89 rating. But there is White Lie Early Season Chardonnay--a de-alcoholized concoction selling for about $10 a bottle, aimed at women who are counting calories. In this case, it's what's inside the bottle that is "downright offensive," says Ewing-Mulligan, who in 1993 was the first U.S. woman to earn a Master of Wine degree. White Lie has more in common with Diet Coke than with white Burgundy.

The irony is that all this fluff and fribble are arriving just as more women are getting serious about wine. That's the real news, says wine auctioneer Ursula Hermacinski, author of the forthcoming Wine Lover's Guide to Auctions. From her auctioneer's perch, Hermacinski sees more women raising bidding paddles and crashing the largely male club of wine collectors. "At each new auction, there seems to be a new female face, bidding on her own, for her own account, as opposed to holding her husband's or boyfriend's paddle," says Hermacinski. "At the last auction there was a table of three women bidding on top-quality Burgundy. They were having so much fun. They knew just when to stop and just when to push it. I was very impressed."

There are other signs of the trend as well. Wine Adventure, a magazine specifically devoted to female wine buffs, debuted in July 2005; it even has a sex column, "The Sensual Side." And Mulligan has seen a long-term rise in women signing up for classes. Back in 1982, classes at the Wine Center "were predominantly male," she says. "Now our classes are about fifty-fifty." Brosterman's website is another indication. The site, designed to appeal to women who want more from wine than a flirty label, offers a buying club with some sophisticated choices and travel opportunities for women wishing to take wine-tasting trips like the one featured in the 2004 film Sideways.