They’re winemakers, they’re cellar managers, they’re oenologists, and they are vineyard managers. In fact, forty-six percent of all people in the New Zealand wine workforce are female.
What’s more, according to Lincoln University, international research has found that up to 80 per cent of all wine sold is to female buyers. As such, wine is an industry that must value women at both ends of the bottle.
However it’s not all women-friendly in wine. While women are present everywhere in the wine industry from the vineyards to the Masters of Wine, there still aren’t many women in top jobs yet. There are few women executives in wine who come in as outsiders and don’t run the company as generational businesses. In her book Women in Wine: The Rise of Women in the Global Wine Industry, Ann B. Matasar writes, “No business or industry reaches further back in history or is more global in scope than the wine industry. And no industry has so resolutely excluded women from positions of influence for so long.”
Getting women to the top
To combat this sort of mentality, New Zealand Winegrowers has launched a nation-wide Women in Wine New Zealand initiative. All wine growing regions now have established advocacy groups, with Central Otago launching theirs in January, to a group of 83 members (and growing).
“If women in the wine industry are not an identifiable group then they are not showing the next generation of women that there is a professional career path here and one that offers exciting opportunities and rewards,” says Janiene Bayliss, Managing Director of Ata Mara Vineyard and an organiser behind Central Otago Women In Wine. Eighteen women winemakers are in the region, as are 104 women who are significantly involved in ownership of the 120-odd vineyards in the area. “It has proven difficult for women to enter this industry from different specialities and then to get the recognition, mentoring and advancement that their male counterparts enjoy.”
Jing Song, managing director of Crown Range Cellar, understands such challenges. The 30-year-old Chinese New Zealander worked as a chartered accountant then formed a wine distribution partnership with Grant Taylor, her neighbour in Queenstown. This enterprise turned into a small-batch vineyard that produced premium wine for export to China, the US, Europe, and Australia, and even won the Pinot Noir Trophy at the International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC) in 2015. Yet it hasn’t been easy for Song in industry circles. She finds that some other winemakers are quite shocked with her identity. “This is a male-dominated industry, and it’s also an industry made up of families for generations, so people think it’s really unusual that I’m an outsider,” she says. “People also aren’t used to a new face that is different in age and race, as well as gender. Some treat me equally, but others could be more supportive.”
Women as a consumer market
As paying consumers, women make up the majority of the wine-buying market. A Lincoln University literature review found that women purchase wine more often, and spend disproportionally more, than their male counterparts. Yet research also suggests women find buying wine an intimidating experience, and that the wine industry believes they are more confounded by the product than men are. This doesn’t seem to add up, considering the power women hold in the market.
“Understanding our consumer is important and the growing influence of women in the consumption of wine and enjoying wine and events has not gone unnoticed by our group,” says Bayliss. “Eight of every 10 bottles of wine in the UK that are drunk at home are purchased by women and 85 percent of women of legal drinking age in the USA drink wine. Supermarkets know that women are the shoppers and food and household decision makers – they buy the majority of the wine.”
Wine buying is generally a gender-neutral experience, and this is something the wine industry deserves kudos for. There are few wines marketed specifically with women in mind.
Those in wine don’t patronise consumers like some other industries do by using gendered colours, logos, and explicit wording (though one regrettable exception would be “White Girl Rosé” from Swish Beverages in the USA).
A key issue arising for 2018
On the internet and in the entertainment world, a specific group of women has been identified and it may, regrettably, become a target market for the wine industry in 2018 and beyond.
You may have heard of the popular term “Wine Mom” – thankfully it’s nothing to do with expectant mothers and alcohol consumption. Rather, Wine Moms (or mums, as we would say in New Zealand) are a group that is unashamed of partaking in “liquid patience” after dealing with unwieldy children at the end of the day. The Wine Mom is visible on TV in Modern Family, in films such as Girls Trip, and in the real world in large Facebook groups (consisting of hundreds of thousands of members), quizzes, and viral memes.
Why is this so problematic? The drinking of wine to relax away from one’s children is something seen as essential (even fashionable, humorous, and “cool”, if you look at the online memes) for the modern mother. However one glass – say when the children go to sleep – can turn into a whole bottle, and with such behaviour addiction (and other health problems) becomes a possible outcome if mothers’ wine-drinking activities are habitual and chronic (as it does for all people). If such a vulnerability were to be exploited by the wine industry for sales purposes (e.g. marketing of wine specifically to stressed mothers, in the same way White Girl Rosé is marketed specifically to Caucasian millennial women) it would prove unethical. It would also go against the way the industry operates in terms of both gender neutrality in wine marketing and promotion of responsible drinking. Winemakers should hold each other to account if such a marketing practice does ever emerge in the future.
Steering clear of marketing wine specifically towards women
In a study of California wine drinkers by Neilson, female and male consumers share similarities in wine drinking in terms of occasion, motivations to drink, and preferred wine style. This reinforces the case for gender-neutral wine marketing as the ideal way of reaching the largest demographic and therefore a better market share. With that in mind, are there any aspects of women’s wine purchasing behaviour that are useful for winemakers, potentially usable in subtler ways? The aforementioned Lincoln University research found that women evaluate the price discount cue for buying a lot more than men – they are more likely to evaluate the region of origin purchasing cue. But that’s the extent of it: research does not support notions that brand name, medals, and awards are more valued by one sex over the other; nor is there much support for the idea that women choose wine based on artwork or label design more than men do.
Women are more involved in wine production than ever. And more women are buying wine than ever. There is work to do around allowing women to get into top executive jobs in wine, and we must continue to ensure to keep the industry in check when it comes to vulnerable groups of women. As the daughters of the future follow their mothers into the vineyard, the cellar, and the boardroom, their passion for the drop is something to foster. Will wine ever be a women’s world? Only if women band together and support each other. As Matasar writes in her book, “What one sees is the emergence of an industry that is changing in a multitude of ways, from vineyard management to winemaking to international sales. No matter where you look women are participating in and leading those changes.”
