Ladies (I wrote a few days ago via mass e-mail),
Recently I read with interest an AP article regarding the National Women’s Wine Competition with the slogan “Wine Women Want”. (The Signal March 10, 2007) I can’t go. You can’t go. We weren’t even invited! But we can crash the event in my next column.
Here’s how: In three sentences or less please tell readers what your “relationship” is with wine. Whether you resent not being able to drink as much, thereby not enjoy as much, as the men you don’t outweigh or are sullen when a waitress announces the price to make sure you really want to order that $21 wine by the glass that no male date appears with you to pay for…let me know.
Maybe we women do have more in common on the subject of wine than we realize! Maybe women don’t want a wine whose label announces “Menopausal Merlot”? It’s up to us to identify and demand what we want from the market before men make the decision for us!
Are you with me?
Eve’s Wine 101
First Responders:
Hallo Eve,
“My name is “Claire.” I love wine. My relationship with wine is sacramentally sanguine: holy and hopeful. Christ’s first miracle was changing water into wine at a wedding. Later He held a cup of wine and said, “Take this, all of you, and drink from it.” What better endorsement do I need?
Cheers!”
(I like it! I have educated, religious minded, female friends that drink!)
“I am interested, but I just don’t know the name of the wine that I liked because I just had it at a restaurant the other night…besides that now I am a full fledged whiskey drinker.
Peace out girl!”
Leslie, Seattle
(I think Leslie has moved on to Whiskey from wine as she has moved from Sunny Valencia to Overcast Seattle. If that wasn’t enough she joined a rock band. But let’s not count her out just yet.)
“Women and Wine… One of the most sublime meals I have ever had was at my kitchen counter at night making my children’s school lunch. It was randomly assembled and consisted of the following: a spoonful of blue cheese crumbles, a spoonful of toasted pecans pieces with our Aneas Reserve Sangiovese. Nothing comes close to that combination no matter how expensive the restaurant!”
Cathy MacAdam
Co-Founder
Agua Dulce Vineyards
(I don’t cook so I would never have these supplies “randomly assembled”, but you can bet that I will ask for it next time I come in for a tasting!)
On an Internet search, typing in just women and wine, the first site that I found was www.wine-women.com. It was hosted by Galia Daleva Galmes, her husband Pierre Galmes a “chauffer in the wine regions of France”, events that she will attend, a long list of countries that give only the winery’s female employees, teachers, writers and photographers and finally a link to www.winewomenawards.com all unfortunately in French. It was more women on wine than even I was prepared for. But I still searched for more.
So next I Googled the ratio of women to men drinking wine. You’ll never believe what I found on www.askmen.com from “Johnny”:
Wine tasting clubs: The ratio has always been 3:1, women to men. And as you can imagine, it’s incredibly easy to meet and talk to any woman in this kind of situation. (So now we are prepared for that!)
In a Danish test, (www.ajcn.org), fifty-four percent of women over 30% of the men preferred wine. You can read much more about the growing trend of women over men as wine drinkers at www.wineinstitute.org.
It’s much too late to e-mail all my male friends to see if they agree with any of this reported data. (And that might irrevocably change the column’s bias.) But from my research I bet I am not the only female vinophile wondering about this! The rest of you have undoubtedly already corked your own bottle waiting for hubby to make it home for dinner, the book club to start or the sitter to show. And if “Johnny” is right then it is definitely time to bring on the PMS Pinot before church! Are you with me? This research shows that you are!
One last thing, I just read Ellen Crosby’s The Merlot Murders. What fun! Young woman who was raised on her parent’s winery in Virginia returns home to bury her murdered father only to become embroiled in a family feud over winery rights and eventually, someone fixed on her own demise. The information on Thomas Jefferson and his quest to make Virginia a wine producing state to rival France was interesting, as well as her segues into harvest, production, costs and winemaking. I look forward to her next book, a Chardonnay murder, and more from women on wine
