Wine, Women & Respect: The Nuances of Marketing Wine to Women, at the Boston Wine School

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Wine, Women & Respect: The Nuances of Marketing Wine to Women, at the Boston Wine School

Posted 10/22/2009 at 10:10 AM by Cathy

Full disclosure: I know Doris Hamner. She makes me laugh, she is my friend. We drink wine together. I like Doris Hamner.

So when Jonathon Alsop of the Boston Wine School kindly extended an invitation to the tasting event that Doris was hosting last night, I accepted eagerly. The event was called Wine, Women & Respect and, knowing Doris' background (in wine and as a PhD in sociology), I was keen to hear her thoughts on a subject that I think about often too.

I keep a file of notes and ideas related to wine in general that catch my eye and that one day may lead to articles or stories or events or posts of one sort or another. One tear-sheet in that file is a full-page full-color ad by Turning Leaf that I found in the June/July 2009 issue of Cookie (my previously-favorite parenting magazine that Conde Nast, in its dubious wisdom, decided recently to cancel alongside Gourmet). A picture of a bottle of Turning Leaf Chardonnay takes up maybe 3% of the page, way off in the bottom left-hand corner. The rest of the ad is composed of a laughing 30-something casually-dressed woman (Emily Stark of Parker, Colorado, apparently, if we're to believe the ad copy) who is walking along a beach with blurry, crashing waves in the background. The text, formatted almost like a symbolists' poem, is printed in erratically florid script as follows:

"I am not
the Sum of my RESPONSIBILITIES.
I am not a SOCCER MOM, or a
STATISTIC, or anything else other people
THINK I am.
I am real. [This line is underlined and in bold print]
I am true. I am ALIVE.
and right now i am taking a minute
to remember that
and to breathe." [Breathe is underlined]

And at the bottom of the page, near the picture of the wine bottle:

wine needs time to breathe. [Breathe is underlined]
People do too.
Turning Leaf.
HowDoYouBreathe.com

I tore out this ad not in order to remind myself to buy Turning Leaf Chardonnay (though, as a member of their target demographic, I must admit the ad successfully made an impression). I tore out the ad because it was, to my eyes and experience, innovative.

Innovative, because it featured a lone woman. Because the wine itself was only the subtext. Because the affiliated website – HowDoYouBreathe.com – mentions neither the brand nor even the genre of product. Because there is only a tangential relationship (that of "breathing") between the copy within the ad and the object of sale.

The ad is representative of what marketers, I believe, call the soft sell. But, more to the point of that conversation that Doris Hamner opened tonight at the Boston Wine School, the ad underscores how effective – though subtly effective – the marketing of wine to women can be.

As Doris presented to her audience, study after study indicates that the majority of women are less concerned with number-based, "end result" wine ratings; as a group, women tend to be more concerned with what can be called the life cycle of the wine, from the history of the winery and the philosophy of the winemaker to whether the wine goes well with what's for dinner and whether it simply tastes good.

It's an important distinction that, when considered as part of the kaleidoscope of nuanced preferences that women exhibit toward wine, can and should influence a wine company's marketing portfolio.

I salute wine companies – like Turning Leaf – who are making that effort, and I salute Doris Hamner and the Boston Wine School for opening the door to the conversation.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.