Wine Marketing Part 2 - Female Winemakers - should being HOT be a requirement?
Now this might seem trivial or even sexist question but with labels like Cleavage Creek and Pin Up Wines should we not have HOT women making the wine and not just on the bottle? Requiring female winemakers to be HOT would be for the good of the industry and wine recognition in US culture.
I mean really, if Helen Turley had to get out there personally and sell her wine she'd actually have to charge a reasonable price, and give away free hats or something. I suppose some people are best left in the cellar to do their work.
Dawnine Dwyer made some nice sparkling wine at Chandon but she wasn't lighting fires among drinking age male consumers. Not that Gina Gallo isn't attractive and I'm sure putting her in Gallo ads might work in one form or another but I'm talking about recruiting total Hotties into the winemaking field. Currently there are no such programs. And I'm not talking about Maria Sharpova or Britney Spears, these women don't have to be recognizable world-wide, just attractive enough to get the attention of potential customers. We're talking about expanding our demographic here people! We're not after NASCAR yet, but there's no reason Beringer couldn't sponsor a car!
We may even have a 'Hot Winemaker Gap' with Europe. I find that unacceptable. I'm talking about making Camille Seghesio 'Winemaker of the Year'! Ok, so she's not even a winemaker, what does that matter really? We can't keep wine hotties hidden from public view. How many years do we have to wait before the 'Women of Wine' Playboy pictorial. Too long I think. Is wine's image in the U.S., so rarified that there cannot be the equivalent of the Bud Light Girls? The wine industry could have the 'Wine Wenches', a traveling band of female pulchritude singing the praises of wine (as a BEVERAGE).
Unfortunately I don't think that the U.S. will lead the way in getting Hotties to the forefront of winemaking or wine marketing, the puritanical underpinning of this country and our misguided deference to French wine culture will hinder us. I predict the Australians or the South Americans will lead the way. A new era for the wine industry awaits, we have but to embrace it.
posted by Anonymous at 4:37 PM
2 Comments:
This might seem sexist? This is disgusting you should be ashamed of yourself. Have you seen the men producing wine. Wine making is about the wine, it's not some bullshit Hollywood movie. When you're enjoying a delicious glass of wine are you actually thinking, "gee I wounder if the person who made this is hot?" Because nine times out of ten it will be a balding middle aged man with no fashion sense. Maybe hair should be a requirement.
OMG!
When'd you lose your sense of humor?
Did you ever even have one?
As a guy, I think that some suggestiveness in advertising would be OK, and lets face it, I don't know a guy on earth that would be interested in Jancis Robinson in a teddy...the most recent pictures of her on her own website are - well, to be truthful - pretty much a turn-off.
Does she have to be hot to have a good opinion, not at all. But when you run across a really hot representative of the opposite gender in this biz, sometimes it's worth shouting about. AND YES, that moves PRODUCT, and has for millenia....
The point of this blog is to challenge various stereotypes of wine culture. There has always been an obvious crossover of sexuality/sensuality into the wine biz, and frankly, many of the wineries around the world would do well to introduce a bit of it in their marketing. Look at France where even just a billboard with a woman looking at a bottle of wine is considered "lewd".
FRANCE!!!
Time to shake things up a bit.
Also, thanks for supporting my point albeit in a roundabout fashion: with 90+% of winemakers being middle aged balding men with no fashion sense, isn't it about time we started to support the idea of attractive lithe female winemakers!?
Cheers!
/Vini
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