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Home > Articles > News Index > From Cosmetics to Chardonnay

Tracey Mason and Jane Robichaud are on the team of women that created the low-alcohol, low-calorie White Lie Chardonnay.

From Cosmetics to Chardonnay

Taking their cues from other fields, wineries are tailoring their products to women

Dana Nigro
Posted: Monday, August 29, 2005

To introduce its new White Lie brand in New York, Foster's Wine Estates didn't choose a restaurant with a big-name chef or host a comparative tasting. Instead, it gathered a group of women in a trendy spa, offered them massages and brought in Jennifer Weiner, author of popular "chick lit" novels such as Good in Bed and In Her Shoes.

Welcome to the new world of wine marketing. It's an oft-cited fact in the wine industry that women drink and buy a majority of the wine in the United States; according to a 2003 study from the Wine Market Council, 60 percent of the Americans who consume wine once or more a week are women. Increasingly, wine producers are making efforts to target women, with humorous labels, bottles decked out in lingerie-inspired packaging and brand names that sound like romance novels or perfumes.

"Unlike standard consumer package goods, which are highly marketed, wine was essentially marketed as genderless or more male-oriented than female-oriented," said Mike Lynch, cofounder of the Mad Housewife brand. "If women are buying brands, it makes sense to speak to them."

But are these products genuinely addressing the preferences of an underserved audience, whose tastes may range from white Zinfandel to high-alcohol Zinfandel, or are they just another example of the wine world talking down to women? That depends on the wine and its target audience.

 
Seduction, a Napa red blend, comes in a lingerielike gift bag.  
O'Brien Family Vineyards owner Bart O'Brien said he and his wife, Barb, came up with Seduction, a Napa Valley red Bordeaux blend, when he was struck by how differently men and women talked about wine. Women, according to him, buy wine to be shared, to create an emotional moment. "Men often buy wine to be hoarded," he said. "They take it back to their cave and save it until another collector comes over and then they'll bring it out. It's about scores and history--it's a little game of one-upmanship."

O'Brien said he was afraid that women would be skeptical of a wine with an obvious gender orientation, so he tried to create a serious wine, just with packaging that will appeal to women's aesthetic sense. Priced at $28, the supple, polished 2003 Seduction (89 points on Wine Spectator's 100-point scale) is made primarily from Oak Knoll District grapes and aged in French oak; just under 2,000 cases were produced. The winemakers are former Silver Oak general manager David Cofran and Hugh Chappelle, once at Flowers, now at Lynmar.

Each bottle comes in a sheer, crimson gift bag, and though the front label is elegant, the back avoids typical winespeak, reading: "Romance of the heart, passion of the soul. A voluptuous wine with sensual flavors and a velvet kiss." Though Seduction is carried by wine shops and restaurants, including decidedly non-feminine steak houses, O'Brien hopes to eventually sell it primarily by mailing list.

 
Retailers have played off the Mad Housewife label with 1950s kitchen-themed displays.  
Many of the "women's wines" out now are inexpensive grocery-store brands, such as Mad Housewife, from Rainier Wine, a Seattle négociant that buys bulk wine from California. The company honed the wine's taste and irreverent image--the character of a 1950s-era housewife who has had a long day--by sending surveys and samples to 250 metropolitan-area women in 2004. "We didn't start with any presumption that women's taste was different than men's," said Lynch, who started Rainier with Damian Davis. "We started with the idea that people buying grocery-store wine are looking for something fruit-forward, with a round mouthfeel ... and that turned out to be the case."

The back labels of the resulting Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, priced around $7 to $8, say things like "The dishes can wait. Dinner be damned." Retailers have created floor displays with old fridges loaded with Velveeta and Spam, and the Mamapalooza rock concert had Mad Housewife as a sponsor. Lynch, who aspires to have a 500,000-case business in a few years, said, "The idea was great packaging that women paid attention to and maybe picked up as a goof and came back because they liked it."

 
The design and name of Meditrina was intended to appeal to women, but not overtly so.  
Other wines come from women simply creating something they like. Last year, Susan Sokol Blosser, who makes Pinot Noir in Oregon, introduced Meditrina, a soft, juicy blend of Pinot Noir, Syrah and Zinfandel that is the winery's red counterpart to its unpretentious Evolution. Though the label is bright red and the wine is named after a little-known Roman goddess of wine and health, Meditrina doesn't overtly spell out that it's for women. "We didn't want to alienate anyone," said Susan's son, Alex Sokol Blosser, head of national sales. Nor is Meditrina aimed at a mass audience with its $18 price and 5,500-case production.

Likewise, Olympic Cellars' screw-capped Working Girl Wines originated from the personalities of the women who run the winery. "We didn't start out to say we are marketing to women," said Kathy Charlton, owner of the 9,200-case Washington producer. "It's just who we are, what the winery is, what we stand for. For us, it's not a cute label or a gimmick wine." The winery donates 2 percent of every bottle sold to a local family planning clinic's program for low-income women.

 
Olympic Cellars, which is owned and run by women, released a line of working woman-themed wines.  
The line, priced from $10 to $16, includes Working Girl White, a blend of Chardonnay and Riesling (tagline: "it eases the crankiness and stress of a long day in pantyhose and pumps"); Go Girl Red, a Merlot-based blend; and Rosé the Riveter, made from Lemberger. The winery later added the Bordeaux-style blend Handyman Red for male customers reluctant to order anything that sounds too feminine.

"Everyone's tastes are different," said Charlton. "You can't really make a wine for a woman."

But that's exactly what Foster's is trying to do with White Lie Early Season Chardonnay, introduced in May and developed by a team of women, including winemaker Jane Robichaud. Beyond the lipstick-red label and florid script, White Lie's real distinction is what's in the bottle: a wine lower in alcohol (9.8 percent)--and therefore lower in calories (97 per 5 ounces)--than a typical California Chardonnay. White Lie is "lite" wine--crisp, with little oak treatment.

"We're saying if you like wine and choose not to drink it during the week due to the consequences, we've created something for you," said Tracey Mason, the company's director of innovation.

White Lie was created by harvesting cool-climate Santa Barbara grapes at a lower-than-normal sugar level. That would be 21 Brix, but the wine label doesn't get too technical. Instead, the corks bear white lies such as "But it was on sale" and "Never on a first date." At $10, and with a production of 100,000 cases, it's intended as an everyday wine.

In the end, it seems wines for women are being treated no differently than clothing or beauty products. Charlton, who confesses that her favorite wine is her Handyman Red, isn't entirely happy with that. "I feel sometimes that the ads done in the apparel and food industries have crept into the wine industry: Drink brand A and you'll look and feel prettier; drink brand B and it has less calories. I don't think that's what wine is."

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