The Big Smoke

I wouldn’t read this if I were you. It’s probably just fluff. And badly written into the bargain. Don’t blame me – it’s my gender. We used to be the weaker sex; apparently, we can beef up our pecs as much as we want but the brain matter remains feeble.

What has prompted this outburst of feminist sarcasm – for yes, boys, that is what it is – in our supposedly post-feminist world? A wine survey, commissioned by Vinexpo (the annual wine fair) and compiled with help from Decanter magazine. It’s on women’s drinking habits and supposedly, it’s comprehensive. Well, 4,000 women took part, which is quite a few when you consider that we’re all the bloody same.

According to Decanter, Vinexpo’s chief executive, Robert Beynat, ‘was particularly pleased with the response of 79 per cent of women who said they drink wine because they like the taste – as opposed to its compatibility with food or fashion status, calling it 'extraordinary'.

Extraordinary, is it, that women drink something they like the taste of rather than because some arbiter of taste (male, in all likelihood) tells them to? These oafs were also pleased and surprised that women like red wine more than white – apparently we silly little girls are presumed to have insufficiently developed tastebuds to appreciate a good meaty red when it comes within our orbit.

People buy wines for all sorts of reasons, as Victoria Moore, wine columnist and author of ‘How To Drink’ (published next month by Granta) points out. ‘Why should this survey apply particularly to women?’ she asks. She is having lunch next week with Doug Wregg, of wine importer Les Caves de Pyrène, who, having read the survey, has reassured her that he won’t be serving her a pint of pinot grigio despite the fact that she has two x chromosomes.

Vinexpo is French, which may partly explain this tidal wave of vinous sexism (that is prejudice, in case you missed it. I love France, I adore their language and I drink their better wines – any colour – whenever I get the chance, but if you’re talking gender politics, we have them beat when it comes to progress). But only partly. In the Guardian Review a couple of weeks ago, Sarah Churchwell, an Orange Prize for Fiction judge, wrote of her fellow judge’s disgust at being told by a bookshop assistant that they had no books by women displayed because there aren’t many.

What is this – the Middle Ages? It’s enough to drive a girl to drink.