IT makes me choke into my glass to say this, but it's a man's world. Still. Women buy more wine for everyday consumption than men, tend to have better palates (hot-shot male tasters reluctantly agree), and are visible enough as educators and consultants. But when it comes to actually making the stuff, we're as thin on the ground as happy vines after a hailstorm. Tracey Low, senior white winemaker with the Australian company Penfolds, was welcomed in Dublin on Monday as the representative of a rarely-sighted, exotic species.
Not a threatened species, however, quite the reverse, if there's truth in the theory that wine dames Down Under are setting a new pace. When Tracey graduated in the mid-1980s from Roseworthy, Australia's premier cru college of agriculture and oenology, 20 per cent of the wine students in her year were women, she reckons. That represented an Alpine climb on the graph from 1977 when there was only one and she, poor soul, was obliged to live in the sick bay, for want of any more salubrious female accommodation. Now, Tracey Low estimates, the proportion of women winemakers graduating from Roseworthy must be well over 30 per cent. "It'll never go as high as 50," she says, but there are quite a lot of women out there. You just don't hear about them much."
The wine world seems always to have had a sprinkling of feisty female individualists with high profiles and fat cuttings files. The line leads through the "Champagne Widows" of the 19th century right down to Lalou Bize-Leroy, the biodynamic producer of some of today's most highly prized (and highly priced) Burgundies. It is a much more recent phenomenon, however, to see women signing up in significant numbers for oenology school - a trend which, like so many others, seems to be spreading from the New World to the old.
Is it difficult for women to call the crucial shots in what is still, if you count cellar hands and truckers, salesmen and importers, a bastion of malehood? "Not that much now, but I must admit I've had some rocky patches," says Tracey, who has worked with Southcorp, the mighty corporation of which Penfolds is a part, for the past eight years.
One of the rockiest came just last summer, when she went to the south of France to work on the Laperouse white wine produced as a joint venture between Penfolds and Val d'Orbieu (and sold here by Quinnsworth). "The French are definitely a lot more chauvinistic than Australians about women winemakers," she says. "We had a few pretty heated discussions - all in French." She can't have felt that much of a stranger to the French zut alors tradition, all the same, having come as a young backpacker, years before, to work the vintage at lofty Chateau Petrus.
Tracey Low's well-made Penfolds whites set me thinking about other New World women winemakers whose wines I've tasted recently and enjoyed. Whereas Tracey fell into wine almost by accident, drawn to the lab because she was good at science and maths at school, young Gina Gallo had it in her Californian blood. As the granddaughter of Julio and grand-niece of Ernest, the enterprising old pair who have featured so winningly in Gallo advertising, she was out helping to prune vines at the age of 10. First she landed in the company's sales department, with a degree in business and psychology. Soon, however, with grandpa Julio's winemaking passion announcing itself in the genes, she was off to California's top training ground for oenologists at Davis.
Now 29, Gina is responsible for the Gallo Sonoma wines - an impressive range lodged between the mass market varietals pumped out by the world's largest winery and the superb Gallo single vineyard wines which are just beginning to trickle into Ireland. Last year, on her first European meet-the-winemaker tour, she was refreshingly hype-free. Even without this strangely un-American, ingenue touch she'd have melted the hearts of her Irish listeners, anyway, with the news that her mother was a Ryan from Dingle.
Completing this week's trio of New World women with good tastes is Claire Allen, winemaker with Lawson's Dry Hills in New Zealand. Founded just six years ago by Ross Lawson - a man who has since sold his swimming pool construction company in order to devote himself fully to the grape - this winery is making a rapid and ritzy impact. Full credit for its stylish, flavoursome wines must go to Claire Allen, another graduate of Roseworthy who hopped south from Australia to New Zealand's best known region.
If you feel you deserve a treat, try something from Lawson's Dry Hills if you can find it. If not, don't worry: just have patience. Ross and Barbara Lawson will be dispensing samples of their wares at Wine Fair 97 in the RDS - an event which is shaping up with so much promise that it's not a day too soon to block the weekend of October 10th-12th off in your diary. Claire Allen won't be here, alas - but you can bet other members of the winemaking sisterhood will.