My year of wine: It's bad enough labelling women, but the wine too?

05 August 2014 - 02:00 By Jackie May
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Natasha Williams, guest winemaker at the Thirsty Thursday wine club last week, is the first woman winemaker I've met.

Head of Nederburg's white wines, she introduced their Heritage Heroes range, four wines each telling a story about the estate.

I should not have been impressed because, as local wine connoisseur Cathy Marston says, "there are loads of women making wine".

Australian winemaker Jane Wilson has said: "As long as you can hold your drink and do the labour, no one has any prejudices against you." Or your wine, I presume. But it might be worth looking at prejudicial labels.

The "first lady" of South African winemaking is Norma Ratcliffe. Born in Canada, she followed her farmer husband to Stellenbosch, qualified as an oenologist, and produces great wines.

One of these is the 2012 The First Lady Unoaked Chardonnay, from her family's Warwick estate.

The word "lady" here is not used in relation to someone else and doesn't refer to someone who minds her p's and q's. It's not demeaning. Unlike "The Beautiful Lady".

At the wine club we tasted Nederburg's 2012 The Beautiful Lady Gewurztraminer. Fruity, mild, a great white wine. But its label is cringe-inducing.

Dedicated to Isle Graue, an owner of Nederburg, the label says she was "a strong spirit and bastion of strength to her husband when their son Arnold passed away in an unfortunate aviation accident".

We've come a long way since Pliny the Great believed that "contact with the monthly flux of women turns new wine sour". So, why are we still describing women in relation to their husbands? And suggesting it was the father's loss that mattered more than the mother's?

By all accounts, Graue was a lovely and talented woman. But she must have been more than "the beautiful lady".

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