Trailblazers: Pioneering women in wine
Anne Krebiehl MW introduces four inspirational women who each forged a path in wine that others could follow.
For one, it was a sip of Champagne snaffled from her grandfather’s glass as a young girl; for another, a first teenage glass of wine in a restaurant just outside Chicago.
For one, it famously was a 1959 Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses on a college date, and for yet another, it was the early realisation that wine is ‘this extraordinary pleasure that comes from nature, the source of beauty and thoughtfulness, not something you put on a shelf, but something you take into your body’.
All of these wine epiphanies happened 50, 60, even 70 years ago and set four different women on the path of wine – at a time when it still was very much a man’s world. They needed grit, resilience and determination to succeed, but all rose to the top of their professions.
While none of these women necessarily see themselves as trailblazers, they undoubtedly are, rising to the top in what Elin McCoy calls a ‘golden age of publishing’.
They lived through an era that saw wine become a global phenomenon, played a key part in democratising it and inspired legions of other women either to pick a career in wine – like yours truly – or develop a taste of their own.
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Serena Sutcliffe MW
The honorary chairman of Sotheby’s Wine still consults for the auction house. Sutcliffe will turn 80 in 2025. She was the one enchanted by that sip of Champagne and defiantly encapsulates her career path in these words: ‘I just did my own thing; cross me at your peril. Somehow it worked!’
But of course, there’s more to it than that. Having been told, in the 1960s, that she was too young for university, she set off for France, where, as a brilliant linguist, she worked as a translator for UNESCO but, she says, she ‘spent all holidays in the vineyards, especially with small producers and growers, who let me pick, prune, bottle. In the end, I felt I had to change career and go into the wine trade as I was so riveted by wine.’
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She decided to leave France and return to England’s wine trade ‘as I felt that I would learn about wines from everywhere’. Her first wine job, in 1971, was ‘general dogsbody with languages for a big wine-importing firm’.
Luckily, in Britain, there were wine qualifications. The first Master of Wine exams were held in 1953 and the WSET (Wine & Spirit Education Trust) was founded in 1969.
‘I immediately saw that I should go for the MW as I then would be “taken seriously”,’ Sutcliffe remembers, adding that while the wine trade was ‘used to women journalists and authors’, women in the actual trade were far less common.
She passed the MW at her first attempt in 1976 and her plan to move back to France was thwarted by love: she met and married fellow MW David Peppercorn, and together they set up a wine consultancy business in 1977, authoring books at the same time. Sutcliffe then joined Sotheby’s as head of the wine department in 1991 and oversaw its international expansion.
This can’t all have been plain sailing, but Sutcliffe is candid: ‘Sheer bloodymindedness helps build a career! Plus loving one’s subject, which I did and do.’
Her response to whether she was ever patronised is both telling and amusing. It happened ‘hardly ever – maybe because I am a bit Amazonian! The odd patronising drawl, on hearing a female voice, was always from second-raters, so one forgave them.’
Elin McCoy
A cross the pond, in a restaurant just outside Chicago sometime in the 1960s, a 14-year-old Elin McCoy was poured a glass of wine by her father, as the waiter refused to do it – and, she says, this led her to ‘enter into a new world’. She has covered wine for Bloomberg since 2001, her column now syndicated around the world.
Her career in wine wasn’t planned: ‘I married young,’ she says, ‘[and moved to] Oregon, where my husband [fellow writer John Frederick Walker] was getting his PhD in philosophy.’
There, McCoy embarked on her own PhD, in English literature, but ‘we really got interested in Californian wine’, she says. ‘We loved these cool labels, so we thought, “Let’s call them up and see if we can visit.” We drove down to Napa Valley. We visited Mayacamas and other producers. Robert Mondavi would come out and talk to you, like, “Oh, you’re interested”.’
It was a very different world. ‘We quickly realised academia was not really for us,’ she continues, ‘and thought, “Wow, people on the East Coast don’t know about all these Californian wines. Let’s write a book.”’
So the young couple did – it was published, but one agent told them that ‘there was about as much interest in the wines of California as there was in the wines of the Jura, which no one had ever heard of.’ McCoy says: ‘It really was the publication of that book that launched me into the wine world.’
By this she means freelancing for New York Magazine and a number of other publications before becoming the beverage editor for Food & Wine in the early 1980s.
‘It was the upstart food magazine, taking on Gourmet. [It] gave me entry into just about everything,’ including the rather exclusive Wine Circle of New York, where producers – think Baron de Rothschild and Claude Taittinger – would show their wines to New York writers such as Frank J Prial of the New York Times, as well as women such as Eunice Fried and Doris Tobias, so she didn’t feel awkward because of her gender.
McCoy notes that it was difficult to learn about wine without the UK’s possibilities of formal training in a nascent wine market. ‘I was learning on the job,’ she says. ‘Of course, I was patronised, but I felt I was more patronised for being American than for being a woman.’
Karen MacNeil
That same feeling of wanting to know but finding it hard to get any training is echoed by Karen MacNeil, author of the bestselling and encyclopaedic The Wine Bible, a book that stems directly from her early New York days and the basic questions she was looking for answers to.
As a teenage runaway who became the valedictorian of her school (who makes the final speech in front of a graduating class), MacNeil won a full college scholarship and worked three jobs concurrently to make it in New York City.
Sheer hard work and relentless pitching meant she made it as a freelance food writer – who had always loved wine, even when she was penniless. She fondly remembers the 89-cent Bulgarian reds she drank when very young, graduating to Liebfraumilch when the budget stretched to $1.
Without a secure footing, utterly self-reliant and without privilege, she felt more intimidated by the formal New York Wine Circle in the late 1970s. After a friend petitioned for her, she was allowed to attend following a members’ vote, ‘as long as I didn’t talk’.
At the time, she says: ‘Wine was treated in a classist way – all of that was a little bit terrifying.’ The men in the circle were protective of their beats and opinionated, but, MacNeil says: ‘I didn’t have an opinion yet, or at least have an important opinion, but I wanted to ask questions.’
Many women will know just how she felt as she watched equally fledgling men have no such compunctions. ‘The last thing they were going to do is let some upstart like me write for New York Magazine.’
It took her years to gain confidence, to call herself a wine writer. ‘But I felt I could outwork anybody,’ she says. And she did, because MacNeil had an edge, letting go of much of the formality and high-mindedness that surrounded wine then.
‘A lot of the pieces I wrote were what today would be called casual, conversational. What was a bit of insecurity on my part turned out to be what people loved reading.’ She continued working hard and kept her opinions to herself. ‘I don’t know if I was patronised. I was sort of the wallpaper on the side, not really paid attention to,’ she remembers.
‘Interestingly enough, the first men who took me seriously were European. Piero Antinori [head of the eponymous Tuscan estate], for instance, would insist that I sit beside him at dinner.’
MacNeil never took an assignment or a byline for granted and today is one of the most celebrated wine professionals in the US.
Jancis Robinson MW
Hard work is also, unsurprisingly, a central feature of the life of Jancis Robinson MW – probably the world’s foremost wine personality, with countless articles, groundbreaking books, TV programmes and accolades to her name.
This year, Robinson celebrates her 50th year as a wine writer, having got her first job as assistant editor at monthly trade magazine Wine & Spirit in December 1975.
She soon became its editor after Colin Parnell vacated the seat to focus full-time on his baby, the UK’s first consumer wine title, namely Decanter.
‘The typical event was a wine producer coming over to Britain from wherever. British protocol meant I would be sat next to the chief guest,’ she says. ‘So I got the scoop, just because I was a woman.’
Robinson is keen to stress that writers such as Pamela Vandyke Price blazed a trail before her and that Jane MacQuitty, Joanna Simon and Jilly Goolden were her contemporaries. But there’s also something refreshingly non-pretentious about this state school-educated woman who got herself into St Anne’s College, Oxford.
‘Starting my journalistic life on a trade magazine was a key factor because you see how things really are,’ she says. She set herself apart by being ‘maybe a bit more objectively questioning. I came top of the diploma exams; I got the tasting prize in the MW,’ which she passed in 1984.
Hard work – she credits her mother with giving her a good work ethic – and her enquiring, analytical mind were her chief tools: ‘I never felt intimidated. I felt I had found my specialism, had a reasonable brain,’ but adds ‘when I got to Oxford, the male-female ratio was something like 6 to 1, which is pretty good for your confidence’, and which is how she got to taste that bottle of 1959 Chambolle-Musigny.
A supportive husband with whom she brought up three children was also key. She barely recalls any snubs, only an amusing incident when a ‘young city slicker’ sidled up to her at a tasting to ask: ‘I say, you come to these things to taste for your boss?’
But she makes a valid point about going freelance: ‘I haven’t had a boss since 1980. I’m not in a structure. I haven’t got someone who can throw their weight around,’ noting that women caught in hierarchical structures are much more vulnerable.
But when asked if she felt that she was paid less than a man, her answer is clear: ‘Oh yes, I think probably throughout my life.’
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