When Women Go On Vacation

Recently, KnowWines founder Jolene read an article by Sarah Mikutel with this title: “Women don’t need to be in a crisis to travel.” Two points in the article resonated with Jolene right away. The first was that Americans have become enamored with busyness and the hustle, rather than authenticity and intentionality. The second was that women only find it acceptable to travel and spend time with our minds after we hit a “crisis.”

Mikutel found that if you ask most women who travel (including Jolene), they are actually not miserable or escaping a crisis. Women typically travel independently because we’ve reached a point in our lives where we’ve met their intrinsic human needs (physiological, love/belonging, and safety) and are seeking experiences to build self-esteem and self-respect, a lá Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Women in Wine Country

When seeking self-esteem and self-respect, we naturally seek mastery, independence, freedom, and competence, all of which lead to self-confidence. In addition to pursuing these higher-order accomplishments when traveling, we also love learning more about the pleasurable aspects of those basic needs — food, beverage, clothing, shelter, relationships. Traveling to wine country destinations affords ample opportunity for all these pursuits.

The world of women’s travel — and concurrently the world of wine — is rapidly changing. Around 1% of business travelers were women 40 years ago. Today it’s 40%! The keyword search independent or solo female travel grew by 52% between 2016 and 2017. The average age of women adventure travelers is 47. Today, women are traveling more with friends or independently than with family. And more and more often, women are traveling to wine country. This makes sense — after all, women purchase 80% of wine for home consumption, and the GenX generation, which includes the most women travelers, purchases more wine per capita than Boomers or Millennials.

With such a rapid increase in women travelers to wine country, the travel industry is working hard to keep pace. However, Jolene finds that much of the travel literature for wine country - from Napa Valley to the Rhône Valley to Bordeaux - is out of step with current trends and still geared toward men (light on detail and heavy on top 10 lists and trophy experiences). When travel articles are geared towards women, it’s to younger women looking for more of a drinking experience than an intentional travel experience that incorporates tasting and other cultural activities. When articles about wine tourism take the art of winemaking seriously, they often go far to the other extreme, aiming at wine industry insiders seeking “super geeky” wine experiences that may not be well suited for one’s inaugural or second trip to wine country.

Making a Travel Plan

Many women travelers prepare for trips meticulously, constructing Vision Boards or just writing out ideas about our ideal experiences. Rarely did Jolene find information out there that gave a holistic framework for wine country travel for the average woman adventure traveler. That’s why she created this free guide!

This course, Authentic Wine Travel for Women Over 40, is not a catalog of wine regions to visit. Nor is it a simple checklist for how to take the best tour of wine country. Instead, it’s a guide to making the most of your experience when you travel to wine regions. The goal of the course is to help you create a journey that is inspiring, deeply personal, and that, like a fine wine, will hold value for years to come.

If the grape vine could speak, it would tell us that about 2000 years ago it tempted humans to take it and plant it in places it would thrive, which just happened to be some of the most beautiful and bucolic regions of the world. Because many wine-producing regions are naturally beautiful, one does not need to be a wine enthusiast to enjoy travel to wine country. The vines can simply serve as a beautiful backdrop to outdoor pursuits like walking, biking, or hot-air ballooning. But for the wine enthusiast, those vines, and what they produce, can inspire the woman traveller to learn the lore of the region and the personalities of the vignerons, and to experience new tastes, smells, and textures. This course endeavors to give you an holistic take on the myriad possibilities for growth, learning, and fun that wine country can provide the female traveler.

Women Who Love Wine

Here’s a statistic that might surprise you: women buy 80% of wine in the United States that is consumed at home. That’s a whole lot of buying power. It’s not a secret that American women love wine. There are all kinds of memes about “Happy Hour for Mommy,” and many women aren’t shy about sharing that they look forward to a women’s wine night or unwinding with a glass of wine at the end of the day. Women are drinking plenty of wine and they’re buying most of it. But the people we turn to for advice about wine - the experts, the sommeliers - are still mostly men.

Little is known about how women actually shop for wine, but it is known that they rely pretty heavily on the label and point-of-sale materials (the shelf signage frequently found near the price). We also know that wine marketers take advantage of the fact that many women work 60 - 70 hours or more each week between a career and home responsibilities. That means they are seriously strapped for time and need to multitask. In other words, they aren’t going to spend time in a specialty wine shop when they can just get their wine at the grocery store. Sure, it’d be lovely to visit a local bottle shop and learn the characteristics of dozens of wines, but more often than not, a busy mom will just choose from what’s easily available. Unfortunately for her, a diversity of great wines is really not available in grocery stores the way it is in bottle shops. Compare this experience of wine shopping to the experience of men, who typically consult up to 5 sources of information and read books and magazines about wine before purchasing. Women consult about 3 sources, and typically on the spot in the store. As a result, men have a strong preference for small wineries, and women typically have a preference for national and international wineries (big brands). Men display a stronger preference for $25 and up wine while women have a strong preference for two price points, $10 to $15, and $2 to $10.

The Changing Landscape of Women and Wine

The good news is that women’s lives in America are changing in some very specific ways that lend themselves to a deeper, richer experience with wine:

First, more and more women are opting out of heteronormative lifestyle. Many women choose not to get married until much later in life, if they get married at all. And many married women are choosing not to have children, a huge shift from previous generations. These women have the extra time and money to seek out a wine experience that is deliberate and unrushed, in opposition to the overwhelmed mom that so many “grocery store wineries” are targeting.

Second, the online shopping economy enables generations of women to purchase groceries and all manner of consumer goods like wine from the dashboard of a laptop. “Shelf talkers” are now online and the attractive photo is now a teeny-tiny thumbnail. This makes it easier for women to link to the valuable information about wine that has traditionally been sought out by men. While these online wine purchasing details are still targeted to male consumers, more and more female consumers are discovering them - and that’s progress.

Third, nearly half of married American women are divorced by midlife. Once the heartache is over, these divorced women are often on a mission to completely reinvent themselves, from their appearance to their job to their lifestyle, all with the goal of making a fresh start. It can be a joyful exercise for these women to go out and discover their own tastes - in clothes, furniture, food, cars, décor, and wine. They want to travel, they want to experience things, and they want to taste what they’ve been missing. So, it’s not just more time that is opening doors for women in the wine world - it’s also a genuine desire to learn more.

Finally, an AARP study shows that women 45 to 90 are much happier now than they’ve ever been. How’s that for great news? Women are starting to feel a sense of freedom from all sorts of heteronormative assumptions. They don’t so often seek approval from others, and they feel more free to be themselves. They still feel young and are excited for the new adventures that life has to offer - maybe they’ll learn a new language, travel abroad, or become serious connoisseurs of wine, something they always enjoyed but never had the time to fully explore.

The Wine Future is Female

As it turns out, the wine industry is also at a crossroads. Just making good products isn’t enough anymore to grow the market. Since the 1960s, there have been significant scientific, agronomic, and engineering advances that enable better quality of wine throughout the growing, winemaking, and sales channels. There’s a new abundance of female wine makers and women offering their expertise as wine country travel guides It truly is a great time in the history of the world for good wines - and for the women who appreciate them.

Interested in checking out some great wine books written by women? Check out our review of the Top Nine Wine Books by Women!