Wine, Women and Globalization: The Case of Female Sommeliers

The research presented in this chapter started in the early 2010s on a winter afternoon in Helsinki, Finland. I was sitting in a large hotel’s wine bar and glancing through a Swedish wine magazine: just glancing, as I was not in the mood to read. What I noticed, however, struck me quite forcefully. In the whole magazine, there was just one woman featured in just one of the pictures. She was walking behind two men in a vineyard. If this absence of female presence was the case in a Swedish magazine, I found myself thinking, what would be the situation elsewhere? I have since found that this magazine may have been an exception and that even in places where one would least expect women to feature strongly in traditionally male-dominated wine-related professions, one may find surprising numbers of women operating in wine worlds, cultures and fields today.