The Two Wine O’Clocks: (Un)Timely Meditations on Gendered Alcohol Consumption

Wine o’clock terminology is now ubiquitous across many countries. Originating in marketing, it is now used to achieve much more than merely encouraging people to drink more alcohol or simply deployed as a means of branding and merchandising goods. Once it moves into the domestic sphere, it becomes a way of justifying one’s alcohol drinking practices. This is especially true for female drinkers, whose alcohol consumption still is markedly more hemmed in by societal norms than is the case for men. For women to declare that it is now wine o’clock is a way to claim that their drinking is legitimate, does not disrupt expectations of being a responsible kind of person, and that it has been somehow earned. There are two types of wine o’clock, one which fixes a set and recurrent time of day, and another which affirms that any point in time that the drinker wishes to identify is a legitimate drinking time. Both types bring potential trouble for women who seek to justify their imbibing in such terms. The chapter considers these matters through a historical-sociological perspective, encompassing the long-term, intertwining histories of capitalism, clock time, commercialism, and gendered drinking patterns and expectations.