Double standards

Why should every new drink aimed at women be teeth-shreddingly sweet?

WIMMINS’ discos were held on most Saturday nights when I was at college during the early 1980s (Yes, I really am that old. 

My picture with this column keeps getting younger as I become progressively more haggard, rather like Dorian Gray in reverse).

Male students were allowed in but it was forbidden for any of the sisters behind the bar to actually serve them a drink. They could pour it, but not actually hand it over.  The solution to this problem was to have a few XY chromosome students behind the bar (rather like drones, or worker ants) to take the money from bemused male punters and then hand them their drink once an XX chromosome personage had poured it.

I’m pleased to say that I survived this adolescent apartheid, but even now, during my mid-riff crisis, double standards between the sexes and alcohol persist.  Wine PR, it seems, is a job for women (and Rupert Ponsonby) and is consequently laden with all the baggage of sexism.

My beloved editor here at The Drinks Business tells me he is fed up with being given the wine list before a meal and the bill afterwards when he is being taken to lunch by a female PR.

Quite understandably, he finds it embarrassing to push the bill across the table to the 20-year old woman sitting opposite, and very difficult to do so without peeping.

We have made some progress, in that Laydeez Nights, where women get in free and men get to buy all the drinks, have been kicked into touch by the Equal Opportunities Commission.

But, of course, sexism works both ways.  Ever since I started working in the drinks industry I have been amazed at the assumption that every new drink aimed at the female market should be teethshreddingly sweet (and designed by Bet Lynch).

Is it because it has been scientifically proven that girls like pink and, as we all know, pink correlates with sweet? It reminds me of Al Murray’s Pub Landlord persona who insists on the golden rule "Sweet white wine or a fruit-based drink for the ladies and a pint of lager for the feller."

Why should women get to drink all the rubbish? It certainly doesn’t support the popular myth that they are inherently better tasters than men.  But now, at last, the sisters really are doing it for themselves.

A report from market analyst Datamonitor, which has been picked up by most of the press over the last few weeks, has found that young British women are now the biggest boozers  in Europe.

Those aged 18 to 24 are downing the equivalent of 357 pints a year – equivalent to more than five bottles of wine a week.  This is three times as much as their Italian counterparts, who drink 104 pints a year, or one glass of wine a day.

Apparently, young women in the Netherlands get by on 188 pints a year while German girls drink 333 pints annually.  Young British women already drink well in excess of the recommended 14 units of alcohol a week (as compared with the 21 units for men) but, according to Datamonitor, this consumption is set to increase by 20% to 426 pints a year by 2007.

None of this comes as any surprise after Girls Aloud "star", Cheryl Tweedy, 20, was convicted of duffing up a female lavatory attendant in a drunken attack in the womens’ toilets of a nightclub in Guildford as she attempted to grab a load of lollipops which, she insisted, she was going to pay for later.

Waking up at the end of the Northern line wearing a kebab is still a rite of passage and a badge of honour for young males, but, girls, do you really want to go there? The cab ride home can be mighty expensive.

Not to mention the dangers involved for young women losing control in a public place.  One particularly sad and disturbing reason why women drink RTDs, I am told, is because it is harder to be slipped a Mickey Finn through the neck of a bottle.

The Portman Group is unlikely to approve of the fact that British women are drinking their Continental counterparts under the table, yet, understandably, many wine marketeers would consider it a job well done.

With increasing focus on selfregulation, the drinks industry must be very wary – to use that dreadful, hackneyed expression – of "overdelivering". 

Bad taste in the mouth Speaking as both a rugby fan and a wine lover (there are many of us) I am heartily sick of the relentless sledging of the world’s number one rugby team in the Australian press.

Drinking an oak-laden, identi-kit, Aussie Chardonnay, heavily discounted of course, and with none of the finesse of Johnnie Wilkinson’s goal-kicking, I recently found myself wondering "Is that all you’ve got?"

The trump card that Australian winemakers have played in achieving their phenomenal success in this, their number export market, has been their ability to ingratiate themselves as our "fair dinkum" mates from Down Under.

But all their whining about our whingeing arrogance (an oxymoron surely) would seem to imply that they are only dinkum when it suits.  The unprecedented heights of Pommie bashing at present indicate that they really don’t care for us very much at all.

If rugby enjoyed a fraction of the popularity that soccer does in this country, I believe we would have witnessed a chastising backlash against Australian wines, led by the tabloid press.  Just a thought, sport.

When we eventually do win the final, I’ll be celebrating with Champagne (unless we lose to France).