Ah, wine.
Isn’t it fascinating how wine has long been a male-dominated industry, and yet, whether in movies, shows, or real life, it’s so often the woman holding a glass of red at night, or sipping sparkling wine in the bath?
There’s something about wine that feels inherently feminine. It engages your senses, it makes you feel, it brings you back into your body. No wonder it’s become a staple in so many women’s lives, whether fictional muses or women like you and me.
That said, I didn’t fall in love with wine simply because it’s beautiful. I became obsessed because I felt it could teach me something about womanhood, and it didn’t fail.
I’ll admit, there were times I didn’t even like the wine I was drinking. But because of the branding, the mood, the moment — I drank it anyway. I chugged just to feel the buzz. I played the part of the woman with the glass, but I wasn’t actually her. I wanted to be the kind of woman who sips, who knows how to hold her glass, who doesn’t feel intimidated by the wine list, who knows her senses and trusts them.
The first time I drank wine as a woman (and not as a girl pretending to be grown), something shifted.
My senses woke up from the very first swirl, the very first sip. Suddenly, the gap between what I had learned (in my mind) and what I could feel (in my body) began to disappear. The more I tasted over the following weeks, the slower I sipped. The more intention I brought into each glass. And (believe it or not), the smaller my pours became. I no longer needed more. I needed better. I began to savor every drop. Each sip started to feel like a story, something to feel, not just to drink.
For me, drinking wine is like making love. When you sip slowly, tune into your senses, and open to the moment, it becomes sensual, soulful, intimate. But when you chug to numb or forget, it becomes something else entirely. Something rushed. Something disconnected.
So I stopped drinking wine to numb. I started drinking wine to feel more.
And somewhere in that transition, I became her — the woman who knows what she’s doing.
Because a woman who knows what wine she likes (and why) is a woman who knows herself.
And I’ve found that the qualities we seek in wine often mirror the kinds of pleasure we crave in other areas of life: in love, in perfume, in food, in sex. What we find delicious is never random. It’s a reflection of who we are.