And this hints at what I’m getting at with the phrase ‘arresting the slippage’. It is well know that psychoanalysis proposes that desire is structured as a ‘lack’. When the baby boy is finally severed from his originary continuity with the mother’s body by the father’s phallus, two things happen simultaneously. One, the boy spends the rest of his days trying to reunite with mama (which is primordially his ‘proper’ body), and two, as a freshly formed ’self’ he must mediate or translate this desire (for what he cannot not possess) through the agency of the father, which is, in Lacan’s magnificent rereading of Freud, language itself, rooted, as you might guess, in the father’s possession, his ownership, of the only phallus that matters. So the baby boy must learn to ask for what he cannot have with a language he does not ‘own’. Language is a haunting, alienating agency, not the road to a cure. And this, btw, is why analysis is said to be interminable. Speech does not fill the hole in a troubled soul. It is the hole itself. All of this is to say that desire, in the psychoanalytic schema, is born of a lack. However much we speak, however much we wander the world, however many our loves, all of our efforts, all of our ‘desires’ are driven but this structured lack, by this lifelong search for the primordial missing part of our body that language, the father’s phallus, itself creates. Every subject/object of our desire is but more slippage. Life is an endless series of ideational substitutions for what cannot exist, the search for a place that is ‘nowhere’.

And the situation with the baby girl is an even more grim and fatalistic scenario. Indeed, the shadow of Freud haunting your essay does not really get at his truly monstrous intellectual rigor. It is not for nothing that generations of women have fought hard to out-think both he and his most brilliant student, Lacan, to find a pleasure that is not phallocentric. And to that point, frankly, NOB’s notion of ‘polymorphous perversity’ was mere diddling with the massive Freudian prick. We both know that it was just a line to pick up girls. The promise of sexual equality by us cool dudes was a ruse, a mask, yet another trick of seduction. And NOB knew that game well.

So, no. I am not a pantheist. I am most certainly not a NOB devotée. That ’sexuality/life-force/divine madness’ can be seen as conceptually isomorphic would funny to me were it not so historically tragic, certainly if read through the prism of Freud and Lacan. NOB’s last talks and work, pagan in the main, spoke of the need for the world to be cleansed by fire. You will be hard pressed to find a more perfect illustration of the return of the repressed. Mother Earth, I am coming home.

Been Doon So Long is a very fine book, by the way.

So the first thing I would ask about whether wines might be gendered is how do you arrest the slippage? I mean, how do you stop ‘gendering’ from impregnating the entirety of wine culture? From the flowery label, to the aggressive tannins, from the barrel filled with juice, to a stuck fermentation, from a cork forcefully inserted, to a prophylactic screw-cap, does the gendered imagination ever tire? Perhaps it doesn’t, perhaps it won’t. It certainly hasn’t.

What do women want (their wine in)? A clean glass. Blind tastings, anyone?

It is interesting that you would characterize “umami” or savoriness as a more or less masculine characteristic of wine. i think that I might identify it as a more feminine characteristic – found in a wine that tries to integrate, blend or engage in a dialogue with food, rather than seek to dominate it. Women do seem to be a bit more clever than men in trying to find potential opportunities to link with the world.

I take your point on the distinction between feminine and female in a wine and would like to suggest that in some instances (though not always) this distinction arises from the dichotomy between vins d’effort and vins de terroir. A wine of effort is a stylized wine and therefore its qualities might be thought of as being perhaps more extrinsic than the deeper qualities found in a vin de terroir. I would suggest that in fact all vins de terroir, even the ones we think of as being the most “masculine” – think Paulliac with its firm astringent tannins or Cornas with its hard mineral edge – have a deeply feminine quality to them, a seductive, ever-changing, revealing/hiding aspect that draws us to them – haunting is the word that you use.

A propos of nothing, if you are ever given the opportunity to try a Musigny, esp. from de Vogüé, you should seize upon it. It is truly the most feminine and mysterious wine that has ever been fashioned. And of course beneath the “soft,” beguiling, wildly fragrant surface aspect lies a core of strength that descends right to the center of the earth.

I am in agreement that the vocabulary of gender might not be the most productive in truly conveying a wine’s essence. But I think it is incredibly useful to think of the wine tasting experience as a dialogue, and we bring all of ourselves to this dialogue – our sexuality, our history, our understandings and misunderstandings about the world. Maybe it’s time to dust off the Martin Buber text from the Philosophy survey class that we haven’t thought about in ages.

I am not sure about the future of wine criticism or wine writing, but I think that it is always useful to think about the tools that expand our experience and consciousness, that make us more complete human beings. I sincerely believe that wine (like sexuality) can be something like a holy sacrament that brings us to a more rarified, ecstatic realm of experience. I’m going out now in the driving rain – maybe the universe is telling me that I need to take a cold shower.

Marketing aspect aside, I’m not sure the dichotomy that exists in what men drink and what women drink is quite so clear cut—there’s a gaping split on the men as far as I’m concerned. While I will give you that most women are not drinking the high-octane wines that line our store shelves, men are not exclusively flocking to them either. There are two camps of men wine drinkers from what experience has shown me: those that chase the steroid-like trophy wines and those that could give a shit about muscle and instead prefer the soft curvature and subtlety of a wine that doesn’t knock you on your ass. Hell, those men even pick up a glass of (gasp) white wine in public once in a while.

Either way, to purposely direct your wine to a certain consumer group is certainly, as Meg said, to forfeit “some degree of your wine’s rightful claim to broader relevancy and appeal.” Why point a laser when you can cast a flood lamp?