What you say? Wine experts aren’t qualified? No, they are eminently qualified—just ask them. They hold many pieces of paper which show that they have undergone hours and days and years of rigorous study and have passed the most excruciating of tests. My hat is off to them. They just aren’t suitable.

How can this be?

Herein lies the humor: it’s why they had to study so much. Did you ever notice how so many of these experts are Old Guys? Yes, it takes time, they say. Sometimes a lifetime to amass the body of knowledge required to speak with authority about wine.  Spun positively, this means that that the learning never ends. Interpret it a different way, and you might just say some people will never learn.

There are naturals in this game, and luckily they are coming to the fore. And most of them, you will be quick to notice, are young women. Very young women. Andrea Immer leaps to mind, as well as Jancis Robinson (okay she’s not exactly 24 now, but she started a while ago), Leslie Sbrocco, Karen MacNeil and Natalie MacLean. They are all young, accomplished wine writers.

Yeah, there are also a few young guys (the exceptions to the rule) who can do it effortlessly, but why do all the old men still seem to rule the Wine Expert roost? With respect, I contend that the Old Guys are, by nature, the wrong people for the task—and women are, in general, the right ones.

I could back up my argument with that old riff about wine and money and men and glass ceilings, but I’d only be partially correct. It’s true that our current dynamic started decades ago at the end of prohibition, when women knew their place—which apparently wasn’t in the cellar. But to me the interesting question is not how women’s wine wisdom was squelched in the past. Rather, I’d like to discuss what makes the female wine perspective so valuable today, now that it is finally enjoying a much-deserved moment in the spotlight.

Am I saying you can’t rely on a man’s opinion when it comes to wine? No; it just means that most of them had to work harder to produce that opinion. And following, why you’ll see more and more women in what was once considered almost solely a man’s domain.

A TALENT FOR TASTING

In 2000, Yale’s Linda M. Bartoshuk published her now-famous study of genetic differences related to palate sensitivity, and found that the world was divided up along a bell-curve of three basic “tasting groups”: supertasters, tasters (by far the largest group) and non-tasters. Supertasters were described as “tasting a neon world of flavors,” while non-tasters’ palates discerned a “pastel” version of these same flavors. “Tasters” —that’s most of us—lie somewhere in between.

What is truly interesting is that 35% of women are supertasters, compared to only 15% of men. Both male and female supertasters have boatloads more fungiform papillae (those bumpy critters on your tongue that house the actual taste buds). But females have an even greater weapon: hormones.

Researchers at Philadelphia’s Monell Chemical Senses Center took a close look at the retronasal cavity above and behind the tongue and mouth, where the finer aromas and flavors of wine and foods are detected. It seems that women of child-bearing years (and post-menopausal women on hormone-replacement therapy) could detect and distinguish low-level odors against both clean air and a range of other odors, whereas most men and many post-menopausal women could not.

Further, Monell’s research showed that female supertasters tended to dislike the flavors of sugars and fats, whereas male supertasters love sugar and fat. They also noted that the nose is the first thing to go in both sexes due to age damage. What does this mean in the world of old, male wine tasters? The news is not good: younger women have it over men in spades.

But let’s get back to the fat-and-sugar concept, which is important. The most-followed raters tend to give 90+ point ratings to hugely-extracted, concentrated, ultra-dry heavily tannic reds with lots of oak. This would seem to suggest that these raters fit into the category of “tasters” or “non-tasters”—those who need huge flavors in order to get their palates moving. Worse still, according to Bartoshuk, non-tasters also have a tendency to prefer the flavors of ethyl alcohol—so the higher the alcohol content the better. And, if you look at the wines that score big with the Old Guys, not only are they overly-extracted exclamation-points-in-a-bottle, they are also very, very high in alcohol. What better business to get into if you like the taste of alcohol than sampling wine, eh, Miles?

At the end of the day, these guys have difficulty with anything subtle. They consider more delicate wines “wimpy.” Basically, they can’t taste them, and consequently give them low scores. It’s one more very compelling reason you might want to look at who is rating your wine before you accept their “number” at face value.

And what about yours truly? Myself, I’m a pinot-loving sugar-and-fat guy; what Tim Hanni—another great palate-deconstructor and a Master of Wine—describes as a “fruit smoothie.” That makes me one of the lucky 15% of men who fall in the “supertaster” category. You can check it out to find out which type you are.

PSYCHOLOGY

Okay, so women have estrogen and progesterone on their side, probably so that they could, back in the old cave days, figure out if some foodstuff was going to kill the entire clan, and so they could sniff out which child was which in the middle of the night while the old man was out hunting, scouting and maybe even killing the occasional enemy clansman.

So men, with all of that hunting, scouting and killing, had testosterone working for them. How does this competitive, win-at-all-costs mentality play into the Wine Expert game? Well, we have a rigorous championship that one must endure to become a Master of Wine. Even Tim Hanni, who got into the whole deal primarily in order to debunk it, is still an A-type (in my humble, A-type opinion).

First of all, Tim is one of only 20 Masters of Wine in the US (there are only 250 worldwide). To achieve this status, one must pass an extraordinarily difficult multi-year, multi-level exam. Of the 20 US “MWs,” only three are women. There are many more Master Sommeliers, since the testing is merely ridiculously difficult, as opposed to impossibly so: 74 in the US, and again, only a handful of females. Why?

It’s rigged, baby. It’s run by men, and to “win,” to get to the tippy-top, you must spend years memorizing endless arcane facts that only the other Masters of Wine really care about. This wealth of wine trivia does not, in the opinion of most run-of-the-mill wine people, really count for much when it comes to actually purchasing and enjoying wine. It’s kind of like a stamp collector who can tell you in which year and on what press using which inks a particular rare Yugoslavian stamp was produced. That’s nice. But I’ve got something that needs to go in the mail today. Do you know where the nearest post office is? No?

So, if it’s not really helping anyone out, why all the hoopla about memorizing stuff and taking tests, with rather little emphasis on organileptic analysis (wine tasting)? I’d propose that it has to do with the fact that men and women naturally play the wine game in completely different ways – and the rules were set by men.

Many young women, once they have been given a glass of typical wine from region X, Y or Z, can more quickly and more readily identify these same wines than their male counterparts (as proven in just such a test at Monell), even without any other knowledge of the wines. Men, on the other hand, need to learn a whole bunch of tricks to achieve the same proficiency. Comparing smells to other smells, for instance. It smells like lavender, it smells like peach, it smells like grapefruit. These techniques are a means of picking out a particular chemical cue in order to puzzle out a wine’s origin. More grapefruit than peach? Probably Sauvignon Blanc. More peach than apricot? Probably Viognier.

Women are much more gestalt about the matter. It just smells like Gewurztraminer, and maybe more peachy than the normal apricot that a lot of old guys might look for in Gewurztraminer. That’s why the old guy thought it was Viognier, and why he was wrong. And it’s also why she found it interesting and refreshing and gave it a high score, and why he thought it atypical and bad and gave it a low score.