Women Wines and Vineyards. Managing, Innovation and Gender in the Italian Wine Making Sector

Usually women and wine have been related in the demand side of the market. Women’s behaviors in wine consuming is an important field of investigation both for marketers and researches. ‘Female’ wine means today, more and more, the desire to know how to choose a high quality product, pleasure to taste in a conscious way, knowing the characteristics of the wines to match them correctly to the food, and even in the fashion realm. Wine consuming is a distinctive character and a cultural topic also for women in a framework of a higher level of knowledge. Nevertheless, in the last twenty-five years, Italian women have entered the wine making sector with higher professional skills rather than in the past, when the woman’s presence was substantially underrated. Many of them inherited farms and vineyard estates in a female succession line instead of the traditional masculine predominance. The traditional role of the women in the rural family changed and even in the most wealthy landowner families. During the last decades the role played by women has undergone radical transformations both the activity actually performed, for both the internal dynamics: they are increasingly franked by poorly skilled tasks, gradually establishing itself as entrepreneurs. According to the Population Census of 2011, ISTAT Italian rural areas are home to approximately 11 million people (19% of the national population), of which 51% are women. Italian women in the rural provinces account for 40% of employment. Figures job applicants are different: paid employees engaged in the collection and initial processing of the products, women who are the beneficial owners of the company, but not the actual management, women who, while working full time in the family business, covering the role of adjuvant, entrepreneurs who have created sustainable and competitive agricultural enterprises. Also adjacent professions, such as in agronomy, wine tasting and culinary have been more feminized. The managerial role of women has significantly raised both in quantity and in quality, even with the birth of the national association of Women of Wine. Thus, after this factual finding, a research question can be: is there a female specificity in the wine making sector in Italy? The paper reports preliminary results of an exploratory research aiming at describing and interpreting the ‘new’ role of women in the sector, giving some enlightenments on economic and social reasons for the increasing importance of women as entrepreneurs in wine making and marketing. The method followed is qualitative by performing a dozen of face-to-face deep interviews to key- informants, selected in a snowballing scheme among the main Italian female entrepreneurs. Findings regard the history of the Women of Wine National Association, their innovative initiatives in wine marketing, and the first descriptive model of the female entrepreneurial formula.