Sex, Sexism and the Natural Wine Label

Monday, 21 July, 2014
Rémy Charest, Punch Drink
Would you drink–or serve–a wine called “Big Titties” or “Panty Remover”? Most people’s answer would likely be “absolutely not.” However, if you’ve dined at some of the country’s top restaurants, you may well have.

Those are in fact the names of two well-liked wines in the loosely defined category of “organic/natural”: Grololo by Domaine Pithon-Paillé in Anjou, and Piège à Filles by Touraine producer Les Capriades. Only the names are in French, which is likely why these kinds of labels have largely gone unquestioned in North America. Grololo is a pun on grolleau, the Loire variety from which it’s made, and “lolos” is a somewhat childish word for breasts. Piège à Filles would literally be translated as “girl trap,” but “panty dropper” or “panty remover” describes the idea more, er, faithfully.

There have been other examples of such “sexy” (or is that sexist?) labels within the community of natural winemakers. Pascal Simonutti has produced bottles featuring a full-frontal nude photograph of 1970s pornstar Brigitte Lahaie (in magnum, of course). Another, Cyril Alonso, put out a cuvée of gamay nouveau called Cougar, with a condom under a peel-back label and a slogan that translates to “I like them young.”

More recently, there was a fair amount of discussion surrounding one of the most explicit labels, a recent vintage of J’en Veux (“I want some”) a cuvée by Jura superstar Jean-François Ganevat. It features a drawing of a woman, shown neck to thighs, with her hand in her underwear. Ganevat has added more headless naked women to the labels of two cuvées for his new négociant wines, Cuvée Madelon and De Toute Beauté. On Twitter, writer and ex-sommelier Aaron Ayscough reacted by saying: “Ganevat: the Dov Charney of Natural Wine. Discuss.”

Another example comes from Alice Bouvot and Charles Dagan, the couple who run Domaine de l’Octavin, in Jura. They created an unfiltered bubbly called Foutre d’Escampette, a pun on the French expression “prendre la poudre d’escampette” (“to make an escape”), with the word “foutre” added in, the French word for cum. An… un-disgorged wine called “escaped semen”? The association of substances is unusual, to say the least, but that didn’t stop a French natural wine blogger from calling it “easy to swallow” in a review.

This risqué trend has also gone beyond France. South African winemaker Craig Hawkins recently released a bottling of his El Bandito line featuring a full-length photo of a voluptuous, tattooed naked woman seen from behind. And while in Austria, recently, Alice Feiring spotted a label featuring a naked woman seen through a keyhole, and wondered if men would ever get sexualized on labels by female winemakers.

Using sex to sell alcohol isn’t exactly a new idea, but the natural winemakers seem to do it in a rather more in-your-face way. “And it isn’t equal opportunity, it is sexist,” pointed out Alice Feiring, when asked about this provocative trend in labeling. “Why not put a cock on a label? If we’re going to do it, let’s go all out.”

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