As a writer I have if anything benefited from being a bit more memorable than most men (the name helps) and, in the early days, from being seated next to the host or principal guest and therefore better placed to get the story than my male counterpart at the other end of the table.
I used to add, however, that life was not nearly as easy for women actually working in the wine trade. For decades I had the feeling that, as in so many other walks of life, much of the hard work was being done by women but they were rarely allowed to occupy the top jobs.
However, in Britain at least, that has recently changed. Conviviality, the biggest wine company in the UK, has had a woman at the helm since 2013 (Diana Hunter top right), when the second biggest company, Enotria, was also run by a woman. The CEO of the third biggest, Berry Bros & Rudd, may be a man but both the head wine buyer and, from December, chair of the board, will be female. Armit and Lay & Wheeler are smaller but still important additional British wine trade examples with a smashed glass ceiling.
But things may not be quite as evenly evolved elsewhere. Australian wine publicist and writer Jane Thomson has actively promoted women-only wine initiatives and conceived the Australian Women in Wine Awards in 2015 to encourage female role models in the traditionally male-dominated Australian wine industry. (I remember on my first visit to Australia in 1981, I was introduced to 'our female winemaker', singular, Pam Dunsford of Chapel Hill. At Australia's famous Roseworthy wine college, she was such an exception that she had to sleep in the sick bay.)
Jane Thomson now has such an array of female winemakers to choose from for her awards that when she staged the third annual awards ceremony in London last month, there were more Australian winemakers than had ever previously been seen together in Australia House, all of them female.
But she has been viciously abused online for her pains. It seems that cyberspace is the last frontier for gender equality; smart women who express an opinion are seen as easy targets by, one assumes, men who are clearly not smart but certainly have an opinion. This, I reckon, is sufficient argument in favour of occasional, if contentious, all-female professional gatherings.
Because the week after attending these awards I was due to speak at one such, the sixth annual Women in Wine Leadership Symposium in New York, I made the special position of women in wine the focus of my weekly email the Friday before last and have never had such a positive and engaged response, from almost as many men as women.
To read more online, click here.