In the book "Weinfrauen - Die besten Winzerinnen Europas und ihre Weine" (Wine Women - Europe's Best Women Winemakers and their Wines), author Rolf Klein and photographer Armin Faber portray more than 40 successful women winemakers from all over Europe.
Winegrowing is traditionally organised in many family estates - women bring up the children, cook, keep house and farm together and do a little marketing for the estate besides. For centuries, their role was ostensibly a secondary one - the farm was run by a man, but without the strength of the (married) woman, most farms would probably have collapsed. Times have changed, and so has the wine business. It is now taken for granted that women run farms and are responsible for the wines in the estate as well as for economic decisions. But the industry is not quite so enlightened and emancipated, because women are just as rare in leading positions in the wine industry as in the rest of our economy.
The book "Weinfrauen - Die besten Winzerinnen Europas und ihre Weine" (Wine Women - Europe's Best Women Winemakers and Their Wines) by author Rolf Klein and photographer Armin Faber now brings together 42 women winemakers from all over Europe, including long-time "Vinissima" chairwoman Roy Blankenhorn, Italian star winemaker Elisabetta Foradori from the Trentino, Eva Clüsserath from the Mosel, as well as women winemakers from Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland and France. Information on 36 other wine women is collected in short form in the appendix. The editor Ria Lottermoser-Fetzer collected and selected them all in two years of research.
The portraits, most of which are quite short, describe the careers of these women and how they work in the estate as well as their wines. It becomes clear that many of the women featured in this book raise their children and take care of their families in addition to their jobs - even though most of them have completed an excellent education and have the best qualifications. More than others, they have to organise the double burden of being a top manager and super mum at the same time. But the book fails to convey these women's understanding of their roles, which on the one hand is fed by the intellectual progress of equal rights, but on the other hand has to assert itself in a deeply conservative, sometimes reactionary milieu. The cracks through these biographies become just as invisible as the special self-confidence that is formed and worked through at these extreme poles in hardly any other industry.
So the book remains on the surface: the narration is consistently positive, occasionally forced admiring - everything wonderful, successful, likeable. And the wines? Made with dedication and care, completely connected to the terroir. What else? The photos come closer to the women's personalities, but the always smiling and often staged gourmet magazine poses show more how well these women have learned to stage themselves in the stereotype of the "wine woman" when it serves their own cause. They know how to do it. That's good!
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