Why we need to stop sharing 'wine mum' memes

Not so much about wine itself. I’m quite fond of it and I don’t want to take it away from anyone else - promise!

My gripe is with the incessant marketing of wine to women, especially mothers.

The wine industry has long known that women are a great growth market. For a long time we’ve had ads targeted to women - a la Yellowglen’s iconic "bubbly girl".

Nowadays we have entire ranges for women. For example, Treasury Wine Estate’s global Truvée brand targeted at women aged 30-40, or its emBRAZEN range featuring female trailblazers on the label (with augmented reality through an app) coming to Australia next March.

Wine used to be for everyone but now apparently it’s gendered, much like the evolution (or devolution) of plastic toy bricks into girls’ Lego and boys’ Lego.

But that’s commerce for you. We can shrug and roll our eyes and the proof will be in what we buy or don’t buy.

What bothers me most is the way we are doing the wine industry’s marketing for us in the very way we talk to each other, in person and especially online. It’s the “Facebook wine mum” phenomenon. It’s massive in the United States and it’s huge here too.

You only have to join a few online parenting groups or be friends with a few fellow mothers for the barrage to start. Wine is nicknamed “mummy-juice” or “mummy’s little helper”. Memes declare it’s “wine o’clock” alongside comic pictures of wine glasses three times bigger than your head. Photos of babies wearing jumpsuits emblazoned with “I’m the reason Mummy needs wine”. There’s even a viral video of a corkscrew labelled “mummy’s fidget spinner”, panning to a bottle of white wine, that has clocked up more than 24 million views and has its own t-shirt spin-off.

Cracking jokes about needing wine seems to be a way to perform motherhood to other women in 2018 Australia. It’s the 40-somethings’ equivalent to younger woman sharing diet tips.

I know it’s meant to be a joke but that’s why it’s so insidious; it’s hard to fight back without being called a killjoy. I know I'm a fun friend so I’ll take that risk.

At best it’s condescending, but more realistically it’s normalising hidden alcoholism. At very worst,"wine mum" culture is so ubiquitous, our children pick up on it and absorb the idea that they’re so unlovable we can’t bear to be around them.

I understand being a parent can be hard. I’ve got seven-year-old twins and until recently bed time was a real struggle. I completely relate to the need to find a way to unwind and take the edge off after a hard day. I also know many people have it tougher than me.

I get it. I also know that wine isn’t the only way to relax, and sometimes it makes your problems worse. Having wine as part of a grab gag of stress relief strategies is fine, making it your crutch probably isn’t.

If life really is so stressful you need wine simply to get through the day, maybe it’s time for some changes. If not, then why pretend things are harder than they really are?

Your private stress release strategy is for you to manage. But please, let’s at least cool it on the memes.

The underlying reality is that while alcohol consumption and beer drinking in particular is falling in Australia, wine drinking is bucking the trend, official figures show.

This is mainly driven by women. Research from market research firm Roy Morgan from this year suggests nearly half of all women drink wine in an average four weeks, compared with less than two in five men. In contrast, beer is overwhelmingly drunk by men. Wine also skews to drinkers over the age of 35.

Similarly the government’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey from 2016 – the survey had a sample size of 24,000 and is done every three years – found bottled wine was the most consumed alcohol over all, and it was mainly drunk by women.

The survey also found that people in their 40s and 50s were most likely to exceed the safe alcohol limits of two standard drinks a day. Men are more likely to drink at risky levels than women, but women are catching up. Is that the gender equality we want?

While younger people are more likely to binge, and the survey also points to a weird spike in binge drinking among 60-somethings, the steady imbibing of too much booze, day in, day out, is a hallmark of middle age.

Men in their 40s are the most likely age group to drink at risky levels, while for women it peaks in their 50s, the survey says.

Researcher Dr Janice Withnall, from the University of Western Sydney, says 16 per cent of women in their 30s and 40s are alcohol dependent. In 1990 it was only 5 per cent. In other words, it’s gone from one in 20 women then to one in six women now.

Linked to that is a higher level of alcohol toxicity, alcohol-related diseases, and injury and death by suicide, Dr Withnall says. Most of these women have a strong belief they are not alcohol dependent and therefore do not need help, though they might simultaneously feel guilt and despair and wonder what is wrong with them.

So yeah, it’s a problem.

Even when you don’t personally have a problem with alcohol dependency, the "wine mum" trope is perpetuating a culture where alcohol misuse is normal.

By sharing a meme or making a seemingly harmless joke, you could be enabling your friend’s denial or making it harder for her to deal with a private problem.

The wine industry is already doing a perfectly good job marketing to women. Let’s not do their job for them and market to ourselves as well.

Caitlin Fitzsimmons writes about work, life and money for Fairfax.