Tag Archives: wine and sex

Winebits 666: Wine ads, wine country fires, expensive wine

wine ads
“Come on. ..you know sex sells wine.. even if it doesn’t.”

This week’s wine news: Wine ads are missing the point by emphasizing sex. Plus, a wine country fire update and expensive wine foolishness

• Sex doesn’t sell: A new study, published in the academic journal Sex Roles, casts doubt on whether sex actually sells products. This result should be especially important for wine marketers, who rely on sex almost as often as they do snobbery to sell wine. The Italian study found that women were less likely to find a product attractive and were less likely to purchase it if the product used sexual female models than if the ad was neutral. Men, even more surprisingly, were unaffected by ads’ sexualization. Said the authors: “The present study has practical implications for marketers because it suggests that ‘sex does not sell.’ In addition, considering both the psychological damage and practical inefficacy of sexualized ads, our findings have important implications for public policy.”

• Scorched vines: The Wine Spectator does a fine job recapping this fall’s California wine country wild fires, “More than 200 wineries are in evacuation zones. A few vintners have managed to return to their properties to assess damage in recent days. But evacuation orders remain in place for much of the area, keeping many out.” I did a Napa radio show a couple of weeks ago, and it looked like the worst of the fire season was over. But then the Glass Fire sprang up last week.

• Betting on wine: We’ve written several times about the Kafka-esque reality of Liv-Ex, a stock exchange for the world’s most expensive wines. I mention it again to show one should drink wine instead of investing in it. A smart investor, according to the Liv-Ex article, would have seen a 20 percent return in a decade by investing in specific Robert Parker-favorited wines. Wow — two percent a year? Can’t I get that with a bank CD and then drink the wine?

three reasons

Wine and sex

wine and sexThe Wine Curmudgeon, being a sort of academic these days, understands the need to publish, garner attention for your institution, and prove how wonderful you are. That’s the way the Ivory Tower works in the 21st century, and I’m more than willing to do my bit. But that still doesn’t excuse this kind of behavior — yet another wine and sex study showing that wine and sex make people happy.

This one comes from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where researchers discovered that booze and sex rated highest on the study’s ?pleasure scale, ? beating out volunteering, religion, and childcare. Shocking news, I know.

To its credit, the study looks for legitimacy by noting that governments, faced with policy decisions, want to find out what makes its citizens happy. But even the most loopheaded government (do you hear me, Texas?) has to know that drinking and sex make people happy, while doing housework and being sick, which ranked low on the scale, don’t. So claiming public policy benefit isn’t quite what it seems.

Six years ago, I banned wine health news from the blog, after the infamous Italian study that revealed what every teenage boy has known for as long as there have been teenage boys: If you get a girl drunk, she is more likely to have sex with you, as the noted researcher William Shakespeare discussed. Apparently, little has changed in the wine and health world in those six years.

Finally, this study has been knocking around the cyber-ether for three years. That it showed up a couple of weeks ago when I was looking for something else speaks to the power of Google in determining what we find on the Internet, and that Google thinks we want stories about wine and sex. And yes, I have used the term wine and sex five times in this post to make Google happy; isn’t that what content providers are supposed to do?

Ain’t the Internet grand?