(FT) - Do women have a different relationship with wine to men? I feel quite strongly that — as consumers, at least — they do. In fact, in wine terms, I would actively dislike being a man. Wine joins cars and suiting as a heavily freighted social signifier. Society expects men to know about wine and thinks worse of them if they commit vinous faux pas. Women, on the other hand, are not expected to know anything about wine — witness most waiters’ automatic offer of the preserve taste to the man in the party.

Men’s status is too often measured by the bottles they choose from a wine list or to serve at home. “Is this grand or expensive enough for my boss/client/friends?” seems to be a common masculine concern over wine, whereas “Do I feel like drinking/sharing this?” would be its more carefree female equivalent.

This gender divide has nothing to do with a man’s tasting ability. As has been well documented, in very general terms (and this is far from a personal claim), women have superior tasting abilities to men, performing more precisely and consistently in experiments.

I had the pleasure last month of sitting in on a session at the Digital Wine Communications Conference (as the European wine bloggers’ love-in has been renamed) entitled “We Don’t Need More Women in Wine”. The thesis of Felicity Carter, editor-in-chief of Meininger’s international wine business magazine, was that women are already the most powerful economic force in the world’s wine market. As she pointed out, the US is (at long last) the world’s biggest consumer of wine and here women constitute 59 per cent of regular wine purchasers and 50 per cent of occasional wine purchasers. She also reminded us that according to research company Nielsen, roughly seven bottles in every 10 sold in Britain’s omnipotent supermarkets are bought by women. The same is true in Germany, the UK’s rival as major European wine importer.