The Many Faces of the ‘Wine Mom’
She’s a mother and she drinks wine. Technically, that’s all it takes to join the ranks of “wine moms,” and yet the phrase has come to represent so much more than motherhood and wine enjoyment.
A wine mom, alone, is someone who likes a drink to take the edge off of parenting, and who’s willing to poke fun at that fact. But en masse, wine moms have come to represent (for some) troublesome trends in modern parenting, or even comfortable middle-class complacency. So should you label any mom who likes to drink wine a “wine mom”? That turns out to be a complicated question. The wine mom is either a beleaguered but sympathetic figure, or a subtly sinister one—it depends on whom you ask.
Moms who enjoy wine certainly existed before the internet, but it’s the internet that catapulted the wine mom to meme stardom. In the mid-2010s, as it became commonplace for moms to joke online about drinking wine to cope with the stresses of motherhood: Self-identifying wine moms began to poke fun at themselves , , and . “The most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink,” goes a particularly ubiquitous meme. “Wine is to moms what duct tape is to dads. ,” says another. “Motherhood—powered by love, fueled by coffee, .” Google has in the United States for the past several years. Maybe people are searching for to give as gifts for Mother’s Day and the winter holidays, or maybe when mothers and kids spend time together over those holidays, one or both parties get curious about wine moms, and who qualifies as one.
