Real women drink red wine

Olivia Pope, the hotshot crisis management adviser on the prime-time soap-drama "Scandal," has a pattern of fretting in her empty apartment at night over an enormous goblet of red wine, a little popcorn on the side.

Over on "The Good Wife," high-powered lawyer Alicia Florrick wants nothing more when she gets home from a day of legal maneuvering than a giant glass of red wine. She reminisces about her pre-legal days as a suburban wife and mother, when "drinking a glass of wine at 5" was her ritual.

The women of "Cougar Town" drink vast amounts of red wine out of whatever is handy — goblet, vase or vat. Claire Underwood, now the first lady in "House of Cards," drinks red wine, alone, at an otherwise empty dining room table. Even Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb, hosts of the fourth hour of the "Today" show, famously have glasses of wine in front of them at a jarringly early hour.

American popular culture always has been awash in alcoholic beverages, but seldom has the drink been wine, red wine in particular. And rarely has it been treated so specifically as a beverage primarily for women, served in oversized goblets and consumed like the after-work cocktails of previous eras.

Alicia and Olivia both profess to love wine, but they also drink to self-medicate, to inure themselves to the jagged emotional leaps in plot that buffet their characters and leave their viewers breathless.

Those who love wine aren't necessarily pleased by these depictions. They see wine as far more than a numbing palliative for heartache and anxiety.

But the way wine is used as a character device in TV shows can tell us a lot about how wine is viewed in popular culture. As much as wine lovers would like to believe that the beverage has gone mainstream, in fact its portrayal as a prop suggests that many Americans still view it as somehow effete, foreign or, at least, no different from any other alcoholic beverage.

As assertive professional women operating often in the sphere of men, the characters must drink red, even in their private moments. They are permitted to be vulnerable, but they can't betray themselves to the audience as white-wine-weak.

No show uses wine to portray character more than "Scandal." It's not enough for the audience to infer that Olivia loves wine from her drinking habits. We have to be reminded of it regularly.

"Everyone has a tell," Olivia's associate, Quinn, says to her. "Yours is wine. Red wine. Rare, complex, fantastic red wine."

As if to drive home that point, in the same episode Olivia stops at a restaurant frequented by her amoral, manipulative father, Rowan. Expecting her, he already has ordered her a glass of wine. She picks it up, takes a swig, and instantly identifies it: "Umm, Château Antoine '91" (a fictional name).

But if she is an expert, Olivia treats even the finest wine as if it were a can of beer. She habitually grabs goblets by the bulb rather than the stem, as a wine lover would. She never swirls and sniffs, the ritual that non-wine drinkers alternately find amusing, affected or annoying. She guzzles rather than sips.

For all her love of red wine, Olivia would appear off-putting if she adopted the mannerisms of the connoisseur. They would seem precious, more appropriate for fops like Frasier and Niles from the sitcom "Frasier," whose connoisseurship was used to connote fastidious vanity.