“What Every Woman Should Know About Wine” was published in 1974, the same year the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed by Congress, allowing women to apply for credit cards without having their husband’s or father’s authorization. Fried had already been working as a freelance journalist for well over a decade, mostly focused on writing about travel, and through her travels in France during the 1960s, she became more interested in wine — the varietals, the winemaking process, the people dedicated to its craft.
“Wine writing just sort of evolved,” she says today from her apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. “I discovered that wine could be a subject, that I could tell a story. A particular grape can be so interesting.”
Her work, appearing in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and other periodicals, caught the attention of an editor at Doubleday who already had the title and topic of the book in mind. “Women were just breaking into a lot of different fields,” recalls Fried, “and the idea that these things — like wine — should be more open and accessible to women was just beginning.”
A practical how-to guide with literary flair, the book still holds up 50 years later. Why swirl wine in the glass? “Swirling helps expose the wine to the air, which in turn expands the wine’s bouquet. … Watch how the wine runs down the sides of the glass. In thin legs? Probably a light wine. In sheets? A full, heavy wine.” How to gain the respect of a sommelier? “Let him know by your words that you know wines, let him know by your attitude that you like wines. … But if you are determined to establish your place in the wine world, be prepared to make your own choice.”
But she also used the book to highlight scientific research that showed that women in fact had the biological advantage over men when it came to both taste and smell — research that has been verified and expanded upon since. “Men were not very happy when the news came out that women had better taste abilities,” says Fried, chuckling.
Marsha Palanci, a longtime friend, met Fried more than 40 years ago while working with the French government to import wines to the United States. “She’s always been a journalist, first and foremost,” Palanci says. “Eunice had a very fine palate, and she knew a lot about wine, but she did not embrace the technical speak. She wrote for the consumer, and I respected her tremendously for that.”
Palanci recalls taking Fried and other journalists to a wine tasting in Austria in the 1980s with Georg Riedel, 10th-generation owner of the historic glassware company, who presented a wide array of wines in a similarly wide array of varietal-specific glasses. “Eunice raises her hand and says, ‘Americans are just learning about wines, and we don’t have space in our homes for 12 bordeaux glasses, 12 burgundy glasses and so forth. Have you thought about designing an all-purpose glass?’” recalls Palanci. “He looked at her like she had three heads, but it took Eunice to pose that honest, practical question for her readers.”
Did Riedel ever introduce such practical glassware for its consumers? Yes, it did — although it took several years for the company to catch up with the need Fried had already identified.
“Decades before Stanley Tucci went to Italy, Eunice was translating international culture to Americans,” says Kimberly Voss, a journalism professor at the University of Central Florida and author of “The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community.” “She was normalizing the idea that wine was something that anyone could have.”
This breaking down of the snobbery so pervasive among wine connoisseurs is a common theme throughout Fried’s 1974 book. On one page, she writes blithely about everything from a trockenbeerenauslese to a beaujolais, implying that any woman can learn this language just as easily as a man. “There really were hardly any women writing about wine at that time,” says Fried, “so when you start out as one of the few, you feel like you have to be very, very careful. It was a little frightening because I knew I couldn’t afford to make a mistake.”
Fried still wasn’t afraid to poke fun at the male-dominated wine world. In a chapter titled “Breaking the Wine Society Barrier,” she notes somewhat facetiously that if a woman would like to gain membership into the exclusive Physicians’ Wine Appreciation Society, then she should either choose her next doctor based on his wine-tasting ability and get invited or, alternatively, enter medical school.
The “boys’ club” mentality was certainly no joke, however. Margaret Stern, who was a young woman working in public relations for the wine industry when she met Fried in the late 1960s, remembers how carefully Fried presented herself. “She was always dressed to the nines and utterly gracious,” Stern says. “She had a view that women had to be perfect if we were going to succeed.” Stern herself remembers being invited to meetings of the almost exclusively male Wine Importers Club, which met monthly at Manhattan’s Union League Club, and where she was allowed to enter the building only through the kitchen. “You had to be tough,” she says. “Eunice was strong as hell, but she doesn’t come across as tough, so it must have been something to navigate.”
She was certainly tough enough to spend a year living in a barn in France while writing her 1986 book, “Burgundy: The Country, the Wines, the People,” an evocative deep dive into a region often overlooked in favor of Bordeaux that was praised by Hugh Johnson, co-author of “The World Atlas of Wine,” as a “book of revelations.” Fried captures her readers from the start, writing: “I found a Burgundy not conveyed through vintage charts and vineyard lists. I lived in a rustic country full of grace and vigor. I drank wines as sensuous as liquid silk. I met people who are as much a part of the land as the vines and stones and oak trees are. Burgundy takes hold of you and does not let you go.”
“It became a great passion for me,” she says of her fascination with the region, “but I did have to wear more clothes to go to sleep in that cold barn than most people wear to the movies.”
Fried’s son, Jonathan, remembers his childhood with his mom as influential to his own path as a professional actor. “I identified with the fact that my mother was a writer — an artist,” says Jonathan, 64. “I didn’t understand wine, but I understood that creative inspiration and her determination.”
Today, the same cozy apartment where Fried raised Jonathan is filled with books about wine, photographs of her travels to vineyards around the world and a meticulous archive of hundreds of articles written over more than 60 years. Her annual Christmas party is still a fond memory among her friends, when Fried would bring together an array of wine enthusiasts from all parts of her life: “She would serve champagne and her homemade dolmades, the best I’ve ever had,” reminisces Palanci. “Everyone killed to get an invitation to Eunice’s party.”
But ultimately, it’s the words, not the wine, that really tell the story. “Eunice has always been an artist and a craftsman, and she wanted to make every single word count,” says Palanci. “Her writing is just an absolute joy to read.”
