Women, wine, and wellness: “Mothers’ me-time” in McLaren Vale

This ethnographic study examines women’s participation in South Australian wine tours, and the ways these experiences function as a form of respite, self-care, and identity work. Drawing on ten months’ participant observation, I explore how wine tourism serves as a socially sanctioned space for women to temporarily suspend their everyday roles and responsibilities. I argue that women’s engagement with wine tours represents more than recreational consumption; rather, it constitutes a meaningful practice of boundary-making between domestic obligations and personal autonomy. In this paper, I examine the complex negotiations of gender, leisure, and selfhood that unfold in these liminal spaces of tourism and sensory engagement. The findings demonstrate that wine tours provide women with important opportunities for what participants consistently termed “me-time”—a culturally specific form of temporal and spatial separation that enables identity maintenance, social connection, and emotional replenishment within the context of contemporary Australian motherhood.