The Case Against the White-Wine Emoji by Stephen Harrison

The Philosophical Case Against the White-Wine Emoji

I suspect that some readers are, uh, distracted by other news today. But here's my latest article in case you’d like to puzzle over something else.

In July, the Unicode Technical Committee was a bit of a buzzkill: It announced that for now, it would not add a white-wine emoji to Unicode’s standard emoji mix. The meeting minutes noted that the UTC’s Emoji Subcommittee would “Continue to consider ‘white wine’ emoji for future addition.” If certain news outlets are to be believed, white-wine drinkers everywhere were devastated. In a piece titled, “The Petition for the White Wine Emoji Has Been Sadly Rejected,” People encouraged its readers to continue the fight and “keep hope alive that one day you’ll see a white wine emoji at a keyboard near you!” Food & Wine magazine opined that the white wine emoji “has generated plenty of support and, frankly, seems inherently logical.”

The issue is not that the UTC is made up of teetotalers or beer partisans. In fact, there are already emoji options to display a glass of red wine and sparkling wine flutes. But what Kendall-Jackson and other winemakers behind the campaign proposed to Unicode was the option to expand the wine glass emoji so that users could red, pink, or white wine. Unicode already has a standardized approach such that distinct emoji forms like the red heart emoji and black heart emoji display the correct colorings across platforms, but the organization is continuing to deliberate when it will offer different color options for objects.

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Best,
Stephen