They are reputed to be civic-minded, sociable, well-connected and wired; optimistic, confident and spoiled.

But there’s something more pressing the wine industry wants to know about today’s youth: Will they drink chardonnay?

Millennials, the 75 million North Americans born in the decades between disco and Dubya, have started to draw their first paycheques, and that means an explosion in discretionary spending power. That’s good news for purveyors of such millennial necessities as iPhones, $250 designer sneakers and custom ring tones.

It’s also the driving force behind a spate of new marketing initiatives aimed at dressing wine down in baggy pants, as it were. With labels such as Dog House, Naked Grape and Sacre Bleu, the industry is borrowing the party-time imagery of beer and spirits and mixing it with smooth-sipping blends crafted specifically for fruit-craving twentysomethings.

“Wine is starting to play up its fun side,” says Gary Glass, president of White Rocket Wine, a new California venture aimed exclusively at young people. The company was launched by billionaire Jess Jackson and his wife Barbara Banke, principals in an empire that includes prominent California brands Kendall-Jackson, Arrowood and La Crema.

White Rocket is at least the third venture launched within the past year to aim specifically at new wine drinkers - particularly millennials, the oldest of whom are in their late 20s - joining Underdog Wine Merchants, a unit of San Francisco-based giant Wine Group, and Sonoma Vineyards, which was recently spun out of Rodney Strong Vineyards of Healdsburg, Calif.

One of White Rocket’s founding brands, transferred from Mr. Jackson’s existing portfolio to give the company a running start, is Dog House, a popular “critter” label that leans heavily on the inevitable pet-related double entendres (”two paws up”) and a cute cartoon label.

White Rocket’s first homegrown wines, meanwhile, won’t be out until later this year or beyond, but Mr. Glass is sanguine about the market’s potential.

“Many millennials are already of drinking age, and many of them will be coming of drinking age over the next few years,” says Mr. Glass, 41. “That’s the largest consumer buying segment, measured by buying power, in the United States. And they have a higher propensity to try wine than Generation X did. So that makes them even more important to the industry.”

According to the Wine Market Council, a U.S. trade organization, millennials have been reaching for corkscrews earlier in life than either Generation X or baby boomers did. In a recent survey, 40 per cent said they drank more wine in 2006 than in the previous year, compared with just 20 per cent for Generation Xers and 13 per cent for boomers.

Still other companies are turning to grassroots marketing initiatives akin to those employed by the music industry to sell existing brands, such as event sponsorships and word-of-mouth “viral marketing” on the Internet. Most notably, London-based giant Diageo last year broke new ground by partnering with Interscope Geffen A&M Records to sponsor a North American concert tour dubbed Uncorked & Unplugged. The 24-date series, with one Canadian stop in Toronto, featured performances by emerging artists such as Sierra Swan and MoZella “paired” to samplings of three Diageo wines, Moon Mountain, Dynamite Vineyards and Solaris.

“One of my favourite moments was at a show in San Diego,” says Helen Mackey, a brand manager with Diageo. “A guy who was probably 28 came up and said to me, ‘This is great; I’m going to buy this wine and take my CD home and listen to this CD with the wine.’ I think in the age where people are tired of being marketed to directly by brands, this was a way to have an experience that is real and true.”

By Beppi Crosariol
Globe And Mail, Canada

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