Wine X Magazine and the Wine Brats find a young new market for one of America's oldest products.

"Bottoms up" is probably the last phrase you'd hear after being handed a goblet of chardonnay, but Darryl Roberts is looking to change that.

As the founding editor and publisher of Wine X Magazine, Roberts is trying to turn Generation X hip to wine. The inspiration to start the magazine came when Roberts, a self-proclaimed wine lover, realized that younger drinkers weren't swilling zinfandels or pinot noirs.

"I found that younger people were simply intimidated by wine," says Roberts, who claims the wine industry has exacerbated the problem.

Turned off by the pretentious and parvenu image created by companies, the younger set on the whole imbibes more low-brow beverages, such as beers and microbrews. If that trend continues, Roberts says, it will cause the profit margins at vineyards to evaporate.

He's right. According to wine industry reports, only 4 percent to 6 percent of Generation X adults (21- to 35-year-olds) drink wine, compared to the national average of 46 percent. Moreover, almost all of those core drinkers are over 40: Baby Boomers who first adopted the spirit as their drink of choice during the high-flying Bacchanal '80s. Since the Boomers have stretched past their 50s and graduated from the bar and club scene, wine growers have seen their sales slip almost 10 percent since 1982. And Roberts suspects that the sale of wine will drop off even further if wine insiders don't redirect their focus.

For the most part, wine advertisements depict gray-haired couples sipping gleefully on glasses of cabernet at haughty five-star restaurants. Wine festivals and tastings are no better, catering to wine industry individuals instead of the general public and charging prices that humble the paychecks of entry-level workers.

"Young people have been sent the message that they can't afford the sophistication of wine," Roberts says, and he thinks that's poppycock. "It doesn't take any more money or any more sophistication to enjoy a glass of wine than it does a glass of milk. You either like it, or you don't. And until the industry embraces this concept, until the industry gets off its high horse and stops believing its own propaganda, wine will continue to only reach a very small percentage of the American population - a percentage that, as each year passes, continues to decrease," Roberts exclaimed during a recent speech.

But how do you tempt a group of consumers that is skeptical of advertisements and marketing targeted toward them? A group that already has a preconceived negative notion of the product, but that also has discretionary cash and is looking to spend it? By changing the rules, as Roberts has done with Wine X, the blasphemous brother to traditional wine publications. "This isn't your parents' wine magazine," explains Roberts. "Wine X isn't about black ties, wine auctions or how to do Napa Valley on $1,000 a day. It's about giving people what they want: wine, food and an intelligent slice of vice!"

Wine X serves up that combination in a slick package that is soaked with scathing satire aimed directly at the esoteric style of the wine-writing genre. For instance, departments range from The Surreal Gourmet, in which VH-1 celebrity Bob Blumer serves up offbeat culinary concepts; Sex, Wine & Rock 'n Roll, features how to pair wine with romance and music; and the most popular feature: X-Rated Wines, Wine X's answer to the popular 100-point wine-rating scale.

Dismissing the traditional wine grading system as feckless, Roberts said in one press statement: "With so much emphasis having been placed on rating wines on the 100-point scale, I think we've lost perspective of what wine is really about. Wine is about passion. It's about the total experience, from the environment you're in, to the people you're with, to the music you're listening to."

To put an end to the archaic system, Wine X critics judge a bottle on a system of one to three Xs - with three being "exceptionally cool" - and offer easy-to-swallow descriptions such as, "Like an amoeba: simple but has its place in the food chain." Or, to describe an Australian merlot, like "a koala bear eating boysenberry Jell-O in a eucalyptus tree wearing a thong."

The irreverent rhetoric and cryptic reviews seem to be hitting the mark. In its less than one-year existence, the publication has captured more than 8,000 subscriptions and boasts a circulation of just over 25,000. With the goal of making the world's most important (and intimidating) beverage accessible to a younger generation, Wine X has established a youthful and loyal core readership. Roberts says. "This segment of the population is driving the Information Revolution. And Wine X Magazine is going to be right there providing fuel for that revolution."

Of course, Roberts is also hoping that advertisers from the industry will provide some of that rocket fuel. Although the magazine has done its job on the content end, one problem the 37-year-old publisher has faced is getting advertisers to submit ads that fit with the magazine's style. Many of the conventional old-style bottle shots and vineyard ads are still splattered between the publication's funky graphics and design.

"The wine industry is a conservative industry, and for the most part, they don't get the magazine," says Roberts. "That's fine, but they should at least understand why the magazine is important."

For Richer or Pour-er

Roberts isn't alone in his quest to loosen the proverbial tie of the wine industry. Another group, dubbed the Wine Brats, took a pledge to break down the barriers for Gen-Xers that have developed around wine and its mystique.

The group, which runs as a non-profit, consists of three founders, have a shared interest in the cause: Each of them hail from famous wine families. Jeffrey Bundschu from Gundlach-Bundschu Winery, Jonathan Sebastiani from Viansa Winery, and Michael Sangiacomo from Sangiacomo Vineyard met at college and found that wine was not a welcome addition among their peers at parties.

"Most people were intimidated by wine. You can't pronounce anything, and then you can't even see the bottles in a restaurant because they are all in the back. There was a fear factor, and the perception is that it's really expensive, and it's all 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,'" says the group's executive director Joel Quiggly.

To transform that notion, the three teamed up, and with their parents' blessing (and backing) officially formed the Wine Brats five years ago.

The methods that the group uses to accomplish that task are unorthodox, to say the least, but the stunts have grabbed the attention of drinkers and the wine industry. For instance, the inaugural event that the group planned was at a restaurant opening in San Francisco. When a young pair of diners came in and ordered martinis or beers with their meals, the Wine Brats would go up to the table and accost them.

"Why didn't you order wine with your food?" they'd ask.

The patrons were then asked to take a sip of their beer and a bite of their food. Then they were given a glass of wine and asked if it complemented the food better.

"Nothing goes better with food than wine. Wine just rules," Quiggly states. "It does things to food that nothing else can do."

Most of the customers agreed with those sentiments, and the publicity that the group received upstaged the restaurant on its premier.

To date, there are more than 45 Wine Brats chapters nationally, and vineyards such as Beringer, Gallo-Sonoma, Kendall-Jackson and Sebastiani donate thousands of dollars each year to fund events that the group hosts.

The group's most hyped affairs thus far have been their Wine Raves, a roving party that is a collaborative effort between Roberts and the Wine Brats. Unlike other sedate sipping soirees, Wine Raves are a fusion of food, fashion, art and music.

The traveling fete recently landed in Boston at the Karma Club. There, wine revelers swirled among the tasting booths as they nibbled on hors d'oeuvres from local area restaurants. But beyond the elements that are to be expected at wine tastings, a whole night of surprises was planned. At 7:30, a delivery team arrived with boxes of pizza for the partygoers. Around 8:00 daring women were invited on stage to have their hair styled in wine-inspired 'dos (think grapes as barrettes), and on the far corner of the dance floor that was pumping out acid jazz and trip-hop, a local artist attacked a canvas with acrylics and auctioned off the finished piece at the end of the night.

The Wine Raves are a success for the groups involved because they incorporate elements that are already part of the Gen-X lifestyle, Quiggly says.

"Everybody [in this market] gets their hair done. Everybody digs music. So you have all these other elements that are of interest to them, and we're not just making people walk around tables and sip on things and be intimidated," he says. "You come to the Wine Rave, and you've got fashion going on, you've got acid-jazz grooving in the back. I think that people would probably shudder that we had pizza delivered, but who doesn't love pizza - and it goes great with wine!"

Quiggly may have stumbled onto the magic potion that marketers have been searching for to melt the cold hearts Gen Xers have developed toward target marketing, but he explains that it's hard to convince people to come over to your product. The trick, he says, is to bring the product to the people. "We will come where you like to hang out because we dig the music that you dig, and it is not fake," he explains. "It's the stuff that we already love and the way that we like to do things."

The quagmire that the wine industry - and many others for that matter - have fallen into is understanding what Gen Xers will react to. Advertisements aimed at Generation Next usually focus on extreme sports, loud music or plaid flannel. That's not the sub-group that wine companies should be targeting. "Not everyone between the ages of 21 and 36 is alike," Quiggly says. "Everyone is skewed to the idea of 'Oh, Generation X, they're radical and alternative.' I would say that by no means are they all like that. I agree: Let's reach people in their 20s, but let's reach those who are positioned to make wine part of their life."

Instead of reaching an audience through Rolling Stone, Quiggly says that wine companies would be smart to put their money in publications such as Modern Bride or Vogue. Young adult women constitute one of the target population segments for wine. In fact, the Wine Market Council is preparing this fall for test marketing next February that will be aimed at occasional wine drinkers, many of whom are in their 30s. The ads, which will promote wine as an any-occasion beverage, rather than something to be saved for special times, will air on programs such as "Ally McBeal," which has a large, young female viewership.

The rest of the wine industry is starting to follow suit. Stone Creek, for example, beamed in wine for a recent Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas, and SouthCorp sponsored the Los Angeles Salsa (dancing) Competition. Vineyards such as Canandaigua and Sutter Home have also developed wines infused with fruit flavors. The hope is that the fruity concoctions will have a success similar to wine coolers, the tingly refreshing beverages introduced in the '80s that were a hit with young female drinkers.

Quiggly says his goal isn't to redirect the wine industry's focus. Rather, he and Roberts just want to see the industry give due respect to a generation whose sheer size should send marketing people scurrying. That, and maybe witnessing twenty somethings slam down some Chianti at a bar.

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