Wine Market Council launches promotional campaign

Food & Drink Weekly, Sept 8, 2003

The Wine Market Council, which represents wineries, growers and distributors, has launched a $2 million ad campaign with the slogan "kick'n back," aimed at changing the image of wine as a drink only for formal occasions into an everyday beverage, representatives for the group said recently. To kick-start the campaign, the group will issue a series of advertisements with a debut on September 26 in People magazine to urge Americans to think of wine as "compatible with casual, contemporary lifestyles."

"We would like to suggest more occasions, more everyday occasions," said David Freed of WineVision, an industry strategic planning group. "Instead of grabbing water, soda or beer, we would like for them to consider grabbing a glass of chardonnay."

"There's a tremendous opportunity in making wine a more casual and common part of American life," said John Gillespie, president of Wine Market Council. If roughly 28 million occasional wine drinkers--persons who drink wine less often than once a week--each buy an additional bottle of wine each month, demand for wine in the U.S. market would grow 11 percent in a given year, Gillespie said.

The ad campaign comes amid concerns over how to turn young adults into wine drinkers and how to keep them from being daunted by some 6,000 wine labels in the U.S. market. Moreover, the United States has relatively anemic consumption compared with other wine-making countries. Americans drink about 2 gallons of wine per year per capita, compared with 2.7 in neighboring Canada, 4.6 in the United Kingdom and 15 gallons in France. "There is a lot room for growth, but you need to make it more part of the culture," said Peter Byck, chief executive of Winery Exchange Inc., a developer of private-label wines in California.