Follow-up: Wine, younger consumers, and cooking shows

60 cooking shows had a chance to make money from wine; none of them were interested

The post about this generation’s cooking shows and their lack of interest in wine turns out to be more than my sharp-eyed insight or even curmudgeonly ranting. Bill Wallace, a long-time wine sales and marketing executive, invented a way for cooking shows to sell the wine they featured on their episodes.

This came at no risk to the shows, was completely legal, and offered the potential for a nice cash return as well as viewer good will.

So how many shows signed up, Bill?

“I pitched over 60 cooking shows and never received a response,” says Wallace, who has been doing this long enough that he helped Julia Child get wine for a couple of benefit cooking demonstrations during her heyday. “Must be a generational issue.”

Sigh. Is it any wonder I worry about the future of the wine business?

There seem to be a number of things going on here besides an indifference to wine. One reader said she was surprised by the post, since Alison Roman includes wine in her cookbooks. So my guess includes the following:

• YouTube’s adult viewing restrictions, to stop minors from accessing pornography. Videos with alcohol must be labeled for adults only, as I found out when I did the PLMA shoot. So if your target audience includes ages 16 to 18, putting wine in a video will lock them out. So no wine.

• Wine’s cost. Many of today’s YouTube chefs seem to have minimal budgets, given the production values, the lack of editing, and so forth. So buying enough wine to cook with may push the budget over the edge. The catch here is that wine doesn’t show up much on Food Network shows, and one would think they have the budget.

• Our old friend three-tier. Wallace says his proposal was completely legal – vetted by lawyers, even. But as we’ve seen over the years, it’s difficult to expect people who aren’t retailers to understand that. They see how difficult it is to sell wine, what with the layers and layers and layers of red tape and regulation, and then run in the other direction.

In the end, of course, a complete indifference to wine seems to be the primary reason for its lack of acceptance on these cooking shows. But the other stuff doesn’t help, either.

Photo: RODNAE Productions from Pexels