Tag Archives: 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

The Baby Boomers had Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, but the You Tubers popular with Gen X and the Millennials don’t bother with wine

The Wine Curmudgeon has solved wine’s most vexing problem – why younger people don’t drink wine. The reason? Their cooking shows don’t feature it the way the Baby Boomer cooking shows did. Hence, the youngest generations have never learned that wine is just as much a part of dinner as plates and letting the pots soak.

Don’t look so surprised. Yes, there are other reasons – wine’s complexity, its cost, and the country’s emerging neo-Prohibitionism. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the peaks of the U.S. wine boom, first in the 1970s and early 1980s and then in the 1990s, happened at the same time as wine-savvy cooking shows became a fixture on PBS.

Julia Child served wine with her meals, even though in those long ago days it was called things like Mountain Red. So did Jacques Pepin. So did Lidia Bastianich. So did Justin Wilson. So did Ina Garten, even though she never seemed to much care about it. In fact, wine was such a part of these shows that Julia Child contemporary Graham Kerr used it as shtick.

But the people who cook for today’s generations – many quite talented – rarely have alcohol anywhere in the kitchen, even to cook with. Frankie Celenza? Nope. Molly Yeh? Nope. Alison Roman? Cider maybe, but nary a glass of wine.

In fact, I’ve pitched several of them about adding wine to their shows. What better for their straightforward, cost-conscious recipes than the Wine Curmudgeon’s straightforward, cost-conscious wine advice? Alison, pal, I know just the $10 wine for your Internet-famous chickpea stew.

Never heard back from anyone. Which, I suppose, is understandable. Once you’ve experienced Alvin Zhou’s 30-pound Oreo, what does wine matter?

Pepin has said wine was crucial to what he was trying to do, that it was important to introduce U.S. viewers to the joys of wine and food. He also thought it was important to point out that wine doesn’t have to be expensive: “I am not a snob about wine, you know. I usually buy a bottle under $10 or whatever, if you know what to buy.”

My guess is that this change started 20 years ago, more or less around the time America’s Test Kitchen became popular. Its format rarely includes wine, and former host Christopher Kimball told me wine was entirely too hard. Instead, it focused on more “practical” matters, where wine advice wasn’t seen as helpful to its audience as finding the best saute pan or the best supermarket chocolate chips.

Which, frankly, is the younger generations’ loss. Wine is a lot of fun; just strip away the snobbery and the cost. That’s what this $8 rose was invented for. Anyone who appreciates a 30-pound Oreo should appreciate that.