It's no secret. There's a wine boom going on. Thousands of acres around the world are being planted and conned into yielding better wines than humanity has ever enjoyed, yet Gen-X hasn't taken up wine like their Boomer forebears have.

Some in the industry have noticed this needed next wave of wine drinkers are drinking, well, beer and smart cocktails. A handful of wineries are taking advantage of one American magazine fashioned to reach this "lost 40-year-olds.

Darryl M. Roberts is the 36-year-old editor/publisher of Wine X, working out of Santa Rosa, Calif. On the phone -- and sounding a bit like Crispin Glover tempered with a dash of Christian Slater -- Roberts says, "I was hanging out at a lot of clubs and I was talking to a lot of people and it wasn't that Gen-X wasn't drinking; they just weren't drinking wine."

Roberts started in TV in 1985, first working on the last months of Graham Kerr's The Galloping Gourmet. After a number of years at a small production company, he went to work at a few wineries and then used his insights to start a small wine newsletter. That newsletter evolved into the slick colour magazine Wine X.

Roberts says his field research and questionnaires showed that Gen-Xers are "set in their consumption habits in their mid-to-late twenties. That doesn't mean they won't experiment with stuff after that, but what we found out was that if they're drinking Scotch at 27, then they're going to be drinking Scotch when they're 67. And if they're not drinking wine at 27, there's a good possibility they won't drink it when they're 67."

The magazine is clearly geared to a young demographic, well designed along the Ray Gun grunge aesthetic, using text as a design element.

Naturally, there is a Web site. In fact, a lot of the magazine's early development was shaped by instant feedback from the Net. Another site called Wine Brats is a nonprofit organization started the same time as Wine X and actively promotes wine as part of a young lifestyle. Wine X, Wine Brats, and the establishment New York Times co-operatively run a youth wine-chat site called Wine-Rave. Wine-Rave has even gone on the road, staging different young-adult wine events across the U.S. Roberts says Wine X will probably have a touring rave this year, too.

The editorial mix of Wine X is what you'd expect -- music, cool stuff, and cool places to hang out -- but the tone is refreshing. Probably the most impressive and amusing break with a traditional wine magazine is the wine reviews.

Wine writing has become pretty dull and mirthless these days. Rarely does it betray the joys of wine as social and emotional lubricant. The powerful drive to nail every bottle of wine to a rating out of 100 has become oppressive.

Back in his 1986 collection of wine essays, British writer Auberon Waugh offered his own personal corrective, recommending "that wine-writing should be camped up: The writer should never like a wine, he should be in love with it; never find a wine disappointing but identify it as a mortal enemy, an attempt to poison him; sulphuric acid should be discovered where there is the faintest hint of sharpness. Bizarre and improbable side-tastes should be proclaimed: mushrooms, rotting wood, black treacle, burned pencils, condensed milk, sewage, the smell of French railway stations or ladies' underwear --anything to get away from the accepted list of fruit and flowers. As I say, I am not sure that it helps much, but it is more amusing to read."

It looks as if someone finally got the message. Wine X only reviews wines it believes worth drinking, and rates them from one X (recommended), XX (highly recommended), and XXX (exceptionally cool). In the December-January issue, one Californian Gewurztraminer (XX) tasted "like a good blind date with a hair stylist -- floral, spicy, not overly deep but extremely enjoyable (even though when you're close you pick up a slight hint of perm and nail polish remover)," while a neighbouring Viognier (also XX) is summed up with "imagine eating Froot Loops in a gingerbread house on a hot afternoon." Perfectly decent, and useful consumer assessments of two difficult-to-describe grape varieties. And a giggle, too.

"I think a lot of people think that we just sit there and make up these things," says Roberts, who writes the stylized reviews with one of the Wine Brats called Stewart Dorman. "I mean we do, but we taste the wine as a normal tasting panel would. We write down all the characteristics we get. We write down all the fruit and the vegetables and all that boring stuff that everybody else writes about. But then we take it one step further and we try to put it into a language or have fun with it so the vast majority of people will understand it."

Unfortunately, not a lot of people in the industry do. Getting the advertising support needed to keep the magazine's circulation of 30,000 alive has been a challenge.

"It has been like pulling teeth," Roberts agrees. "I'll be honest with you. It's been really tough. It goes back to the people making the decisions are not our demographic. And they don't understand that if they don't get it, they're not supposed to."

However enough wineries to keep Wine X going realize that it may just reach Gen-Xers by breaking with the norms of wine journalism. The ninth edition comes out shortly.

On the retail side, Liberty Wine Merchants in B.C. has four stores set up with an X-Rated wine section, using the magazine's reviews as a guide for customers. It's a hopeful sign.

Darryl Roberts eventually volunteers the fact that "I grew up in Ontario, you know. Ridgeway," near Fort Erie. "I was six when I moved to the States. But I still have a lot of friends up in the Niagara-on-the-Lake area," and mentions Donald Ziraldo of Inniskillin and Sandra Marynissen of Marynissen Estates. That helps explain the feature on icewine in the last issue, as well as a smattering of Canadian table-wine reviews, like Henry of Pelham's 1997 Riesling Reserve (X): "The Ric Ocasek (The Cars) of riesling -- quirky, fast, and in desperate need of food. Speeding toward XX." Or Inniskillin's 1997 Pinot Noir (X): "Like an amoeba -- simple but has its place in the food chain."

Roberts says, "I try to get up there once a year. Donald usually puts me up. I don't get to drive the Ferrari. One of these days."

Not with a review like that, I'm guessing.