A WINE mag with Tori Amos on the cover? What's this got to do with wine, you might ask. But that's probably the magazine's secret. It looks more like Rolling Stone than Decanter. And it is quite deliberate.

Wine X, which started a little more than two years ago, comes from California and sells a respectable 35,000 copies per issue. Its mission statement is to provide "a new voice for a new generation of wine consumers".

"We're specifically targeting younger alcohol consumers, Generation X, with straightforward information and education regarding wine and how it can fit into their lifestyle. Our credo is, 'Wine isn't a lifestyle, it's a complement to one'," the statement continues.

Gen-Xers are defined as people born between 1961 and 1981. In the US, there are 80 million of them, of whom (as some aren't yet 21) about 74 million are of legal drinking age. There will be 10 million more of them than baby-boomers.

What is a worry, particularly for the future health of the wine industry, is how few of them, particularly in the US, are drinking wine. According to the editor of Wine X, Darryl Roberts, "only 4 to 6 per cent of Generation X adults drink wine, compared with a [US] national average of 46per cent. If you account for every Xer who has maybe one glass per year, it's [about] 10 to 11 per cent."

One oft-stated truism is that the next generation doesn't drink what its parents drank. Anecdotally, in this country, Xers are favouring alco-pops -- such as Lemon Ruskis -- and white spirits such as vodka over wine, although increasingly there are products coming on to the market aimed at X-ers.

One is the Soho range, which comes in fluorescent bottles, the most recent release of which is the sparkling Soho Cuvee Brut. It's a starting point. And certainly here we have more of a wine-drinking culture, even among twentysomethings, who have grown up with wine on the parental table.

But a great deal more of them need to be turned on to drinking wine to soak up the big production increases that are anticipated. Here, this year's vintage yielded more than 1 million tonnes of grapes, an increase of 20 per cent on last year. But by 2002, according to James Halliday's calculations, there'll be a further increase of nearly one-third (312,000 tonnes), or another 262 million bottles, almost all destined for export.

The US market, in particular, is one that needs to grow to absorb this production. More than three-quarters of the wine consumed in the US is by a small minority, 16 per cent of the population.

"People form their consumption habits for life in their mid to late 20s," Roberts says. "It costs five to 10 times as much money to change the consumption habits of a 45-year-old as it does to help form the consumption habits - and brand loyalties -- of a 25-year-old."

So what's being done to encourage Xers to take up wine? Too little, argued Roberts in a lecture he gave to the American Society of Wine Educators' annual conference in Portland, Oregon, a few years ago. The situation hasn't improved in the interim.

"I tend to piss people off, especially older people, because the wine industry's solution to reaching my generation with wine is to stick its head in the sand, thinking that, if left long enough, the problem that we're not drinking it will just go away. Solve itself. But it won't."

Roberts believes there is a widespread myth in the wine industry -- "that young people will grow into wine as they get older. They will, like all the generations before them, accept wine into their lifestyle as they make more money and travel more ... they'll grow into it. Just like all the other generations did," he says.

"[This] is bullshit. This myth is just exactly that, a myth. There has not been one generation [in the US] that has 'grown into wine' or incorporated wine into their lifestyle simply because they grew older.

"We are not, as an industry, marketing wine to Generation X. The majority of wineries, wholesalers, retailers and core wine consumers are not only neglecting my generation when it comes to wine but rejecting us. There has been little or no attempt by the wine industry to reach out to younger alcohol consumers -- consumers who are now establishing their drinking habits for life - with the message that wine can be and, more emphatically, should be a part of their lifestyle.

"Instead, the wine industry has gone to great lengths to alienate both itself and its product from us. Industry advertising is vastly restricted to elitist wine publications, [which] preach to the choir; [which] boast reader demographics of older, wealthier individuals; and whose contents exploit the lifestyles of the rich and famous and very privileged people enjoying what they consider a very privileged beverage.

"Wine dinners are generally conducted in exclusive restaurants, featuring wines out of most young people's price range. As one Xer put it so poignantly: 'You cannot continually insult a group of people and expect them to turn around one day, and support you.'

"The industry continues to market to the same people, in the same publications, in the same staid presentation that it has for the [past] 20 years. It still doesn't understand that these marketing techniques aren't working anymore. That unless new strategies are implemented -- that unless we bring new, younger wine consumers into the market today -- there will be no wine industry tomorrow."

The industry continues to advertise to the converted but, argues Roberts, "we don't need to market wine to these people. They're sold on the idea of wine, that drinking wine is a good thing. Millions and millions of wine advertising dollars are spent each year in wine publications [that] reach [only] wine consumers -- competing with each other for a slice of the same cake instead of going out and baking a new one. I think it's safe to say that if we're not drinking wine, we're probably not reading Wine Spectator."

So what magazines should the wine industry be advertising in?

"We must reach out to them on their level," says Roberts. "If you go down to your local news-stand and find the Gen-X section -- you can't miss it, it's the one with all the purple-haired kids with their pants down around their knees standing in front of it -- you'll find publications like Wired, Juice, Spin, Rolling Stone ... All these publications are written for young adults by young adults. And you'll find all the other alcoholic beverage industries are advertising in there. In full force. With ads that appeal to young consumers. Not their parents.

"The Internet is one of the best marketing tools that the wine industry can use to reach Generation X. We have a medium where, for about $3000, a winery or wine company can establish their own Web page and potentially reach over 100 million people worldwide, mostly young, with unlimited product and information, graphics and potential sales, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year."

Roberts cites his experience with Wine X: "In our first year, our subscriber base, in print, went from 1000 to 5600 subscribers. A nice percentage increase. Our Internet hits, though, people who read the publication online, went from zero to over 120,000."

That was when there were 58million Net users. By 2003, there are predicted to be 545 million Net-user accounts worldwide, a market we can't afford to ignore.

Roberts's lecture, Marketing Wine to Generation X: The Great Oxymoron, can be found in full on the Wine X Web site: http://www.winexmagazine.com