"It's about time," says Bob Keane of The Wine handbook about the ad push. "The wine industry has lost one, if not more, generations of consumers because they haven't made wine attractive to drinkers."

Or at least not to the masses.

Robert Roux, marketing executive at Kendall-Jackson, says until now, "the education, experience and more discerning nature of high-end customers made them unreceptive to TV advertising."

His company still doesn't do a lot. Instead, it conducts two-hour wine education and tasting seminars for business-school students and affluent young professionals at employers such as Smith Barney and the World Bank.

Cultivating young-adult drinkers also has become an industry goal: The Wine Market Council has tapped "Milk Mustache" ad agency Bozell Worldwide to develop a $6 million ad campaign that will roll out in test markets next spring, says council President John Gillespie.

Those efforts are unusual because winemakers don't much like the advertising game, even though they're playing it more often. The industry spent $43.2 million on advertising in 1996, according to Competitive Media Reporting. That's about as much as Anheuser-Busch will spend just on prime-time TV advertising in 1998, but it was a 54% increase over spending the year before.

Darryl Roberts, publisher of Wine X, a magazine for the twentysomething crowd, toasts the new marketing efforts but says he hopes it's not too little too late. "When we grew up, we saw our parents drinking wine, but we didn't see any wine ads, so we started drinking microbrewed beer, designer martinis and single-malt Scotch," Roberts, 35, says. "Wine should fit in, but the industry has ignored Generation X."