Growing up as a raving Philadelphia Eagles fan, I knew no one who drank wine at a football game. As a kid, the only thing I ever remember hearing about wine and football was when people sneeringly referred to the fans of the San Francisco 49ers—always better than the Eagles back then—as “Chardonnay sippers.” Not that anyone should try to interpret culture via Philadelphia’s sports fanbase. One Eagles-49er game I attended, in 1997, ended up with so many fights (and even a flare gun shot into the visitors’ section) that the city literally opened a jail in the stadium.

In any case, regardless of my upbringing, I’ve always found it strange that wine and football have always been treated like oil and water. Pro football is unlike, say, pro basketball when it comes to wine. The NBA, for instance, has a serious wine culture, as I discussed on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast a few months back. With football, there’s only a handful of ex-players and coaches who’ve made the post-career jump to wine: Drew Bledsoe, Dick Vermeil, and Charles Woodson, most notably.

So it was big news, two years ago, when E & J Gallo, America’s largest wine company, signed a reportedly $30 million sponsorship deal with the National Football League. Until then, NFL football was squarely a beer-dominated sport, with Anheuser-Busch controlling all the league’s alcoholic beverage sponsorships. But in 2021, the NFL divided its booze sponsors into three separate categories: beer and hard seltzer (still held by Anheuser-Busch), spirits (held by Diageo), and wine. Barefoot, Gallo’s flagship mass-market brand, is now the “official wine sponsor of the NFL.”

Stephanie Gallo, chief marketing officer of E & J Gallo, presented the deal as a grab for a completely new audience of non-wine drinkers—as if wine were something alien to most football fans. “As an industry leader our role is to welcome new consumers to the wine category in unique and relevant ways. This partnership will do just that by bringing our avid fan bases together,” Gallo said. Since E & J Gallo has always presented Barefoot as a “starter wine”—that false euphemism the industry uses to sell cheap, branded, bulk wine—this tracked with their general marketing strategy.

However, the first Barefoot ads that started appearing during NFL broadcasts suggested a different reality. The commercials featured Patrick Warburton—the actor who’s been rehashing his Puddy character from Seinfeld for 30 years—as spokesperson. If Gallo was truly going after a younger audience of new wine drinkers for “starter wines,” this seemed an odd choice. That’s likely because, in reality, the real consumers for wines like Barefoot are Gen X and older, the people who still drink wines like Yellow Tail, Butter, Josh, etc.—the “starter wines” they never moved on from.

Fast-forward to the next season, when Taylor Swift started making high-profile appearances at Kansas City Chiefs games to watch her boyfriend Travis Kelce play. Swift’s sudden NFL fandom is widely credited with introducing a huge swath of her loyal fans to football. At that moment, Gallo shifted tactics, and partnered with Donna Kelce—the 70-year-old mother of Travis and Jason—to share her favorite wine pairings. “When I heard that Barefoot Wine was welcoming new fans to the NFL this season, I wanted to help,” said Donna Kelce. “Football, like wine, should be easy to enjoy. You don’t need to be an expert to enjoy either of them.” So, even though Taylor Swift is a millennial and her fans skew younger, Barefoot chose to partner with the older boomer lady sitting next to Swift in the private box, who’s potentially her future mother-in-law.

Now, Gallo is not necessarily promoting wine in the same way that maybe we talk about it here at The New Wine Review. On Barefoot’s NFL page, a major portion of the content is given over to wine cocktails—including the Celebration Spritz, which calls for 4 ounces of Barefoot Sauvignon Blanc, A FULL OUNCE of maraschino cherry juice (yikes), along with a mix of lime, lemon, and grapefruit juices, and simple syrup.

All of which is to say that it’s fascinating to consider the Gallo-NFL partnership in the context of the American wine industry’s current existential crisis. As many have reported, this crisis has been caused by the industry’s reliance on cheap, bulk wine—those “starter” or “entry-level” wines that have stagnated in the $9.99 to $11.99 range for more than a decade.

Two years ago, the annual “State of the U.S. Wine Industry” report from Silicon Valley Bank made it clear: “The wine industry has allowed the lower-priced entry-level wines to be produced without transparency as to ingredients and in a homogenous and uninteresting way that’s unlikely to appeal to those young consumers who want to drink better and drink less today.”

Perhaps Gallo sees, in NFL football, a unique audience that for years hasn’t been able to fathom any beverage beyond Bud or Bud Light. Perhaps they see a completely unwashed mass of people who know nothing about wine. An audience they might convince to become Chardonnay sippers at a football game. I mean, anything can happen, I guess?

After all, to torture a football metaphor, the people selling cheap bulk wines probably feel like it’s late in the fourth quarter, the clock’s ticking, and they’re down by a touchdown. Why not throw the Hail Mary?