This is just one of the stories from our “I’ve Always Wondered” series, where we tackle all of your questions about the world of business, no matter how big or small. Ever wondered if recycling is worth it? Or how store brands stack up against name brands? Check out more from the series here.

Listener Kate Sheppard from Philadelphia asks:

Why do you see beer and liquor commercials, but rarely (if ever) do you see ads for wine?

While you’re settling in to watch the latest football game, there’ll be no shortage of beer commercials. You’ll see celebrities like Pedro Pascal and Snoop Dogg enjoying a bottle of Corona, while Budweiser will try to appeal to animal lovers by featuring its team of Clydesdale horses. 

But it’s true, as our listener Kate Sheppard pointed out, commercials for wine are much rarer. 

There are both economic and cultural reasons for their absence on television, experts told Marketplace. 

The big beer makers simply have more money to spend and television is a medium where companies go to advertise inexpensive products. And wine makers, seeking to preserve the image of wine as a luxury product, have opted to market their product in less flashy ways. 

The economic reasons you don’t see wine ads

Beer is more accessible and tends to be cheaper, which is why it makes more sense for beer companies to produce commercials for their products. 

More than a third of the U.S. consists of monopoly states where wine and distilled spirits are sold only through a state-run store, said Lisa Jacobson, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

“So that creates some barriers to access,” said Jacobson, who’s also author of the book, “Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition.” 

Alcohol is also generally more expensive in monopoly states, Jacobson said. 

“The government-run stores in the monopoly states often inflate prices because they don’t have to compete with other sellers,” she said. 

The beverages that you see advertised on TV — like sodas, juices and beers — aren’t that pricey, Jacobson said. 

“Beer always has a much lower excise tax on it, and beer really is available pretty much across the nation,” Jacobson said.

And because the top beer producers own so much of the market, they have more marketing dollars at their disposal to run big national campaigns, said Emily Contois, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa and the author of the book, “Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender & Power Collide in Food Media & Culture.”

The top 10 beer producers own 67% of the market, while the top 10 wine producers only own 13.3% of the market, Contois said. 

“Wine is broken up into smaller pieces. They would have less to spend on advertising,” Contois said. 

The cultural reasons you don’t see wine ads

Instead of television, wine makers have opted for different advertising methods. “They invested their effort in getting restaurants to sell their wine,” Jacobson said. 

And more recently, Jacobson pointed out that they’ve launched wine club memberships, a subscription-based model that allow customers to try different wines for a recurring fee. 

Commercials also don’t fit the image of wine as a luxurious product. 

“It's just off brand for wine as a particular kind of commodity that, for decades, has tried to cultivate an image of being a product of artisans, a product that takes great care, and a product that, frankly, is not a one size fits all. There are all the different varietals that you can buy,” Jacobson said. 

Wine hasn’t always been seen as a luxury item — wine makers worked to change its image after the Prohibition era ended in the 1930s. Back then, the people who drank wine tended to be from immigrant communities, so the drink was perceived as “low brow,” Jacobson said. 

The industry distanced wine from distilled spirits by trying to change the way consumers talk about wine, Jacobson explained. 

The Wine Institute, an organization that represents California wineries, developed training manuals for people who sold wine, including retailers and waiters. They also created wine correspondence courses, teaching people to use a different vocabulary when talking about wine, Jacobson said.

“They want to get away from this idea that wine is mass produced, and they want to heighten wines’ agrarian mystique,” Jacobson said. “So one of the first things they say is, don't refer to wine makers as wine manufacturers, refer to them as wine growers.”

They wanted to recast them as “gentleman farmers, rather than having people think of them as merchants of booze,” she added.  

But wine ads do exist 

Wine ads aren’t completely absent from our screens — throughout TV history, there are brands that decided to dabble in commercials. 

“What's fascinating about the wine TV commercials is that there are few of them, but the ones that are made end up being so memorable and so slightly off that they are also widely parodied,” Jacobson said.  

Like the commercials for Thunderbird, a cheap, flavored wine made by E. & J. Gallo Winery. 

One Thunderbird commercial that was commonly parodied features James Mason, a British performer praising the wine with his “luxurious theater actor’s voice,” even though it had a “low-brow image,” Jacobson explained. 

“I think that ad is so funny because there's such a disjuncture between the kind of elegance of James Mason and how the wine is kind of popularly understood,” Jacobson said. 

E. & J. Gallo Winery also released commercials for its Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, which launched in the ‘80s. 

“The flavored wines and wine coolers are going for an audience that isn't the type to sit down to drink wine with their dinner. They're not going after people who are already drinking wine on a regular basis or comfortable enough to order it in restaurants,” Jacobson said. 

They’re trying to attract a younger demographic in wine with a drink that’s “pleasing to the palate,” Jacobson said. 

Some wine makers do appear to want mass market appeal depending on the type of product they’re selling. In recent years, Archer Roose has released commercials with actress and director Elizabeth Banks to advertise its line of canned wines. 

Their tagline is: "Luxury wines. In cans.” If you want to advertise on TV, sometimes you have to embrace contradiction.