How Union Wine Company Made Pinkies Down a Digital Rallying Cry
Union Wine Company's Pinkies Down is a digital campaign published in August 2016 in the United States, created by Portland agency Story Manufacturing, that uses humor to dismantle wine formality and position the brand's canned Underwood wine as an everyday, accessible choice for ordinary Americans.
The campaign's name doubles as a manifesto. Where wine culture has long been associated with elevated pinkies, hushed tasting notes, and rituals that exclude casual drinkers, Union Wine Company offered a direct rejoinder: wine doesn't have to be this hard. The full campaign title — Pinkies Down: Wine doesn't have to be this hard, Pinkies — frames that tension as both a punchline and a genuine consumer promise. Across four media assets delivered through digital channels, the campaign translates an attitude into a visual language, inviting American wine drinkers to abandon self-consciousness and simply enjoy the drink in their hand.
The campaign's roots run deeper than a single creative brief. According to unionwinecompany.com, the "pinkies down" philosophy emerged from a brainstorm session founder and owner Ryan Harms convened in early 2013, the same session that produced the canned wine format and the wine truck concept. That origin story matters: Pinkies Down is not an external positioning imposed on the brand but an authentic articulation of a philosophy that has shaped Union Wine Company's product decisions from the outset. The 2016 digital execution, archived on Clapboard, brought that philosophy into a cohesive campaign form for the United States market, giving Story Manufacturing the creative brief to express years of brand thinking through four tightly crafted digital assets. The campaign sits within the Food and Drink category and, more specifically, the Alcoholic Drinks industry, operating at the intersection of wine accessibility, humor, and cultural provocation.
Union Wine Company launched its Underwood canned wine in 2014, according to marketwatchmag.com. By the time Story Manufacturing released the Pinkies Down digital campaign in August 2016, the timing reflected acute market awareness rather than coincidence.
According to shankennewsdaily.com, US off-premise canned wine sales reached approximately $14.5 million in the 52 weeks ending June 18, 2016, representing growth of approximately 125% from approximately $6.4 million in the preceding year. Canned table wine alone grew from approximately $668,000 in the year ending June 2015 to approximately $6.7 million in the year ending June 2016, as reported by shankennewsdaily.com. Those numbers confirm that the category was expanding rapidly, yet canned wine still represented only a small fraction of total US wine volume, according to bio-conferences.org — meaning the competitive imperative was not merely to sell more cans but to legitimise the format against deep-rooted scepticism.
That scepticism came from multiple directions. Established bottled wine brands carried decades of category authority, and direct competitors in the emerging canned segment, including Ste. Michelle Wine Estates and Francis Ford Coppola Winery, were beginning to test canned formats of their own. In the United States, the cultural association between wine quality and glass bottles remained a genuine barrier. Union Wine Company's strategic insight, as documented at unionwinecompany.com, was that the barrier was not primarily about the product but about permission — American consumers needed cultural cover to drink wine from a can without feeling unsophisticated. Pinkies Down provided that cover by reframing the act of not performing wine knowledge as the smarter, more confident choice. Story Manufacturing translated that insight into humor, positioning irreverence itself as a mark of discernment rather than ignorance.
Michael Etter served as creative director and art director on the Pinkies Down campaign, according to michaeletter.com, with Mattias Segerholt also serving as creative director, per packageinspiration.com. The Portland-based agency Story Manufacturing had already developed the Underwood brand identity and packaging before the 2016 campaign, describing the sub-brand as the "cooler younger brother" within Union Wine Company's portfolio, according to packageinspiration.com — a characterisation that set the creative register for everything that followed.
The campaign comprises four media assets, as documented in the Clapboard archive. The creative approach leans on visual and tonal humor, constructing scenarios in which the social performance of wine appreciation is held up for gentle ridicule. This mirrors an earlier creative direction that Union Wine Company itself had established: a September 2014 behind-the-scenes post, noted in the Clapboard archive, credited David Cress, Eric Edwards, and Story Manufacturing with producing videos about "the challenges of trying too hard when drinking wine." The 2016 Pinkies Down campaign extends that lineage into a more fully developed digital execution, sharpening the comedic premise and delivering it across formats suited to how American audiences consume content online.
The humor functions strategically as well as aesthetically. By making the target of the joke the pretentious wine drinker rather than the uninitiated one, the campaign flatters its audience. The viewer who laughs is implicitly aligned with Union Wine Company's values — curious, relaxed, unpretentious. That positioning is consistent with the brand's stated mission, documented at unionwinecompany.com, of offering craft-quality, affordable Oregon wine for everyday occasions while removing the formality associated with traditional wine culture. In the United States digital landscape of 2016, where shareability rewarded content that made audiences feel in on the joke, that creative logic was well calibrated. Production credits beyond those named above are not fully documented in publicly available sources.
No verified performance data specific to the August 2016 Pinkies Down digital campaign — such as view counts, engagement rates, or attributed sales lift — is publicly available from named trade sources including Ad Age, Adweek, Campaign, The Drum, or Contagious. No awards for this specific execution appear in the Cannes Lions or Effie databases at the time of writing.
What the structural evidence does confirm is that the campaign operated within a category experiencing rapid growth. According to shankennewsdaily.com, US off-premise canned wine sales were expanding at a rate that, per marketwatchmag.com, validated Union Wine Company's early commitment to the format. Canned wine represented approximately 25% of Union Wine Company's sales at the time of a founder interview documented at winebusinessanalytics.com — a figure that contextualises the commercial stakes behind the campaign's creative ambition.
Evaluated on structural grounds, the Pinkies Down campaign demonstrates coherence between brand philosophy, product format, and creative execution. The digital medium suits the irreverent tone; the four-asset structure provides enough variation to serve different platform contexts without diluting the message; and the humor mechanism is designed for organic sharing among the American audiences the brand was trying to reach. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting a well-defined creative concept with clear brand alignment, tempered by the absence of verified performance metrics and limited documented trade coverage. The campaign's primary legacy may be less about measurable short-term return and more about embedding "pinkies down" as a durable brand attitude across the United States market for subsequent years.
Pinkies Down is a digital campaign Union Wine Company published in the United States in August 2016, created by Portland agency Story Manufacturing. It uses humor to challenge wine snobbery, positioning the brand's canned Underwood wine as an accessible, everyday choice. The campaign comprised four media assets and carried the tagline "Wine doesn't have to be this hard."
Story Manufacturing, a Portland-based agency, created the campaign. Michael Etter served as creative director and art director, according to michaeletter.com, and Mattias Segerholt also served as creative director, per packageinspiration.com. Story Manufacturing had previously developed the Underwood brand identity and packaging before the 2016 digital campaign launched.
The concept originated in an early 2013 brainstorm session led by founder Ryan Harms, according to unionwinecompany.com. That same session produced the canned wine format and the wine truck concept. The 2016 digital campaign translated that long-standing brand philosophy into a cohesive creative execution for United States digital audiences.
US off-premise canned wine sales reached approximately $14.5 million in the 52 weeks ending June 2016, up approximately 125% year on year, according to shankennewsdaily.com. The category was growing rapidly but remained a small fraction of total US wine volume, making campaigns like Pinkies Down important for legitimising the format among American consumers.
The Clapboard Score for Pinkies Down is 63 out of 100. The score reflects a well-defined creative concept with strong brand alignment and a clear humor-driven strategy. It is tempered by the absence of publicly verified performance metrics and limited documented coverage in major trade publications for this specific 2016 execution.
No verified awards for the 2016 Pinkies Down campaign appear in the Cannes Lions or Effie databases based on currently available public records. While no trade press documentation has been identified for this execution in Ad Age, Adweek, or Campaign, the campaign remains archived on Clapboard as a notable digital entry in the US alcoholic drinks category.
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